If the goddamn NSA can't snoop on an encrypted conversation between a lawyer & client, then frankly, they're not doing their job
Really? I thought that in the US client-lawyer communication was protected by law. Forget the technical aspects of whether they can: if US lawyers are this convinced that the US government has zero respect for its own laws you guys are in a lot of trouble.
Sorry, but you are wrong. The lack of flying cars is the failure of lawyers.
Unfortunately suing car manufacturers for failure to produce a flying car is not an attempt that is likely to succeed.
The reason the second hand market needs to be suppressed is not because PUBLISHERS are greedy. It's because PROFESSORS and UNIVERSITIES are lazy (or cheap).
I don't follow you here. University profs do not need the second hand market to be suppressed. I take your point that we may be complicit in that we let the publishers force the students to buy texts because we assign assignments from the text's questions rather than write our own. However this scheme would work just as well if the publishers updated their texts once every 20 years. The rapid changes of editions only benefits the publishers and not the profs. In fact just the reverse because you then have to go through the new edition and figure out all the new question numbers so multiple editions actually increases work for the profs!
This "problem" can be quickly and easily solved by teachers who don't use the exercises in the book at all.
It is not quite as simple as that. I do in fact do exactly as you suggest already. I write my own assignment questions and full solutions are posted on the website after the due date. (I've never posted anything to a library before - although that might have been the way it used to be done). However students always want more than just the assignment questions and rightly so: they want to test themselves with new questions they have not tried before to check that they really do understand the concept. Hence there is always a need for more questions that the prof has written...and there is no way a prof can write up as many questions and solutions as the book has - they typically have 60+ questions per chapter. Past exam papers (with solutions) help to some degree but questions from the text are still useful because it takes time to develop such a resources.
I do not get the impression that lawyers want smart thoughtful people on a jury.
Depends on the lawyer. My uncle was a bank inspector which caused him to assist lawyers prosecuting bank employees on several occasions. The prosecutors ALWAYS wanted smart, intelligent people who could understand how the defendants had defrauded the bank. Of course the defence wanted idiots who could not understand any of it.
My uncle joked that jury selection was as simple a looking at the newspaper the potential juror carried into the court room: FT and they were out, the Sun and they'd be selected!
...all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book.
The problem of multiple book editions is one reason why I now always try to make up my own questions for assignments. That plus my students get used to the type of questions I ask so the exam is not very different to what they are used to.
In fact I am convinced that the only reason the books for large 1st year courses have new editions so frequently is to change the question numbers to suppress the second hand market. In one extreme case I'd pointed out several errors in a text to the publisher and they published a new version without any of the errors fixed but the questions numbers all changed (but with the vast majority of the questions exactly the same!). Unfortunately it backfired because I was the course convener that year and we changed to a book from a different publisher...which then prompted the original book's author to contact me through the editors to fix the errors! Needles to say this interest in profit over accuracy did not leave me with a good impression!
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity
How do you know this? One possibility is that there are more that 3 space dimensions. If this is the case AND the LHC has enough energy to access them we could well end up being able to study quantum gravity at the LHC. This might not give is flying cars but in order to first utilize something it is neccessary to understand it.
Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
It depends on what you think the goals of physics are. As a physicist myself I would define them as "to understand how the Universe works". While we still have a long way to go physics has by no means been a failure in that regard. We understand far more about how the Universe works than we did 50 or 100 years ago. Whether or not we can produce flying cars or fusion reactors depends on HOW the Universe works. To say that physics is a failure because these things are extremely hard to produce would be like saying that Columbus' expedition was a total failure because he didn't get to India. You cannot complain physics is a failure just because the Universe does not work the way that YOU want it to - we study the laws of physics, we don't get to make them.....although it would be interesting if we could!
Actually not all of it is offline. One of the things I have a research grant for is to develop a realtime remote farm for monitoring the detector. This is to catch subtle detector problems quickly before we end up collecting 2 weeks of useless data.
For the Tier 1 a significant fraction of the data is raw 'sensor' (we call it detector) data. This allows reconstruction program converts the data into physics objects like electrons, muons, jets etc.) to be rerun on the data once bugs in the initial reconstruction program have been fixed.
...and how many of those problems would be smaller if it were not for the lawyers for the opposite side? How many can afford the lawyers for the rest? We have national health services (outside the US) - if lawyers are so important how come there is no national legal service?
Shouldn't courts be more interested in finding out the truth of what happened and not who can hire the best story teller? This is what I think is completely missing from the English-based legal system.
Not always. Flying from Canada you go through US customs and immigration in Canada. This is definitely my preferred way to do it for two reasons.
First, the process occurs under Canadian law which only requires that you tell the truth to the US border guards. You are free to withdraw from the process at any time (in which case you don't get to fly) and all they can do is deny you boarding or presumably inform the Canadian authorities if you've been a really naughty boy.
Secondly I've always found the US border guards in Canada to be far more professional, courteous and knowledgeable than their US based counterparts. Its still not a fun process to go through (I'm an EU citizen) but at least I feel like the guards are competent and treat me fairly which is really all you can ask for since they don't get to make the rules.
While police and judges fill different roles, *BOTH* need to appear to be acting in the interests of the government...
They need to be seen to be acting in the interests of JUSTICE. Unfortunately these days this is not always the same as the interests of the government.
Remember that the Earth frame is arbitrary.
True - but as far as we know it is the only frame with any observers in so while the other frames you mention exist the only one that matters to us is the frame we are in.
...if the Earth were at rest in it then we would see a sky with a uniform temperature in all directions.
The Earth's motion relative to the CMB only accounts for the dipole moment. The higher order multi-pole moments would not disappear and so the temperature would still not be uniform.
There's only a tiny fraction of c relative velocity between us and the center [sic] of the galaxy.
True but not really relevant. Unless the readership of Slashdot is wider than I'm aware of the only frame of reference of relevance is that of the Earth. Hence that is the only frame you need to concern yourself with is that one.
The weird effects that relativity is famous for come into play when you're comparing clocks between two reference frames that are moving relative to each other at relativistic speeds.
Not actually true: they are larger at those relative speeds but are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc.
(Physics degree speaking here).
Physics professor speaking here:-).
Also, does this have ramifications for other disk-based DVR's such as those offered by cable companies and DirecTV?
Can you even buy disc based DVRs in the US anymore? I was visiting the in-laws at christmas and thought I'd pick up a cheap DVR in the US (given the the US$ is so weak compared to the Canadian at the moment) and could not find one anywhere. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, some local Albuquerque shop - nothing and the same on their websites.
A few years ago in Chicago they were all over the shops and they are still easily available in Canada and Europe. I wondered at the time whether there was some bizarre US patent problem...and I'm guessing that there is. If you need evidence that your patent system is hurting you here it is: the rest of the developed world is enjoying technology you cannot buy (unless you pay an inflated price plus a monthly subscription to Tivo).
The cognitive enhancers listed have *very* mild effects, and are often used as a stronger form of the effects of caffeine.
In that case why are they prescription only? The only reason for making drugs require a prescription is for safety i.e. habit forming, can be over dosed, bad side-effects for some members of the population, reactions with other commonly available medications etc.
Who knows if it's fair. Who cares. Is your only purpose in doing science to compete with other scientists? I thought the point was advancing the base of human knowledge.
Advancing the sum of human knowledge is the goal. Unfortunately to do that governments only allocate limited funds. Hence there is a competition for those funds and they will get allocated to the scientists who can show the best results/progress.
Taking drugs to enhance performance comes at some risk to the user's health. So should I have to risk my health to compete with others for limited funding for my research? This is the same argument behind athletic drug testing: why should athletes have to risk their health to compete with drug users?
So who decides whether you should be treated or not? How does the ambulance decide whether to not to come in the first place? What happens if you abstain from drugs but have a heart attack at a party where someone is taking drugs and the medical crew jump to the wrong conclusion?
You cannot have sensible medical coverage based on acceptable causes. By the time you find out that you are treating an irresponsible idiot you've already treated them and trying to make that decision before you treat them will lead to people with "acceptable" problems being denied access to treatment.
no town of Nazareth at the time Jesus was supposed to be alive
You might want to read this article and this article. There seems to be considerable archaelogical evidence of a settlement at Nazareth before and just after (50 AD) the time of Jesus - although not an important one. In addition there is considerable evidence for the Walls of Jericho.
I'm not going to claim that there are no inconsistencies in the Bible - clearly you cannot have a global flood, although a big regional one is certainly possible. Plus we can date the Earth to be a lot older that 4,000 BC (or whatever the Bible - with calculations - says). However the examples you give are actually supported by archaelogy.
It depends on the situation. If you are having a chat over a pint in the pub then that's fine. If you were engaging in a scientific debate about the existence of unicorns then you should get taken to task. Since this is what Dawkins claims to be doing about god then he should expect to get taken to task.
I find the sad thing with Dawkins is that he often comes across as irrational as the fundamentalist nutters he arguing with - although I expect that goes some way to explain his popular appeal: it is 'fun' to see two people getting really mad at each other. He needs to remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I wonder if this technique will work with Fortran code we still use in our Monte-carlo generators for the LHC. I'm sure it also contains ancient bugs....
A lot of us particle physicists have Swiss bank accounts simply because a major particle physics research centre, CERN, is located in Switzerland. Of course the secrecy will be a great way for us to stash the ransom when we hold up the world by threatening to destroy it.
Any scientists who say that they know one way or another what will happen are not scientists at all.
Saying that you know a certain outcome is not possible is not the same as saying that you know what will happen. For example if I measure the mass of an unknown object I know it has a mass and so I can rule out getting a result of zero kg even though I don't actually know what mass I will measure.
Nevermind the physics what exactly does this US court expect to happen if they rule against it and we totally ignore the ruling, which is what will happen, and we go ahead anyway? It will make the US courts look pretty silly.
Then why don't musicians pay for their union membership themselves out of their earnings like every other union? Effectively Artists get $1.77 and then have to pay 10% to their earnings to the union. Hmmm...now I see why the union doesn't want it presented like that!
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I thought that in the US client-lawyer communication was protected by law. Forget the technical aspects of whether they can: if US lawyers are this convinced that the US government has zero respect for its own laws you guys are in a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately suing car manufacturers for failure to produce a flying car is not an attempt that is likely to succeed.
I don't follow you here. University profs do not need the second hand market to be suppressed. I take your point that we may be complicit in that we let the publishers force the students to buy texts because we assign assignments from the text's questions rather than write our own. However this scheme would work just as well if the publishers updated their texts once every 20 years. The rapid changes of editions only benefits the publishers and not the profs. In fact just the reverse because you then have to go through the new edition and figure out all the new question numbers so multiple editions actually increases work for the profs!
This "problem" can be quickly and easily solved by teachers who don't use the exercises in the book at all.
It is not quite as simple as that. I do in fact do exactly as you suggest already. I write my own assignment questions and full solutions are posted on the website after the due date. (I've never posted anything to a library before - although that might have been the way it used to be done). However students always want more than just the assignment questions and rightly so: they want to test themselves with new questions they have not tried before to check that they really do understand the concept. Hence there is always a need for more questions that the prof has written...and there is no way a prof can write up as many questions and solutions as the book has - they typically have 60+ questions per chapter. Past exam papers (with solutions) help to some degree but questions from the text are still useful because it takes time to develop such a resources.
I do not get the impression that lawyers want smart thoughtful people on a jury.
Depends on the lawyer. My uncle was a bank inspector which caused him to assist lawyers prosecuting bank employees on several occasions. The prosecutors ALWAYS wanted smart, intelligent people who could understand how the defendants had defrauded the bank. Of course the defence wanted idiots who could not understand any of it.
My uncle joked that jury selection was as simple a looking at the newspaper the potential juror carried into the court room: FT and they were out, the Sun and they'd be selected!
...all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book.
The problem of multiple book editions is one reason why I now always try to make up my own questions for assignments. That plus my students get used to the type of questions I ask so the exam is not very different to what they are used to.
In fact I am convinced that the only reason the books for large 1st year courses have new editions so frequently is to change the question numbers to suppress the second hand market. In one extreme case I'd pointed out several errors in a text to the publisher and they published a new version without any of the errors fixed but the questions numbers all changed (but with the vast majority of the questions exactly the same!). Unfortunately it backfired because I was the course convener that year and we changed to a book from a different publisher...which then prompted the original book's author to contact me through the editors to fix the errors! Needles to say this interest in profit over accuracy did not leave me with a good impression!
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity
How do you know this? One possibility is that there are more that 3 space dimensions. If this is the case AND the LHC has enough energy to access them we could well end up being able to study quantum gravity at the LHC. This might not give is flying cars but in order to first utilize something it is neccessary to understand it.
Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
It depends on what you think the goals of physics are. As a physicist myself I would define them as "to understand how the Universe works". While we still have a long way to go physics has by no means been a failure in that regard. We understand far more about how the Universe works than we did 50 or 100 years ago. Whether or not we can produce flying cars or fusion reactors depends on HOW the Universe works. To say that physics is a failure because these things are extremely hard to produce would be like saying that Columbus' expedition was a total failure because he didn't get to India. You cannot complain physics is a failure just because the Universe does not work the way that YOU want it to - we study the laws of physics, we don't get to make them.....although it would be interesting if we could!
Actually not all of it is offline. One of the things I have a research grant for is to develop a realtime remote farm for monitoring the detector. This is to catch subtle detector problems quickly before we end up collecting 2 weeks of useless data.
For the Tier 1 a significant fraction of the data is raw 'sensor' (we call it detector) data. This allows reconstruction program converts the data into physics objects like electrons, muons, jets etc.) to be rerun on the data once bugs in the initial reconstruction program have been fixed.
...and how many of those problems would be smaller if it were not for the lawyers for the opposite side? How many can afford the lawyers for the rest? We have national health services (outside the US) - if lawyers are so important how come there is no national legal service?
Shouldn't courts be more interested in finding out the truth of what happened and not who can hire the best story teller? This is what I think is completely missing from the English-based legal system.
The key is that it's after you've already landed.
Not always. Flying from Canada you go through US customs and immigration in Canada. This is definitely my preferred way to do it for two reasons.
First, the process occurs under Canadian law which only requires that you tell the truth to the US border guards. You are free to withdraw from the process at any time (in which case you don't get to fly) and all they can do is deny you boarding or presumably inform the Canadian authorities if you've been a really naughty boy.
Secondly I've always found the US border guards in Canada to be far more professional, courteous and knowledgeable than their US based counterparts. Its still not a fun process to go through (I'm an EU citizen) but at least I feel like the guards are competent and treat me fairly which is really all you can ask for since they don't get to make the rules.
While police and judges fill different roles, *BOTH* need to appear to be acting in the interests of the government...
They need to be seen to be acting in the interests of JUSTICE. Unfortunately these days this is not always the same as the interests of the government.
True - but as far as we know it is the only frame with any observers in so while the other frames you mention exist the only one that matters to us is the frame we are in.
...if the Earth were at rest in it then we would see a sky with a uniform temperature in all directions.The Earth's motion relative to the CMB only accounts for the dipole moment. The higher order multi-pole moments would not disappear and so the temperature would still not be uniform.
True but not really relevant. Unless the readership of Slashdot is wider than I'm aware of the only frame of reference of relevance is that of the Earth. Hence that is the only frame you need to concern yourself with is that one.
The weird effects that relativity is famous for come into play when you're comparing clocks between two reference frames that are moving relative to each other at relativistic speeds.
Not actually true: they are larger at those relative speeds but are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc.
(Physics degree speaking here).
Physics professor speaking here
Also, does this have ramifications for other disk-based DVR's such as those offered by cable companies and DirecTV?
Can you even buy disc based DVRs in the US anymore? I was visiting the in-laws at christmas and thought I'd pick up a cheap DVR in the US (given the the US$ is so weak compared to the Canadian at the moment) and could not find one anywhere. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, some local Albuquerque shop - nothing and the same on their websites.
A few years ago in Chicago they were all over the shops and they are still easily available in Canada and Europe. I wondered at the time whether there was some bizarre US patent problem...and I'm guessing that there is. If you need evidence that your patent system is hurting you here it is: the rest of the developed world is enjoying technology you cannot buy (unless you pay an inflated price plus a monthly subscription to Tivo).
The cognitive enhancers listed have *very* mild effects, and are often used as a stronger form of the effects of caffeine.
In that case why are they prescription only? The only reason for making drugs require a prescription is for safety i.e. habit forming, can be over dosed, bad side-effects for some members of the population, reactions with other commonly available medications etc.
Who knows if it's fair. Who cares. Is your only purpose in doing science to compete with other scientists? I thought the point was advancing the base of human knowledge.
Advancing the sum of human knowledge is the goal. Unfortunately to do that governments only allocate limited funds. Hence there is a competition for those funds and they will get allocated to the scientists who can show the best results/progress.
Taking drugs to enhance performance comes at some risk to the user's health. So should I have to risk my health to compete with others for limited funding for my research? This is the same argument behind athletic drug testing: why should athletes have to risk their health to compete with drug users?
So who decides whether you should be treated or not? How does the ambulance decide whether to not to come in the first place? What happens if you abstain from drugs but have a heart attack at a party where someone is taking drugs and the medical crew jump to the wrong conclusion? You cannot have sensible medical coverage based on acceptable causes. By the time you find out that you are treating an irresponsible idiot you've already treated them and trying to make that decision before you treat them will lead to people with "acceptable" problems being denied access to treatment.
Ok here is a call for less government regulation and use of more technology: make these legal.
no town of Nazareth at the time Jesus was supposed to be alive
You might want to read this article and this article. There seems to be considerable archaelogical evidence of a settlement at Nazareth before and just after (50 AD) the time of Jesus - although not an important one. In addition there is considerable evidence for the Walls of Jericho.
I'm not going to claim that there are no inconsistencies in the Bible - clearly you cannot have a global flood, although a big regional one is certainly possible. Plus we can date the Earth to be a lot older that 4,000 BC (or whatever the Bible - with calculations - says). However the examples you give are actually supported by archaelogy.
They just say "Unicorns aren't real."
It depends on the situation. If you are having a chat over a pint in the pub then that's fine. If you were engaging in a scientific debate about the existence of unicorns then you should get taken to task. Since this is what Dawkins claims to be doing about god then he should expect to get taken to task.
I find the sad thing with Dawkins is that he often comes across as irrational as the fundamentalist nutters he arguing with - although I expect that goes some way to explain his popular appeal: it is 'fun' to see two people getting really mad at each other. He needs to remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Trademark on a color? Next thing you know they'll want trademarks on letters or digits.
Well they are T mobile.
I wonder if this technique will work with Fortran code we still use in our Monte-carlo generators for the LHC. I'm sure it also contains ancient bugs....
A lot of us particle physicists have Swiss bank accounts simply because a major particle physics research centre, CERN, is located in Switzerland. Of course the secrecy will be a great way for us to stash the ransom when we hold up the world by threatening to destroy it.
Saying that you know a certain outcome is not possible is not the same as saying that you know what will happen. For example if I measure the mass of an unknown object I know it has a mass and so I can rule out getting a result of zero kg even though I don't actually know what mass I will measure.
Nevermind the physics what exactly does this US court expect to happen if they rule against it and we totally ignore the ruling, which is what will happen, and we go ahead anyway? It will make the US courts look pretty silly.
Then why don't musicians pay for their union membership themselves out of their earnings like every other union? Effectively Artists get $1.77 and then have to pay 10% to their earnings to the union. Hmmm...now I see why the union doesn't want it presented like that!