But no one has tied relativity to quantum mechanics yet. Therefore those speed limits only apply to a narrow vision of the universe.
Sorry but Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are very well integrated: it was first done by Dirac in ~1932 and led to the prediction of anti-matter which was discovered a few years later with the positron (anti-electron). The Dirac (along with the Klein-Gordon and Proca) equations form the underpinnings of Quantum Field Theory which is what we use in particle physics to describe all the fundamental particles of nature (that we know of) and how they interact (except via gravity). This has Lorentz invariance built into it and is a complete union of QM and SR.
What is harder is to unify QM and GR. This has not been successfully done yet. You can create a quantized gravitational field relatively easily but the problem is that you have to specify a maximum energy scale in order to normalize it (in 3+1D at least). This is bad because there is no justification for a maximum energy scale once you include gravity where the physics will change. Hence either the theory is wrong or there is something else at some really high energy. In either case you cannot use it to make meaningful predictions and so we say we have no valid way, yet, to unify QM nd GR.
...and then you need system administrators and a repair/replacement budget and technicians to do it plus a network connection and and extremely patient help desk support (given the MPAA's demonstrated understanding of technology). This will also mean you need a manager and a building to put the racks in, security staff etc etc etc. The staff and building can certainly be shared by multiple "films" but I can well imagine the costs of all these staff and there overheads will add considerably to the cost.
if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know?
Exactly what do you mean by "change"? I've heard suggestions that the fundamental constants may have changed as the Universe expanded but that does not really mean that the "laws of physics" have really changed. There would still be an EM wave, nuclei, atoms etc. but just slightly larger/smaller faster/slower etc. than now. In fact I think this suggestion that "we don;t care or think" about where the laws come from is not quite true.
My take is that the laws of physics are, at least partially, due to the properties of space-time. Supposing we were deep underwater creatures with zero experience of air. Our physicists would likely come up with slightly different laws of nature. Light would travel slower, the EM force would be weaker etc. However we see the same effects in vacuum now. The strength of the EM force increases with increasing energy because the vacuum cannot shield the charge as well, the cause of the electrons mass is postulated to be the Higgs field which fills all of space so if we lived outside space the electron may well not have any mass at all etc.
So it is very clear that the properties of our space-time affect the laws of physics which we measure. What is not clear is whether things like, say, an electric field are a fundamental law outside space-time or a result of the properties of space-time. However to answer that we would either need to do an experiment outside our space-time continuum to compare results or have a really smart theorist come up with some framework which solves this and has predictable phenomena which we can measure inside our space-time.
What the original poster seems to have forgotten with the "scientists don't seem to care" comment is that the key to good science is NOT just about asking good questions - any idiot can do that! It is about asking good questions to which you have a chance at finding the answer. The reason physicists do not ask this question is that we have no idea how to find the answer....yet!
The simple number of vulnerabilities is not a good metric of security. I seem to remember that one of the Windows ones last year was one where displaying a picture in a web browser, ANY web browser, could compromise your machine. I don't remember seeing close to that severe for a Mac.
In fact you could make the argument the other way around: the reason there are so few fixes with Windows is because the problems are so big and far reaching that it takes a lot longer to patch them. This conclusion is also probably wrong but is just as valid as the one in the original post.
Well I'm a particle physics professor and the overwhelmingly common pronunciation is 'kwark'. Although I have heard the occasional 'kwork' but only from US people and that only rarely....so now that re-education campaign has worked we just need to get them to pronounce the name of the Z ('zed') boson correctly!:-)
Second, the teacher was right in assigning detention. The teacher is in charge and has the right to tell the students what they can and can't run on school computers.
Just because you have the right to do something does not make it correct. For example you have the right to go into the street and shout non-threatening racist comments but is a very long way from correct behaviour in any imaginable circumstance. The important thing that many seemed to have missed is that the teacher is lacking in teaching, not just IT, skills.
If the reaction to something the students do but which he/she has never seen before is to shut it down without understanding it how is that encouraging learning? Nobody can know it all but the reaction to something new which your students come up with should be to ask them to explain what it is, how it works, why its better etc. That way YOU learn something new and your students get encouraged to think. In addition, far from losing respect, they will develop a far greater respect for you because you are being honest and respectful to them. Even if it turns out to be a daft idea you can at least explain to them the reason why your way is better than theirs which will hopefully improve their thinking next time.
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties...
Err...don't you pay your president and other politicians? So technically aren't they government employees? Notice them doing much more than spread propaganda? If you want to clean things up shouldn't you start at the top?
Two domains would, of course, be out of the question to support two official languages.
Yes because then you'd end up with very confusing URLs since the two languages are integrated (at least if they are like all the other Canadian government websites). For example you could link to the english article via the "parlement" domain and vice versa.
Do they think that Canadians are too stupid to spell "parliament"
No they just realize that some Canadians spell it "parlement" and so calling it "parl" is the same stem in both official languages....and before you go making wisecracks about french speaking Canadians just remember that we are asking for the government to listen to us. So we can hardly fault them when they listen to and accommodate an even bigger minority.
Why software engineers seem to think intuitivity is something worth striving for in their tools is beyond me
So if you wanted to make a quick edit to a picture you would happily spend several hours with viGimp figuring out th correct keystrokes for red eye reduction? Or if you wanted to produce a quick spreadsheet you'd happy spend hours learning viCalc? You want to make tools intuitive so that people can get up and start using them quickly - this is NOT mutually exclusive with making them good for 'power' users.
A good example is 'emacs'. The only reason I ended up as an emacs user was because of the X11 interface. It had pull down menus for cut, paste etc. up to and including rectangular copy and beyond. What this meant was that I could initially use the clunky menus until I learnt the key combinations - this was greatly helped by those menus having the key combinations next to them. Hence there was the 'intuitive' clunky interface which taught you the 'expert' interface. The result was that I could be productive while learning how to really use the editor and I also got to see the more powerful commands. If 'vi' had an interface like that (maybe it does now?) I would have dropped all the emacs bloat in a second.
In my opinion this is what Linux is learning now: you want to keep the power interface behind the scenes but you need a clunky, intuitive interface initially to get people using your code.
if we start eliminating/changing genes that we don't want, are we perhaps eliminating things humanity needs in the future.
While I understand your point we have already been doing this to some extent for the past 100 years or so. As technology has improved people who would never have survived to reproductive age have managed to do so. A genetic weakness to measles, polio, TB etc is no longer a problem thanks to vaccines and infections are far less dangerous thanks to antibiotics so people with weaker immune systems are not disadvantaged.
So given this I'd propose a slightly provocative question: "Can we afford not to start manipulating our own genetic heritage?". I don't know the answer but I'd much rather have the knowledge and ability to do this than to not have it because who knows what nature will throw our way in the future?
Is there any form of encryption that you believe people like the NSA cannot crack?
That is not the correct question to ask. The one you should ask is "Is there a form of encryption that MI5/NSA/... cannot be bothered to crack given the type of info encrypted?". Encryption is like securing your house. You only have to make it secure enough that the effort to break in an steal something is greater than the value of the contents warrants.
As long as there is a means to decode the message it will almost always be possible to break the encryption scheme if by no other means that hacking your machine and taking the decryption key (the possible exception may be quantum encryption technology). However it is extremely unlikely that any government would bother to do this to discover your secret recipe for mince pies!
Problem is that storms come up rarely but suddenly there (usually) and it takes almost two hours to get to the Racetrack from the nearest paved road - three hours from the Death Valley visitor's center - and if you get out there before a storm, there's no guarantee that even a very capable 4x4 will get you back afterwards.
Isn't this what remote camera's were invented for? I doubt this location is so remote that there isn't some way to link it up or at least to store the data and then periodically retrieve it. The question is have these rocks moved recently or is this a rare (i.e. once/century say) type occurance?
Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.
Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
It is probably always possible to claim that something is research. However claiming that, as a law professor you are engaging in legal research is far more believable that if you were, say, a professional body builder. That's the problem, as I see it, with law. Unlike science it is not the search for the true story, it is the search for the most believable story.
Okay, let's see here...strokes kill about 150000 people each year in the U.S., and the government spends about $400 million on stroke research. Terrorists with radioactive materials have killed approximately zero people ever, and the government spends $650 million+ on (admittedly clever) directional radiation detectors. Yeah, we're clearly doing a great job of rationally allocating our money.
You fail to understand statistics. The 150k strokes a year is a large statistical sample and thus it is easy to predict the number from one year to the nect with some degree of statistical accuracy.
Now consider the nuclear case. There have been zero incidents since nuclear weapons existed in man-portable form, say 20 years ago. Now assuming a poisson distribution of events this means that we can conclude with a 95% confidence level that the rate of such events is less than 3.09 per 20 years i.e. less that a roughly 15.4% probability per year. Assuming that such an event would kill 1 million people this means that we are only 95% certain that the annual death rate from such terrorism is less than the death rate from strokes.
However the above is a conservative estimate because technology is making it easier to build nuclear weapons so whereas the above calculation assumed a constant probability distribution of such events that is not correct and it is getting more and more probable. So really we are less than 95% certain. In addition comparing the death rate is not a fair statistic. A better comparison would be years of human life lost. A majority, but certainly not all, stroke victims are old or have recently suffered other life threatening conditions like a heart attack or aneurism. However a terrorist bomb would kill children as much as the elderly (and everyone in between).
So while you cannot show that this is the most effective way of spending money to save life neither can you show that it is not. However given the uncertainties in any such calculation it is far from a total waste of time which is what you were suggesting.
A personal tattoo does not fall into the listed categories of fair use such as criticism, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Ah...but since the person in the example was a law professor couldn't he claim that the Captain Caveman tattoo was legal research because he wanted to see if he could get sued for having it and so therefore he couldn't be sued? Or would that much circular logic make a judge's head implode?
And if you don't think scientists scientists, and engineers, get attached to their beliefs, well, you haven't seen a PhD advisor block approval of a thesis that proves 20 years of his research work and his entire lab's purpose was wasted.
...and since when did a PhD get awarded by a student's supervisor? The student should go straight to the chair and insist on a thesis defence with suitable, arms length examiners. In fact in the UK this is a matter of course and the supervisor is not part of the PhD exam at all.
Of course if you are claiming that 20 years of research is completely wrong then you had better have extremely good evidence to that effect and it will certainly be a lot harder without your supervisor's support. However that is exactly how it should be otherwise science would get nowhere. Typically a lot of work and evidence went into establishing the original paradigm and you need to be very sure that it is wrong before you throw it all out of the window.
I don't advocate the censure of Canada; but the issue seemed to have been Canada's treatment of natives and immigrants....
That such a motion 'nearly passed' says more about the decline of the status of Canada than about the UN.
As an immigrant to Canada I can definitely say that it is an extremely welcoming country in both its government and its people. Look at the outcry here that has resulted from the tasering incident in Vancouver. This was clearly not government instigated and it has shocked the Canadian public. To accuse Canada of human rights abuse because of this incident is simply insane.
It certainly does not show that Canada is in decline - it was simply a stunt by Iran to distract from its real human rights and nuclear issues! All it shows that the UN has a bureaucracy that allows stupid things to happen from time to time, like every other government in existence....but just because something can be abused does not mean that we'd be better off without it.
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But no one has tied relativity to quantum mechanics yet. Therefore those speed limits only apply to a narrow vision of the universe.
Sorry but Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are very well integrated: it was first done by Dirac in ~1932 and led to the prediction of anti-matter which was discovered a few years later with the positron (anti-electron). The Dirac (along with the Klein-Gordon and Proca) equations form the underpinnings of Quantum Field Theory which is what we use in particle physics to describe all the fundamental particles of nature (that we know of) and how they interact (except via gravity). This has Lorentz invariance built into it and is a complete union of QM and SR.
What is harder is to unify QM and GR. This has not been successfully done yet. You can create a quantized gravitational field relatively easily but the problem is that you have to specify a maximum energy scale in order to normalize it (in 3+1D at least). This is bad because there is no justification for a maximum energy scale once you include gravity where the physics will change. Hence either the theory is wrong or there is something else at some really high energy. In either case you cannot use it to make meaningful predictions and so we say we have no valid way, yet, to unify QM nd GR.
...and then you need system administrators and a repair/replacement budget and technicians to do it plus a network connection and and extremely patient help desk support (given the MPAA's demonstrated understanding of technology). This will also mean you need a manager and a building to put the racks in, security staff etc etc etc. The staff and building can certainly be shared by multiple "films" but I can well imagine the costs of all these staff and there overheads will add considerably to the cost.
...even their April Fool tricks are 8.5 months late!
if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know?
Exactly what do you mean by "change"? I've heard suggestions that the fundamental constants may have changed as the Universe expanded but that does not really mean that the "laws of physics" have really changed. There would still be an EM wave, nuclei, atoms etc. but just slightly larger/smaller faster/slower etc. than now. In fact I think this suggestion that "we don;t care or think" about where the laws come from is not quite true.
My take is that the laws of physics are, at least partially, due to the properties of space-time. Supposing we were deep underwater creatures with zero experience of air. Our physicists would likely come up with slightly different laws of nature. Light would travel slower, the EM force would be weaker etc. However we see the same effects in vacuum now. The strength of the EM force increases with increasing energy because the vacuum cannot shield the charge as well, the cause of the electrons mass is postulated to be the Higgs field which fills all of space so if we lived outside space the electron may well not have any mass at all etc.
So it is very clear that the properties of our space-time affect the laws of physics which we measure. What is not clear is whether things like, say, an electric field are a fundamental law outside space-time or a result of the properties of space-time. However to answer that we would either need to do an experiment outside our space-time continuum to compare results or have a really smart theorist come up with some framework which solves this and has predictable phenomena which we can measure inside our space-time.
What the original poster seems to have forgotten with the "scientists don't seem to care" comment is that the key to good science is NOT just about asking good questions - any idiot can do that! It is about asking good questions to which you have a chance at finding the answer. The reason physicists do not ask this question is that we have no idea how to find the answer....yet!
The only difference that I see, which puts me in the science camp, is that scientists at least try to prove themselves wrong.
Actually that's not quite correct: we keep trying to prove ourselves right. Its just that we aren't always successful!
The simple number of vulnerabilities is not a good metric of security. I seem to remember that one of the Windows ones last year was one where displaying a picture in a web browser, ANY web browser, could compromise your machine. I don't remember seeing close to that severe for a Mac.
In fact you could make the argument the other way around: the reason there are so few fixes with Windows is because the problems are so big and far reaching that it takes a lot longer to patch them. This conclusion is also probably wrong but is just as valid as the one in the original post.
Well I'm a particle physics professor and the overwhelmingly common pronunciation is 'kwark'. Although I have heard the occasional 'kwork' but only from US people and that only rarely....so now that re-education campaign has worked we just need to get them to pronounce the name of the Z ('zed') boson correctly! :-)
Second, the teacher was right in assigning detention. The teacher is in charge and has the right to tell the students what they can and can't run on school computers.
Just because you have the right to do something does not make it correct. For example you have the right to go into the street and shout non-threatening racist comments but is a very long way from correct behaviour in any imaginable circumstance. The important thing that many seemed to have missed is that the teacher is lacking in teaching, not just IT, skills.
If the reaction to something the students do but which he/she has never seen before is to shut it down without understanding it how is that encouraging learning? Nobody can know it all but the reaction to something new which your students come up with should be to ask them to explain what it is, how it works, why its better etc. That way YOU learn something new and your students get encouraged to think. In addition, far from losing respect, they will develop a far greater respect for you because you are being honest and respectful to them. Even if it turns out to be a daft idea you can at least explain to them the reason why your way is better than theirs which will hopefully improve their thinking next time.
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties...
Err...don't you pay your president and other politicians? So technically aren't they government employees? Notice them doing much more than spread propaganda? If you want to clean things up shouldn't you start at the top?
...they originally just planned to drop the 'L'.
Two domains would, of course, be out of the question to support two official languages.
Yes because then you'd end up with very confusing URLs since the two languages are integrated (at least if they are like all the other Canadian government websites). For example you could link to the english article via the "parlement" domain and vice versa.
Do they think that Canadians are too stupid to spell "parliament"
No they just realize that some Canadians spell it "parlement" and so calling it "parl" is the same stem in both official languages....and before you go making wisecracks about french speaking Canadians just remember that we are asking for the government to listen to us. So we can hardly fault them when they listen to and accommodate an even bigger minority.
Why software engineers seem to think intuitivity is something worth striving for in their tools is beyond me
So if you wanted to make a quick edit to a picture you would happily spend several hours with viGimp figuring out th correct keystrokes for red eye reduction? Or if you wanted to produce a quick spreadsheet you'd happy spend hours learning viCalc? You want to make tools intuitive so that people can get up and start using them quickly - this is NOT mutually exclusive with making them good for 'power' users.
A good example is 'emacs'. The only reason I ended up as an emacs user was because of the X11 interface. It had pull down menus for cut, paste etc. up to and including rectangular copy and beyond. What this meant was that I could initially use the clunky menus until I learnt the key combinations - this was greatly helped by those menus having the key combinations next to them. Hence there was the 'intuitive' clunky interface which taught you the 'expert' interface. The result was that I could be productive while learning how to really use the editor and I also got to see the more powerful commands. If 'vi' had an interface like that (maybe it does now?) I would have dropped all the emacs bloat in a second.
In my opinion this is what Linux is learning now: you want to keep the power interface behind the scenes but you need a clunky, intuitive interface initially to get people using your code.
The government is by the people for the people.
Well I suppose one out of two isn't bad.
if we start eliminating/changing genes that we don't want, are we perhaps eliminating things humanity needs in the future.
While I understand your point we have already been doing this to some extent for the past 100 years or so. As technology has improved people who would never have survived to reproductive age have managed to do so. A genetic weakness to measles, polio, TB etc is no longer a problem thanks to vaccines and infections are far less dangerous thanks to antibiotics so people with weaker immune systems are not disadvantaged.
So given this I'd propose a slightly provocative question: "Can we afford not to start manipulating our own genetic heritage?". I don't know the answer but I'd much rather have the knowledge and ability to do this than to not have it because who knows what nature will throw our way in the future?
As such, they cripple that option in order to maximize drive life time and make sure its REAL primary use is back ups.
It is utterly useless for backups unless you are happy to have random file extensions excluded from you backups or restores when performed remotely.
Is there any form of encryption that you believe people like the NSA cannot crack?
That is not the correct question to ask. The one you should ask is "Is there a form of encryption that MI5/NSA/... cannot be bothered to crack given the type of info encrypted?". Encryption is like securing your house. You only have to make it secure enough that the effort to break in an steal something is greater than the value of the contents warrants.
As long as there is a means to decode the message it will almost always be possible to break the encryption scheme if by no other means that hacking your machine and taking the decryption key (the possible exception may be quantum encryption technology). However it is extremely unlikely that any government would bother to do this to discover your secret recipe for mince pies!
Problem is that storms come up rarely but suddenly there (usually) and it takes almost two hours to get to the Racetrack from the nearest paved road - three hours from the Death Valley visitor's center - and if you get out there before a storm, there's no guarantee that even a very capable 4x4 will get you back afterwards.
Isn't this what remote camera's were invented for? I doubt this location is so remote that there isn't some way to link it up or at least to store the data and then periodically retrieve it. The question is have these rocks moved recently or is this a rare (i.e. once/century say) type occurance?
Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.
Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
Is there anything you can't count as research?
It is probably always possible to claim that something is research. However claiming that, as a law professor you are engaging in legal research is far more believable that if you were, say, a professional body builder. That's the problem, as I see it, with law. Unlike science it is not the search for the true story, it is the search for the most believable story.
Okay, let's see here...strokes kill about 150000 people each year in the U.S., and the government spends about $400 million on stroke research. Terrorists with radioactive materials have killed approximately zero people ever, and the government spends $650 million+ on (admittedly clever) directional radiation detectors. Yeah, we're clearly doing a great job of rationally allocating our money.
You fail to understand statistics. The 150k strokes a year is a large statistical sample and thus it is easy to predict the number from one year to the nect with some degree of statistical accuracy.
Now consider the nuclear case. There have been zero incidents since nuclear weapons existed in man-portable form, say 20 years ago. Now assuming a poisson distribution of events this means that we can conclude with a 95% confidence level that the rate of such events is less than 3.09 per 20 years i.e. less that a roughly 15.4% probability per year. Assuming that such an event would kill 1 million people this means that we are only 95% certain that the annual death rate from such terrorism is less than the death rate from strokes.
However the above is a conservative estimate because technology is making it easier to build nuclear weapons so whereas the above calculation assumed a constant probability distribution of such events that is not correct and it is getting more and more probable. So really we are less than 95% certain. In addition comparing the death rate is not a fair statistic. A better comparison would be years of human life lost. A majority, but certainly not all, stroke victims are old or have recently suffered other life threatening conditions like a heart attack or aneurism. However a terrorist bomb would kill children as much as the elderly (and everyone in between).
So while you cannot show that this is the most effective way of spending money to save life neither can you show that it is not. However given the uncertainties in any such calculation it is far from a total waste of time which is what you were suggesting.
A personal tattoo does not fall into the listed categories of fair use such as criticism, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Ah...but since the person in the example was a law professor couldn't he claim that the Captain Caveman tattoo was legal research because he wanted to see if he could get sued for having it and so therefore he couldn't be sued? Or would that much circular logic make a judge's head implode?
Any UK government officials in Thailand had better make sure that their diplomatic immunity is watertight: they just potentially published 7.5 million children's names, birthdays and addresses along with those of the parents.
And if you don't think scientists scientists, and engineers, get attached to their beliefs, well, you haven't seen a PhD advisor block approval of a thesis that proves 20 years of his research work and his entire lab's purpose was wasted.
...and since when did a PhD get awarded by a student's supervisor? The student should go straight to the chair and insist on a thesis defence with suitable, arms length examiners. In fact in the UK this is a matter of course and the supervisor is not part of the PhD exam at all.
Of course if you are claiming that 20 years of research is completely wrong then you had better have extremely good evidence to that effect and it will certainly be a lot harder without your supervisor's support. However that is exactly how it should be otherwise science would get nowhere. Typically a lot of work and evidence went into establishing the original paradigm and you need to be very sure that it is wrong before you throw it all out of the window.
I don't advocate the censure of Canada; but the issue seemed to have been Canada's treatment of natives and immigrants.... That such a motion 'nearly passed' says more about the decline of the status of Canada than about the UN.
As an immigrant to Canada I can definitely say that it is an extremely welcoming country in both its government and its people. Look at the outcry here that has resulted from the tasering incident in Vancouver. This was clearly not government instigated and it has shocked the Canadian public. To accuse Canada of human rights abuse because of this incident is simply insane.
It certainly does not show that Canada is in decline - it was simply a stunt by Iran to distract from its real human rights and nuclear issues! All it shows that the UN has a bureaucracy that allows stupid things to happen from time to time, like every other government in existence....but just because something can be abused does not mean that we'd be better off without it.