If by "we" you mean US Americans then that would explain a lot since I always wondered why I and my fellow human beings were classed as aliens when living in the US. Now I know!
I'd like to know more about what they said. Are they worried it will encourage kids to get interested in crypto?
They are worried because they are still using those codes. Clearly they had not been cracked until now so they must have been secure. Now they are going to have to make things even harder by doing a ROT13 encryption first.
A journalist has a publisher standing behind them who can afford to buy lawyers. A professor has a university with a law faculty standing behind them which makes lawyers. A Harry Potter junkie has their significant other standing behind them wondering why on earth they spend their time writing all that stuff.
The problem in the UK is space and politics more than cost, at least with the current prices of oil, gas and coal. In Canada you can build a plant next to a small town and there is nobody else within 100km who will complain. The small town is kept happy by the influx of skilled workers to their economy (or else you pick a different small town which is).
In the UK you probably can't find anywhere where there is less than about 1 million people within 100km except maybe for national parks where you are never going to be allowed to build one. Since very few of these people will directly benefit from the plant there is no/little motivation to overcome their inherent distrust of nuclear power and so they complain.
What happens when criminals get their hands on this and start disabling police cars as well?:D
They don't need to do anything so complex. Just hold a thin sheet of metal over the rear window, wait for cops to shoot microwaves, the waves reflect and take out the cop's car behind. In fact you don't even need a full sheet a metal grill will do fine. However I'm somewhat amazed this thing works at all since most of a car is sheet metal. I'm wondering how well them have to aim this to get the CPUs or whether it only works on Saturns.
I realise that I was not clear but actually what I was meaning was a language which has male/female pronouns but does not use the female one for a woman somewhat like the german example I gave.
God, I hate that. It's she.
Do you prefer to break the entire language to get rid of a anachronism that nobody takes seriously everyday?
You are missing the point - the first post was written by a woman. I've yet to see a language where you don't use a female pronoun when referring specifically to a woman but I'd be very curious to learn if there is one. I do remember when I was at school that the girls got really pissed off that in german the noun "girl" was neuter (das Mädchen) but even then you still used the female pronoun when talking about a girl.
Having said that I do get ticked off at the PC attitude that we are supposed to use the feminine pronoun when gender is not determined. English has a gender neutral pronoun, "one", so that's what one should use or if one doesn't like how that sounds then one should stick to the traditional rules of the language. If not then how about we fix some of the other "sexist" gender usage in English and have male countries, male ships etc....err...on second thoughts lets scratch the last idea since since talking about "HMS York and her seamen" is a lot less open to confusion than the alternative!
Most interesting particles are the decay products of a collision, not necessarily in cosmic rays.
The problem here is one of energy. Cosmic rays do actually "collide" with the ATLAS detector but the energy available is far, far lower than current colliders plus most of the cosmic rays are muons which mean that they only rarely have a real collision.
Repeatability. While protons in the LHC may collide at 100Hz or so, cosmic rays are a little less predictable.
You are a few orders of magnitude off here. The LHC proton bunches collide at 40MHz and there are roughly 20 collisions per crossing at nominal intensity. In fact the bunches collide so rapidly that the particles from the preceding collision have not actually escaped the detector by the time the next bunch crossing occurs. On the other had, at the surface, one cosmic ray will pass through 1cm3 every second. Down in the detector pit this is less but what also kills the rate is that we want a direction that will pass through most of the detector.
Statistics. To show the existence of a new particle, you need statistics at 5-sigma. This might require tens or hundreds of thousands of recorded events of a certain signature in order to be considered reliable. You simply can't get that from cosmic rays.
Actually new particles have been found in cosmic rays - that is how the muon (heavier brother of the electron) was discovered in 1935/6 (IIRC). To get to 5-sigma you simply need a lot more signal events than background events. If your backgrounds are very low then you don't need many events at all.
(I am not a particle physicist. I just work for them.)
I am a particle physicist and while I don't know whom you work for or in what capacity - thanks! A lot of people don't realise that while there are a lot of physicists working on theses experiments there are even more technicians, engineers, machine operators etc. behind the scenes making it all possible.
People who commit murder are the criminals, not the people who tell em to do it. That goes for hit men too.
Really? Allow me to acquaint you with a tactic of the IRA. Kidnap some poor sod's family and tell him to drive a car filled with explosives into an army checkpoint or else his wife and kids will all get murdered. Technically you are correct, driving the car into the checkpoint to murder soldiers makes the guy a criminal....but I think we would all agree who the real criminals are in this, unfortunately real life, scenario.
If they just thought about it, it wouldn't be a crime.
If all you did was think about it then nobody would ever know and "thought crimes" would be impossible to prosecute. The question here is at what threshold to their actions based on their thoughts cross the threshold? Speaking about them, intending to act on them, actually acting on them?
This clearly should depend on the severity of the crime because the goal here is to protect people/society and not to punish people whom we just don't agree with.
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
...because it is sometimes difficult for non-Americans to comprehend that very few Americans understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
Sad but true.
On the IIS you have a cancelation of forces: the centripetal acceleration of the orbit exactly cancels the acceleration of gravity, leaving you with a delta of zero--a stable orbit, weightlessness.
Sorry but this is just wrong. Force and acceleration are not the same. They are related by F=ma in classical physics but that does not mean they are the same. This is a very common mistake that I see from students in my first year physics lectures so it is a very easy misconception to have.
What F=ma tells us is that forces cause accelerations. In the case of an orbiting object the force of gravity causes the object to follow a circular path i.e. the force of gravity is causing and acceleration such that the object follows an orbit. If there were no force of gravity the ISS would move in a straight line. Since everything is accelerating at the same rate it appears that there is no force acting but appearances can be deceptive.
You are conflating 'weight' and 'mass'.
No I am not - but you are confusing force and acceleration.
OK, you have a rather odd definitions of "death rate" and "birth rate". You might warn people if you're going to use non-standard definitions.
Umm...did you actually even look at the thread before replying? The definition used was in there! How much warning do you need? Secondly the original post commented on a "100% death rate" and given that figure this is the only definition I can think of that makes sense i.e. what is the rate (=chance) of death for humans. Death rate could be interpreted as you would like but not in this context.
I know this is Slashdot and so you aren't expected to read the article but reading the thread you are responding does come highly recommended!
Weight is a measure of the acceleration of your mass due to gravity relative to another mass.
Sorry but this is very wrong. Using your definition then since all object accelerate equally under gravity all objects would have the same weight which is clearly not correct!
So, in the ISS I'd say you are weightless relative to the ISS... and so is the duck.
Weight is a force caused by gravity which is proportional to mass (hence the equal accelerations). Since in the ISS you still feel the gravitational pull of the Earth you still have a weight. The best illustration of this is that you are going round in a roughly circular orbit. To follow such an orbit there must be a force acting on the space station and the source of that force is gravity hence you have a weight.
Perhaps a better way to think of it is imagine you are in a lift at the top of a tower block and someone suddenly cuts the cable and you start to fall. In the brief moments of life left to you you are clearly not weightless but instead are in freefall so you get the illusion of weightlessness. The ISS is just like that...only the freefall lasts a lot longer!
No, the no. deaths/no. births will be less than 100% while the population *growth rate* is above zero. Not at all the same thing.
Here is a simple proof that this is wrong: Are you alive? If so then you must have been born. Hence as long as you do not die there must be at least one more birth than deaths hence, using the above definition the death rate will not be 100%.
Population growth will decrease the death rate and population shrinkage will reduce it but it will never reach 100% as long as there is at least one person left alive - which if you are reading this article should be a reasonable assumption (I hope!).
You know, an astronaut weighs the same as a duck in space.
Actually this is a popular misconception. A few hundred kilometres up the acceleration due to gravity is not much different than here on the Earth's surface. The difference is that the ISS is in freefall you you get apparent weightlessness - effectively all the objects are in the same orbit around the Earth and since orbital velocity is independent of mass it gives an impression of weightlessness. So actually an astronaut still weighs more than a duck in space but is unaware of this because they are in the same orbit. For true weightlessness you have to go a long, long way away.
Sorry that was probably more physics than you wanted to know but this is Slashdot!
Yes - assuming you define the death rate as no. deaths/no. births then it will be less than 100% and will remain so while the population is above zero. To define it otherwise is to assume that everyone alive now will die which, while likely, is not yet proven. Afterall I think I speak for most of the human race when I say that we all want to live forever, or at least die trying!
In any case, you should be using Shadow Copy...er...Time Machine which would have protected you from going and losing track of your own files.
Great! So now not only don't we know where our data is but when it is. Perhaps in a week or two's time the data will materialize in the folder it was supposed to be moved to with an accompanying
"whorping" sound coming from the speakers?
Supposing instead they "jam" cell phones passively using a thin wire mesh on the wall. That would be completely legal. Should they get sued then simply because your cell phone doesn't work when there is an emergency and you could not walk the 10 metres to the wired phone which the premises will presumably have?
If so, other than a fine for illegally blocking the signal actively, why should they be sued?
I don't see why a person who's never read the Constitution, and doesn't know the difference between the Bill of the Rights and the Ten Commandments, or has no understanding of the founding principles of the country, and what made it significantly different from the government we broke away from, should have an equal voice in running the nation.
Simple: it's because a majority of you lot voted for him in your last election!
It might have become easier for criminals to get away with things but it has also become easier for the police to catch them. Computers can scan thousands or millions of fingerprints for matches, driving and passport records can be immediately displayed, police, financial etc. records from around the world can be viewed or transmitted instantly, automatic face recognition is becoming possible etc.
I don't see, once the technology is stripped away, that things have really changed regarding criminals vs. the police: the smart criminals are still a step ahead just as they have always been. The difference is that for the rest of us our privacy is a casualty of the tactics the authorities are using to keep up.
The best part -- that 28-box application mentioned in the article? -- it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application.
This is the other problem. Why are they allowed to submit this much? When I submit a grant application I have limited amount of space to justify my grant. That way I have to condense things down so only the most important and relevant information is transmitted. Why is there not a similar restriction on patents? It is far simpler to request additional details for the patents that need them rather than sift through thousands of pages.
How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?
The question you should be asking is how many needed to get opened.
That drive back to West Michigan from Chicago is hell. It's fine until you near the Michigan/Indian border and then it's all down hill from there.
Really? Actually I used to find that was roughly when the drive improved since the Chicago traffic started to subside, especially once past I-65, and there weren't any more stupid toll booths. I still didn't like the drive but I didn't dislike it as much as driving through Chicago. Admittedly that was partly my fault since the first time I did it, being an ignorant foreigner, I had no idea that speed limit signs like "Maximum 55 mph" near Chicago actually meant "Minimum 55 (and for safety 60+)". Chicago is still the only place I've ever driven when I felt that driving at the speed limit was dangerous because I was going far too slow!
Slashdot Mirror
We ARE the Aliens!
If by "we" you mean US Americans then that would explain a lot since I always wondered why I and my fellow human beings were classed as aliens when living in the US. Now I know!
Mars has a tendency to chew up man made objects.
Well being Europe there is at least one less thing to go wrong because we all use metric units.
I'd like to know more about what they said. Are they worried it will encourage kids to get interested in crypto?
They are worried because they are still using those codes. Clearly they had not been cracked until now so they must have been secure. Now they are going to have to make things even harder by doing a ROT13 encryption first.
There's a reason:
A journalist has a publisher standing behind them who can afford to buy lawyers.
A professor has a university with a law faculty standing behind them which makes lawyers.
A Harry Potter junkie has their significant other standing behind them wondering why on earth they spend their time writing all that stuff.
The problem in the UK is space and politics more than cost, at least with the current prices of oil, gas and coal. In Canada you can build a plant next to a small town and there is nobody else within 100km who will complain. The small town is kept happy by the influx of skilled workers to their economy (or else you pick a different small town which is).
In the UK you probably can't find anywhere where there is less than about 1 million people within 100km except maybe for national parks where you are never going to be allowed to build one. Since very few of these people will directly benefit from the plant there is no/little motivation to overcome their inherent distrust of nuclear power and so they complain.
What happens when criminals get their hands on this and start disabling police cars as well? :D
They don't need to do anything so complex. Just hold a thin sheet of metal over the rear window, wait for cops to shoot microwaves, the waves reflect and take out the cop's car behind. In fact you don't even need a full sheet a metal grill will do fine. However I'm somewhat amazed this thing works at all since most of a car is sheet metal. I'm wondering how well them have to aim this to get the CPUs or whether it only works on Saturns.
I realise that I was not clear but actually what I was meaning was a language which has male/female pronouns but does not use the female one for a woman somewhat like the german example I gave.
God, I hate that. It's she. Do you prefer to break the entire language to get rid of a anachronism that nobody takes seriously everyday?
You are missing the point - the first post was written by a woman. I've yet to see a language where you don't use a female pronoun when referring specifically to a woman but I'd be very curious to learn if there is one. I do remember when I was at school that the girls got really pissed off that in german the noun "girl" was neuter (das Mädchen) but even then you still used the female pronoun when talking about a girl.
Having said that I do get ticked off at the PC attitude that we are supposed to use the feminine pronoun when gender is not determined. English has a gender neutral pronoun, "one", so that's what one should use or if one doesn't like how that sounds then one should stick to the traditional rules of the language. If not then how about we fix some of the other "sexist" gender usage in English and have male countries, male ships etc....err...on second thoughts lets scratch the last idea since since talking about "HMS York and her seamen" is a lot less open to confusion than the alternative!
Most interesting particles are the decay products of a collision, not necessarily in cosmic rays.
The problem here is one of energy. Cosmic rays do actually "collide" with the ATLAS detector but the energy available is far, far lower than current colliders plus most of the cosmic rays are muons which mean that they only rarely have a real collision.
Repeatability. While protons in the LHC may collide at 100Hz or so, cosmic rays are a little less predictable.
You are a few orders of magnitude off here. The LHC proton bunches collide at 40MHz and there are roughly 20 collisions per crossing at nominal intensity. In fact the bunches collide so rapidly that the particles from the preceding collision have not actually escaped the detector by the time the next bunch crossing occurs. On the other had, at the surface, one cosmic ray will pass through 1cm3 every second. Down in the detector pit this is less but what also kills the rate is that we want a direction that will pass through most of the detector.
Statistics. To show the existence of a new particle, you need statistics at 5-sigma. This might require tens or hundreds of thousands of recorded events of a certain signature in order to be considered reliable. You simply can't get that from cosmic rays.
Actually new particles have been found in cosmic rays - that is how the muon (heavier brother of the electron) was discovered in 1935/6 (IIRC). To get to 5-sigma you simply need a lot more signal events than background events. If your backgrounds are very low then you don't need many events at all.
(I am not a particle physicist. I just work for them.)
I am a particle physicist and while I don't know whom you work for or in what capacity - thanks! A lot of people don't realise that while there are a lot of physicists working on theses experiments there are even more technicians, engineers, machine operators etc. behind the scenes making it all possible.
People who commit murder are the criminals, not the people who tell em to do it. That goes for hit men too.
Really? Allow me to acquaint you with a tactic of the IRA. Kidnap some poor sod's family and tell him to drive a car filled with explosives into an army checkpoint or else his wife and kids will all get murdered. Technically you are correct, driving the car into the checkpoint to murder soldiers makes the guy a criminal....but I think we would all agree who the real criminals are in this, unfortunately real life, scenario.
If they just thought about it, it wouldn't be a crime.
If all you did was think about it then nobody would ever know and "thought crimes" would be impossible to prosecute. The question here is at what threshold to their actions based on their thoughts cross the threshold? Speaking about them, intending to act on them, actually acting on them?
This clearly should depend on the severity of the crime because the goal here is to protect people/society and not to punish people whom we just don't agree with.
It is sometimes difficult for Americans to comprehend that very few countries understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
...because it is sometimes difficult for non-Americans to comprehend that very few Americans understand the concept of the free speech and a free press.
Sad but true.
On the IIS you have a cancelation of forces: the centripetal acceleration of the orbit exactly cancels the acceleration of gravity, leaving you with a delta of zero--a stable orbit, weightlessness.
Sorry but this is just wrong. Force and acceleration are not the same. They are related by F=ma in classical physics but that does not mean they are the same. This is a very common mistake that I see from students in my first year physics lectures so it is a very easy misconception to have.
What F=ma tells us is that forces cause accelerations. In the case of an orbiting object the force of gravity causes the object to follow a circular path i.e. the force of gravity is causing and acceleration such that the object follows an orbit. If there were no force of gravity the ISS would move in a straight line. Since everything is accelerating at the same rate it appears that there is no force acting but appearances can be deceptive.
You are conflating 'weight' and 'mass'.
No I am not - but you are confusing force and acceleration.
OK, you have a rather odd definitions of "death rate" and "birth rate". You might warn people if you're going to use non-standard definitions.
Umm...did you actually even look at the thread before replying? The definition used was in there! How much warning do you need? Secondly the original post commented on a "100% death rate" and given that figure this is the only definition I can think of that makes sense i.e. what is the rate (=chance) of death for humans. Death rate could be interpreted as you would like but not in this context.
I know this is Slashdot and so you aren't expected to read the article but reading the thread you are responding does come highly recommended!
Weight is a measure of the acceleration of your mass due to gravity relative to another mass.
Sorry but this is very wrong. Using your definition then since all object accelerate equally under gravity all objects would have the same weight which is clearly not correct!
So, in the ISS I'd say you are weightless relative to the ISS... and so is the duck.
Weight is a force caused by gravity which is proportional to mass (hence the equal accelerations). Since in the ISS you still feel the gravitational pull of the Earth you still have a weight. The best illustration of this is that you are going round in a roughly circular orbit. To follow such an orbit there must be a force acting on the space station and the source of that force is gravity hence you have a weight.
Perhaps a better way to think of it is imagine you are in a lift at the top of a tower block and someone suddenly cuts the cable and you start to fall. In the brief moments of life left to you you are clearly not weightless but instead are in freefall so you get the illusion of weightlessness. The ISS is just like that...only the freefall lasts a lot longer!
No, the no. deaths/no. births will be less than 100% while the population *growth rate* is above zero. Not at all the same thing.
Here is a simple proof that this is wrong: Are you alive? If so then you must have been born. Hence as long as you do not die there must be at least one more birth than deaths hence, using the above definition the death rate will not be 100%.
Population growth will decrease the death rate and population shrinkage will reduce it but it will never reach 100% as long as there is at least one person left alive - which if you are reading this article should be a reasonable assumption (I hope!).
You know, an astronaut weighs the same as a duck in space.
Actually this is a popular misconception. A few hundred kilometres up the acceleration due to gravity is not much different than here on the Earth's surface. The difference is that the ISS is in freefall you you get apparent weightlessness - effectively all the objects are in the same orbit around the Earth and since orbital velocity is independent of mass it gives an impression of weightlessness. So actually an astronaut still weighs more than a duck in space but is unaware of this because they are in the same orbit. For true weightlessness you have to go a long, long way away.
Sorry that was probably more physics than you wanted to know but this is Slashdot!
So, less than 100%?
Yes - assuming you define the death rate as no. deaths/no. births then it will be less than 100% and will remain so while the population is above zero. To define it otherwise is to assume that everyone alive now will die which, while likely, is not yet proven. Afterall I think I speak for most of the human race when I say that we all want to live forever, or at least die trying!
In any case, you should be using Shadow Copy...er...Time Machine which would have protected you from going and losing track of your own files.
Great! So now not only don't we know where our data is but when it is. Perhaps in a week or two's time the data will materialize in the folder it was supposed to be moved to with an accompanying "whorping" sound coming from the speakers?
Supposing instead they "jam" cell phones passively using a thin wire mesh on the wall. That would be completely legal. Should they get sued then simply because your cell phone doesn't work when there is an emergency and you could not walk the 10 metres to the wired phone which the premises will presumably have?
If so, other than a fine for illegally blocking the signal actively, why should they be sued?
I don't see why a person who's never read the Constitution, and doesn't know the difference between the Bill of the Rights and the Ten Commandments, or has no understanding of the founding principles of the country, and what made it significantly different from the government we broke away from, should have an equal voice in running the nation.
Simple: it's because a majority of you lot voted for him in your last election!
It might have become easier for criminals to get away with things but it has also become easier for the police to catch them. Computers can scan thousands or millions of fingerprints for matches, driving and passport records can be immediately displayed, police, financial etc. records from around the world can be viewed or transmitted instantly, automatic face recognition is becoming possible etc.
I don't see, once the technology is stripped away, that things have really changed regarding criminals vs. the police: the smart criminals are still a step ahead just as they have always been. The difference is that for the rest of us our privacy is a casualty of the tactics the authorities are using to keep up.
'New and unused' votes are being posted from $0.30 to $95.
So what's the going rate for second hand or slightly used votes? After all recycling helps the environment.
The best part -- that 28-box application mentioned in the article? -- it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application.
This is the other problem. Why are they allowed to submit this much? When I submit a grant application I have limited amount of space to justify my grant. That way I have to condense things down so only the most important and relevant information is transmitted. Why is there not a similar restriction on patents? It is far simpler to request additional details for the patents that need them rather than sift through thousands of pages.
How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?
The question you should be asking is how many needed to get opened.
That drive back to West Michigan from Chicago is hell. It's fine until you near the Michigan/Indian border and then it's all down hill from there.
Really? Actually I used to find that was roughly when the drive improved since the Chicago traffic started to subside, especially once past I-65, and there weren't any more stupid toll booths. I still didn't like the drive but I didn't dislike it as much as driving through Chicago. Admittedly that was partly my fault since the first time I did it, being an ignorant foreigner, I had no idea that speed limit signs like "Maximum 55 mph" near Chicago actually meant "Minimum 55 (and for safety 60+)". Chicago is still the only place I've ever driven when I felt that driving at the speed limit was dangerous because I was going far too slow!