When was the last time you saw actual analysis and comparisons of a politician's statements on a regular news program.
After living in the US for several years (and having generally stopped watching the news because it did not contain any news) I caught a BBC world service interview with a US diplomat about the US opposition to the international criminal court. The interviewer literaly wiped the floor with this guy but without, in any way, being hostile or argumentative - she did it simply by asking questions and using his answers against him to point out the utter absurdity of his position. Like Jon Stewart but in a serious fashion.
After seeing that interview it was immediately clear to me why I hated the regular US news: they never ask sensible questions and follow up by pointing out the complete absurdity of the responses. I guess that part of the reason for this is that if they did start to ask tough questions they would lose priviliged access to the president which would then kill their career.
It seems to me that the US has a system which claims freedom of the press but then imposes relatively severe consequences if a reporter were to exercise that freedom. In my opinion this is very unhealthy thing for a democracy.
It might be invivsible but, since they liken it to a helicopter, I bet I'd notice even an invisible helicopter flying overhead simply from the noise and downdraft (if it was low enough)!
So did winning the longest running of all time exclude them from the consecutive competition? Dr. Who has had way more than 10 consecutive seasons of the old series - Tom Baker must have been the Doctor for close to that many by himself. I know there were some breaks towards the end but I seem to remember well over 10 years of consecutive seasons as a kid. So how come it didn't win in that category too?
What I do not understand about all the negative comments on string theory is that they seem to object to it purely on the grounds that it has not yet produced a testable prediction. If there was evidence out there that it will NEVER produce a testable prediction then I would completely agree with the critics. To my knowledge this is not the case. There are certainly incredible problems to extracting a testable prediction but does that mean we should give up, pack up our bags and go home?
Sorry but sometimes physics is hard - even for physicists! Of course it might turn out in the end to be a waste of time from the physics point of view (although I'm sure even then it will leave a legacy of interesting maths) but we don't know that yet. Giving up on, from my understanding, the most promising avenue of research just because it turns out to be hard to figure it out is not good physics.
Not really. Bohr's model of the atom was a "picture" which matched experimental data but which was known to not really explain everything (e.g. why were the orbits quantised?). This is the same as the current Standard Model: it matches all observable phenomena at high energy....so far. We know it is not complete though because it does not include gravity, has a heirarchy problem etc.
So I'd take a model to be a system which works but which does not really answer all the questions. String Theory is not that far advanced - they have 10^500 possible solutions last I heard and only one of those can be correct...so they have their work cut out for themselves!
...this whole process seems to be driven by the EU's motivation to get some blood-money and dictate ever-changing terms to a corporation rather than the interests of its citizens.
While it might not be in your best interest to see a US corporation heavily fined by the EU it does not mean that it is not in the best interests of European citizens. Opening up the APIs to allow true competition is definitely in the interests of EU citizens. If they refuse to do that then they should be fined in accordance with the economic benefit that they are denying the EU by acting illegally.
There is already a deportation treaty between the UK and the US (well actually only the UK has ratified it so far and our moronic government did not put in a "only effective when both parties have ratified it" clause) with similar effects. Recently three UK bankers were deported to Texas for activities which took place entirely in the UK but which involved a US firm (Enron). Now as I understand it their actions (if true) were illegal under UK law but this was not important or at all relevant to the deportation case.
This strikes me as the most serious case of loss of sovreignty that I've ever heard of: UK citizens being taken to a foreign court and being prosecuted for alleged crimes committed entirely in the UK. It seems that this treaty will only increase such cases.
I used to get rid of the political money grabbers really quick when I lived in the US. After they gave their little pitch I'd simply say: "I'd love to support you, is there a limit on what foreigners can donate?" Then watch them back track and leave as fast as possible! Of course since I am British it was true but I sure those of you who are US citizens can improvise!
Don't try it in Canada though - I tried the "I'm British" when they came canvasing for votes and they never believe me that I don't get a vote so I always end up have to explain that since 1982 British subjects don't get to vote in Canadian elections (although bizarrely enough I would apparently still do jury duty if I lived in the Yukon!). At least I'll be well prepared for the civics test when I'm finally eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship!
A fun use of such a device is to neutralise an enemies nuclear arsenal and then starting a war with them. They then fire their nukes which does... nothing much at all.
...until they develop laser ignited fusion warheads.
...a lot of us on ATLAS are in Stockholm, Sweden at this week for a meeting. Hopefully this won't be the only trip to Stockholm that ATLAS physicists will make though:-)
Makes me wonder if we are near the edge of what humans can know. Growing up, I took it on fiath that it was just a matter of time before we knew it all. Now, I am not so sure. Perhaps our monkey brains simply can't conceive of the true nature of reality.
It always makes me smile when I hear this. The last time in history when similar thoughts were voiced by a reasonable number of people was at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time pretty much all the phenomena observed had been more-or-less explained by classical physics. There were a few inconsistencies, like the photo-electric effect, but it was expected that these would be mere trivialities to clear up or might just never be knowable.
Of course history tells us that this was not the case. Solving these "trivial" problems lead to the demise of classical physics and the birth of Relativity and Quantum physics. I personally believe that we are approaching a similar breakthrough point in physics. While it is possible that string theory may be the correct way to go it is also possible that things we learn at the LHC will completely change the tack of theorists and point them at something new.
Now I could well be wrong but my guess (and hope) is the universe still has a few tricks up its sleeve yet!
Most people's lawyers don't end up in deep doo-doo for what their clients do in said clients' personal lives. Many company's lawyers *do* end up in deep doo-doo for what their clients do business-wise.
True, but that still does not mean that lawyers run the company. If they don't like it then they leave the company and go to work for someone else. They don't start telling the company that everything it wants to do MUST be approved by them first. As I said before it might be wise for the company to consult it lawyers first but it is not s requirement as SPI seemed to suggest.
So how many people consult their lawyer about the software license before purchasing/downloading the software? This seems to be a similar situation to me. It might have been wise to consult them but the tone of the SPI email should have been "it might be a good idea to talk to us about these sort of things since we are here to help you" and not "how dare you make a decision before you talked to us first". Lawyers are supposed to be their to help you with legal advice not to run your life for you...although it seems that many want to which is probably why so many end up in politics!
...if this is meaning people are becoming more accepting of the idea of Britian being considered a part of europe.
Britain IS a part of Europe. It is a geographical fact. You cannot (sensibly) argue with it. Now there are some of us Brits, thankfully a minority so far, who think we should leave the EU but short of hiring a really large tug and towing the British Isles out into the mid-atlantic it will be very hard for them to stop us being a part of Europe.
Interestingly enough there has been far more anti-EU sentiment coming out of France recently than Britain and yet nobody seems to be jumping on them as "anti-European". So I can't help wondering if this island mentality we are supposed to have affects more than the British.
This story was a real surprise - I never thought Crackpot would get a mention in Slashdot. My parents have a cottage just up the dale outside Gunnerside. However I feel I should point out that Crackpot is hardly a town. It consists of about two farmhouses and a barn! The biggest attraction is probably the name although I do remember going on a good walk from there once.
Incidently the name comes from the norse "pot" meaning hole or dip (in this case referring to the limestone rift there) and "Kraka" meaning crow. As a kid I was always told it was because they found some roman coins in a cracked pot there but I think the former is more plausible!
Anyway it was great to see Crackpot on Slashdot. I suppose next week they'll be a story about the nearby town of Hawes (which is pronounced "whores":-)
The real question is how many eV are the combined masses of the three flavours? The answer to that question portends much for the state of the universe.
This has already been measured by the NASA WMAP probe. If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I read the paper) the limit is that the sum of all 3 neutrino masses is <3 eV/c2. There is a new paper out from WMAP that I have not yet read which may contain an update on this.
In fact this is one of the big mysteries in particle physics at the moment because WMAP said that 23% of the mass of the Universe could not be made of atoms (non-baryonic). The Standard Model only has one possibility for this: the neutrino. However neutrinos are so light that the ones produced by the Big Bang are moving at close to the speed of light and the WMAP results show that this missing dark matter has to be very slow moving thus it cannot be neutrinos....and in fact we do not yet know what it is or whether our models of the Big Bang are somehow wrong.
....but does Skype really operate in the US? I know their network can be accessed from there but do they have any employees or brick-and-mortar based operations there? Microsoft does in the EU and so has a lot of assets which could be seized by the EU courts. As far as I know Skype has nothing that could be seized and since it is a civil suit there is zero possibility of extradition.
To me (a non-lawyer) this seems to be an interesting legal question. Assuming that they do only have a virtual presence in the US suppose Skype just thumbs its nose at the US court and says "so what"? I'm guessing there is nothing that the US court can do.
So do I - I always thought the guards looked like they were carrying toothbrushes instead of swords though! The other game I remember was Citadel - mainly because it was the first game to "speak" - at least when it loaded.
It's not quite clear to me exactly what internet model the article is arguing against. I found there are two ways of reading it:
Two levels of bandwidth available" broadband and, presumably, superbroadband
One level of bandwidth to your house but with complex limits on the bandwidth from your provider to the rest of the world based on protocol, destination etc.
The first I have no problem with: it's the same difference we have now between broadband and dialup. The second I find a lot more troubling. For example supposing my ISP is owned by a competitor to Google will I suddenly find google a lot more expensive to connect to? This would be more like paying to have your house connected to the road system and then being told that to be allowed to drive your Rover on it will cost twice as much as your neighbour pays to drive his Ford.
I'd also wonder how feasible it will be to actually technically implement protocol limits since they would have to allow encrypted connections (at least https if nothing else) and you can pretty much piggyback any protocol on the back of another if the financial motivation was enough to overcome the pain factor.
Yes, if you bothered to read further you'd see that I mentioned the hierarchy problem. But that alone is not enough to convince most people that large extra dimensions are likely to exist; as you say, there are other ways of solving it.
However it provides a far firmer reason to think that LEDs might exist over and above string theory. LEDs potentially solve a real problem. String theories are so far pie-in-the-sky. So I would take strong issue with your claim that LEDs are more speculative than string theory. LEDs were inspired by string theory but do not imply string theory.
Also, your statements about proton decay aren't really correct. The experimental bounds on the proton lifetime are already far longer than the age of the universe, meaning that proton decay is irrelevant to the question of proton vs. antiproton content.
Actually you are dead wrong there. The fact that we see no anti-protons in the universe is because there has to be some process which violates baryon number (one of the Sakharov conditions of the Big Bang). The fact that such a process exists implies that protons should be able to decay into a lower mass state. The reason protons hang around for so long though is because of the enormous energy scale of the baryon number violating process: the Planck scale. If the Planck scale is a lot lower than we think then something else has to explain why protons are so stable and yet we see strong evidence for baryon number violating processes.
Since we're limited to moving 3 spatial dimensions
Possibly only at low energies. At high enough energy we might find that we have 4+1, 5+1 or even more dimensions to move in.
Will it build the space plane? Will it allow FTL travel, in real terms, not some sort of "it would work, if only we had an infinite energy source"? Will it cure HIV, will it stop the third world from breeding like rats? Will it stop the onward march of socialism?
Unless we get out there and do the research how can we tell? We don't even know if extra dimensions exist let alone what we could use them for. I've often heard it said that the problem with trying to predict the future is that in the short term we generally greatly over estimate the march of progress but in the long term we under-estimate it. As an example think of the predictions for immediate bases on the moon and mars at the time of the lunar landings which have still not occurred and yet nobody at the time ever thought we'd have a global network of computers sharing information around the entire globe and revolutionising many aspects of modern life.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you saw actual analysis and comparisons of a politician's statements on a regular news program.
After living in the US for several years (and having generally stopped watching the news because it did not contain any news) I caught a BBC world service interview with a US diplomat about the US opposition to the international criminal court. The interviewer literaly wiped the floor with this guy but without, in any way, being hostile or argumentative - she did it simply by asking questions and using his answers against him to point out the utter absurdity of his position. Like Jon Stewart but in a serious fashion.
After seeing that interview it was immediately clear to me why I hated the regular US news: they never ask sensible questions and follow up by pointing out the complete absurdity of the responses. I guess that part of the reason for this is that if they did start to ask tough questions they would lose priviliged access to the president which would then kill their career.
It seems to me that the US has a system which claims freedom of the press but then imposes relatively severe consequences if a reporter were to exercise that freedom. In my opinion this is very unhealthy thing for a democracy.
NOT a micrometre it is 100 micrometres! See here for details.
:-)
Oh god, give my a dictionnnaryes
On that we definitely agree.
It might be invivsible but, since they liken it to a helicopter, I bet I'd notice even an invisible helicopter flying overhead simply from the noise and downdraft (if it was low enough)!
...Slashdot readers cracked open a fosillized story from a year ago and found that there was still a discussion going on.
So did winning the longest running of all time exclude them from the consecutive competition? Dr. Who has had way more than 10 consecutive seasons of the old series - Tom Baker must have been the Doctor for close to that many by himself. I know there were some breaks towards the end but I seem to remember well over 10 years of consecutive seasons as a kid. So how come it didn't win in that category too?
What I do not understand about all the negative comments on string theory is that they seem to object to it purely on the grounds that it has not yet produced a testable prediction. If there was evidence out there that it will NEVER produce a testable prediction then I would completely agree with the critics. To my knowledge this is not the case. There are certainly incredible problems to extracting a testable prediction but does that mean we should give up, pack up our bags and go home?
Sorry but sometimes physics is hard - even for physicists! Of course it might turn out in the end to be a waste of time from the physics point of view (although I'm sure even then it will leave a legacy of interesting maths) but we don't know that yet. Giving up on, from my understanding, the most promising avenue of research just because it turns out to be hard to figure it out is not good physics.
Not really. Bohr's model of the atom was a "picture" which matched experimental data but which was known to not really explain everything (e.g. why were the orbits quantised?). This is the same as the current Standard Model: it matches all observable phenomena at high energy....so far. We know it is not complete though because it does not include gravity, has a heirarchy problem etc.
So I'd take a model to be a system which works but which does not really answer all the questions. String Theory is not that far advanced - they have 10^500 possible solutions last I heard and only one of those can be correct...so they have their work cut out for themselves!
...this whole process seems to be driven by the EU's motivation to get some blood-money and dictate ever-changing terms to a corporation rather than the interests of its citizens.
While it might not be in your best interest to see a US corporation heavily fined by the EU it does not mean that it is not in the best interests of European citizens. Opening up the APIs to allow true competition is definitely in the interests of EU citizens. If they refuse to do that then they should be fined in accordance with the economic benefit that they are denying the EU by acting illegally.
There is already a deportation treaty between the UK and the US (well actually only the UK has ratified it so far and our moronic government did not put in a "only effective when both parties have ratified it" clause) with similar effects. Recently three UK bankers were deported to Texas for activities which took place entirely in the UK but which involved a US firm (Enron). Now as I understand it their actions (if true) were illegal under UK law but this was not important or at all relevant to the deportation case. This strikes me as the most serious case of loss of sovreignty that I've ever heard of: UK citizens being taken to a foreign court and being prosecuted for alleged crimes committed entirely in the UK. It seems that this treaty will only increase such cases.
I used to get rid of the political money grabbers really quick when I lived in the US. After they gave their little pitch I'd simply say: "I'd love to support you, is there a limit on what foreigners can donate?" Then watch them back track and leave as fast as possible! Of course since I am British it was true but I sure those of you who are US citizens can improvise!
Don't try it in Canada though - I tried the "I'm British" when they came canvasing for votes and they never believe me that I don't get a vote so I always end up have to explain that since 1982 British subjects don't get to vote in Canadian elections (although bizarrely enough I would apparently still do jury duty if I lived in the Yukon!). At least I'll be well prepared for the civics test when I'm finally eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship!
...a lot of us on ATLAS are in Stockholm, Sweden at this week for a meeting. Hopefully this won't be the only trip to Stockholm that ATLAS physicists will make though :-)
It always makes me smile when I hear this. The last time in history when similar thoughts were voiced by a reasonable number of people was at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time pretty much all the phenomena observed had been more-or-less explained by classical physics. There were a few inconsistencies, like the photo-electric effect, but it was expected that these would be mere trivialities to clear up or might just never be knowable.
Of course history tells us that this was not the case. Solving these "trivial" problems lead to the demise of classical physics and the birth of Relativity and Quantum physics. I personally believe that we are approaching a similar breakthrough point in physics. While it is possible that string theory may be the correct way to go it is also possible that things we learn at the LHC will completely change the tack of theorists and point them at something new. Now I could well be wrong but my guess (and hope) is the universe still has a few tricks up its sleeve yet!
Most people's lawyers don't end up in deep doo-doo for what their clients do in said clients' personal lives. Many company's lawyers *do* end up in deep doo-doo for what their clients do business-wise.
True, but that still does not mean that lawyers run the company. If they don't like it then they leave the company and go to work for someone else. They don't start telling the company that everything it wants to do MUST be approved by them first. As I said before it might be wise for the company to consult it lawyers first but it is not s requirement as SPI seemed to suggest.
So how many people consult their lawyer about the software license before purchasing/downloading the software? This seems to be a similar situation to me. It might have been wise to consult them but the tone of the SPI email should have been "it might be a good idea to talk to us about these sort of things since we are here to help you" and not "how dare you make a decision before you talked to us first". Lawyers are supposed to be their to help you with legal advice not to run your life for you...although it seems that many want to which is probably why so many end up in politics!
A: "You can't draw a pony! It was my idea to draw a pony!"
Sorry that's Private Patent's area of expertise, not Captain Copyright's.
Britain IS a part of Europe. It is a geographical fact. You cannot (sensibly) argue with it. Now there are some of us Brits, thankfully a minority so far, who think we should leave the EU but short of hiring a really large tug and towing the British Isles out into the mid-atlantic it will be very hard for them to stop us being a part of Europe.
Interestingly enough there has been far more anti-EU sentiment coming out of France recently than Britain and yet nobody seems to be jumping on them as "anti-European". So I can't help wondering if this island mentality we are supposed to have affects more than the British.
Incidently the name comes from the norse "pot" meaning hole or dip (in this case referring to the limestone rift there) and "Kraka" meaning crow. As a kid I was always told it was because they found some roman coins in a cracked pot there but I think the former is more plausible!
Anyway it was great to see Crackpot on Slashdot. I suppose next week they'll be a story about the nearby town of Hawes (which is pronounced "whores" :-)
This has already been measured by the NASA WMAP probe. If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I read the paper) the limit is that the sum of all 3 neutrino masses is <3 eV/c2. There is a new paper out from WMAP that I have not yet read which may contain an update on this.
In fact this is one of the big mysteries in particle physics at the moment because WMAP said that 23% of the mass of the Universe could not be made of atoms (non-baryonic). The Standard Model only has one possibility for this: the neutrino. However neutrinos are so light that the ones produced by the Big Bang are moving at close to the speed of light and the WMAP results show that this missing dark matter has to be very slow moving thus it cannot be neutrinos....and in fact we do not yet know what it is or whether our models of the Big Bang are somehow wrong.
To me (a non-lawyer) this seems to be an interesting legal question. Assuming that they do only have a virtual presence in the US suppose Skype just thumbs its nose at the US court and says "so what"? I'm guessing there is nothing that the US court can do.
So do I - I always thought the guards looked like they were carrying toothbrushes instead of swords though! The other game I remember was Citadel - mainly because it was the first game to "speak" - at least when it loaded.
- Two levels of bandwidth available" broadband and, presumably, superbroadband
- One level of bandwidth to your house but with complex limits on the bandwidth from your provider to the rest of the world based on protocol, destination etc.
The first I have no problem with: it's the same difference we have now between broadband and dialup. The second I find a lot more troubling. For example supposing my ISP is owned by a competitor to Google will I suddenly find google a lot more expensive to connect to? This would be more like paying to have your house connected to the road system and then being told that to be allowed to drive your Rover on it will cost twice as much as your neighbour pays to drive his Ford.I'd also wonder how feasible it will be to actually technically implement protocol limits since they would have to allow encrypted connections (at least https if nothing else) and you can pretty much piggyback any protocol on the back of another if the financial motivation was enough to overcome the pain factor.
However it provides a far firmer reason to think that LEDs might exist over and above string theory. LEDs potentially solve a real problem. String theories are so far pie-in-the-sky. So I would take strong issue with your claim that LEDs are more speculative than string theory. LEDs were inspired by string theory but do not imply string theory.
Also, your statements about proton decay aren't really correct. The experimental bounds on the proton lifetime are already far longer than the age of the universe, meaning that proton decay is irrelevant to the question of proton vs. antiproton content.
Actually you are dead wrong there. The fact that we see no anti-protons in the universe is because there has to be some process which violates baryon number (one of the Sakharov conditions of the Big Bang). The fact that such a process exists implies that protons should be able to decay into a lower mass state. The reason protons hang around for so long though is because of the enormous energy scale of the baryon number violating process: the Planck scale. If the Planck scale is a lot lower than we think then something else has to explain why protons are so stable and yet we see strong evidence for baryon number violating processes.
Possibly only at low energies. At high enough energy we might find that we have 4+1, 5+1 or even more dimensions to move in.
Will it build the space plane? Will it allow FTL travel, in real terms, not some sort of "it would work, if only we had an infinite energy source"? Will it cure HIV, will it stop the third world from breeding like rats? Will it stop the onward march of socialism?
Unless we get out there and do the research how can we tell? We don't even know if extra dimensions exist let alone what we could use them for. I've often heard it said that the problem with trying to predict the future is that in the short term we generally greatly over estimate the march of progress but in the long term we under-estimate it. As an example think of the predictions for immediate bases on the moon and mars at the time of the lunar landings which have still not occurred and yet nobody at the time ever thought we'd have a global network of computers sharing information around the entire globe and revolutionising many aspects of modern life.