We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms
Really? Wow! I'll have to tell my colleagues working on Quantum Computer research that they might as well research something else for a few years since they are not going to make any breakthroughs until 2023. Perhaps you could also tell me the hard deadline for when we are scheduled to discover the nature of Dark Matter so I too can avoid wasting my time researching it before it is due to be found?
This is where most of the journals came from. They were originally the newsletters of scientific societies which were effectively formed from letters that members would write in with when they had results to share. Hence the reason many have "letters" in the name.
As the number of letters grew it became too much effort and expense for these societies to publish all of them given the technology of the day and so they sold them off to professional publishers who organized the peer review, editing and publishing and then charged a fee to cover their costs and make a profit.
Today technology has now caught up and publishing costs and effort have both been enormously reduced to the point where a professional publisher is no longer required. What we need to see happen is journals returning to being run by professional science societies. If you make membership in the society a requirement to publish in their journals and make the journals available for free then I expect this would easily drive up income from membership dues enough to cover the modest costs of organizing peer review, editing and electronic publishing. It would also avoid the "pay-to-publish" model that causes a conflict of interest: you have to be a member to submit regardless of whether it is accepted and the cost of membership is usually rather modest so even non-professional scientists can afford it.
Universities draw lots of money from the indirect (facilities and administrative; F&A) costs that are included in grants. It's often a bit over 50% of the modified total direct costs for a grant.
Perhaps in the US but in most other countries, it is much less - about 25% IIRC in Canada and something similar in the UK. One way the US government could make its research funding go a lot further would be to set a fixed overhead rate paid to the university separate to the grant that researchers get and make it a condition that no overhead is charged on the researcher portion. This would put a stop the appallingly bloated overhead costs that US universities force their researchers to pay.
Just because people still use it does not mean that it is not obsolete. For example, imperial units are obsolete but some people and countries still insist on using them for a variety of reasons, why should faxes be any different?
These are not, repeat not, the same thing although both called a pound.
That's my point though: using pounds for both mass and force makes imperial units unfit for use because you have no way of knowing what it is that I measured which is entirely the problem that using units is supposed to solve. It also leads to utterly stupid units, for example, you could measure acceleration in pounds per pound even though that looks like a dimensionless unit. Units of pounds-squared has three different possible interpretations etc. It is just nuts.
Indeed since you seem so enamoured with this useless system why not define a pound-length, a pound-time etc. and then you can just use pounds^n to measure everything. Of course, there will be no way for anyone to know exactly what you measured but that's already pretty much the case and at least now you'll only have one unit to remember for everything.
I've seen US news reports. The newscasters spend all their time telling you what is coming up later and then when later arrives they spend most of it telling you what is coming up tomorrow. The actual content is about 30 seconds of information which they almost apologise for having to include and which they rush through to make sure they have enough time to tell you what is coming up after the break.
Now you don't just know the demographics of a family, but of every neighborhood in every city on Earth
Not true. First you only know about neighbourhoods which have a significant number of Facebook users and secondly you only know about those demographics that use Facebook. Those at both ends of the IT spectrum will probably not show up much at all i.e. those with not enough IT knowledge to use it and those with enough IT knowledge to know better than to use it given its horrendous implications for privacy (of which this patent is an excellent example).
That might be a stupid idea but faking 2.7 million visits is even more stupid since it is physically impossible and obviously fraud. If he had faked a few thousand he might well have got away with it since it would have been a lot harder to prove that they were faked.
No, for gross stupidity in attempting fraud. If he had stopped at a few thousand visits he might have got away with it but 2.7 million visits are clearly physically impossible and simply has to be fraud.
The pound cannot be a mass because otherwise "pounds per square inch" would be a unit of 2D density (like kilograms per square metre) and not a unit of pressure (like newtons per square metre). The imperial unit of mass is, according to wikipedia, the slug. If you try to use the pound for both weight and mass then you have a system of units which is inconsistent with basic physics. Indeed the fact that imperial units appear to rely on the definition of a force in terms of a mass really just demonstrates how utterly nuts they are.
Please explain the ancient unit of pressure: pounds per square inch then. You cannot measure pressure in kilograms per square metre. This is why the old imperial unit system is utterly ludicrous. It is out of step with basic physics and lacks any coherent or even consistent definition.
This is the kind of overreaction porn I come to slashdot for.
Is this an overreaction though? You could make exactly the same claim about the postal service. It sped up the interaction between people and allowed for mail-order scams etc. too. However, that same service was also used by law enforcement to transmit information about crooks rapidly e.g by sending fingerprints, crime reports and arrest warrants between jurisdictions. The same applied when the telephone came along.
In all these cases the solution has always been that you use that same reduction in friction to speed up the police e.g. now police can get arrest warrants, photographs, files etc. sent directly to them on the street. It is far better to force everyone to speed up rather than try and make everyone slow down to the speed of some authoritarian, bureaucratic department of government. Indeed if one country did this it would likely find itself left behind by those which don't have such impediments.
First thanks for the explanation, but are you sure your meant 'infinite'?
Yes, it is a definition, not a measurement. Essentially we define the fundmental, unchanging constants of the universe as so many SI units and then use measurements to precisely define the individual units. In fact, in particle physics, we actually start by defining these fundamental constants as '1' unit each and then derive units for energy, momentum, mass etc. from them creating a system known as "natural units". It's not very practical for everyday quantities but very useful if you are dealing with fundamental physics.
By it's very definition a balance in independent of gravity.
No it is not. Even a standard balance relies on the gravitational field for both sides being equal and, if you get precise enough, this may not be true. However, the watt balance balances the force of gravity with an electromagnetic force. Part of the measurement also requires determining the local gravitational field but this is something that you can measure accurately which is why this is still a far better definition than using a lump of metal outside Paris.
The international pound has been defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg.
That's interesting. Since the pound is a weight and the kilogram a mass unless they also fixed the gravitational field in that definition it's open to abuse.
A pound is a weight, not a mass which is not the same thing. While its definition may be based on the kilogram it must also be based on a value for the gravitational field since it is a force.
Just because someone is irresponsible in their personal finances doesn't mean they are incompetent or irresponsible with their professional responsibilities.
You can make that argument about anything though e.g. just because someone doesn't know which end of a computer plugs into the wall it doesn't mean that they cannot manage a government department on cyber security. The problem is though that someone like that is going to be utterly dependent on what their civil servants tell them because they have no experience of their own which is relevant. I suspect that this is what stops democracy being an unmitigated disaster.
Yes, but they usually have to get elected first to be in a position to be appointed. It is unusual for ministers, especially those in the cabinet, not to be elected MPs.
Most science ministers lack a science degree and there have certainly been some decidedly uneducated education ministers. Defence ministers have rarely served in the armed forces and we once had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who could not balance his credit card. Sadly, in a democracy, the only qualification for the job that counts is that you got more votes than anyone else and all this requires is that you look like less of a drooling idiot than the other people standing for election...and sometimes even that isn't true.
Most countries already do this and provide public health coverage from birth. However, this is not going to fix anything and health care is the crux of the crisis with an ageing population. While 60+-year-olds can certainly be extremely productive and useful members of society they need considerably more healthcare than 18-year olds. As the population ages there are fewer low-cost young people and more high-cost elderly people and so the cost per-person is going to steadily rise.
This is going to hurt every country regardless of whether or not they have a public health system. The difference is how the system will deal with it. In Canada and Europe we will end up with more and more taxes going into the health system and the quality of care will probably decline. In the US fewer and fewer people will be able to afford coverage and most people's coverage will likely get more and more restricted.
What evidence do you have that Brexit is the will of the UK people? One vote where over 2 million Brits living in the EU were not allowed to vote and others stupidly stayed home because they thought remain would win? Indeed, if you are so confident that Brexit remains the will of the people then I hope you support a second referendum on whether to accept the deal (if any) that May gets or to reverse direction and remain.
Again though I still think you have this backwards. Gender is not a term which describes how fashion choices relate to the concepts of male and female. Gender is a purely biological distinction and society then layers expectations - such as fashion choices - on top of that biological fact usually in ways that have little or nothing to do with the underlying biological differences.
As an example I can refer to the gender of animals as male or female and yet these exist largely or entirely outside society and so gender is clearly a term that describes biology, not something socially constructed like fashion. However, that underlying biology can be, and is, used by society to determine expectations for fashion.
Unfortunately I've been called a few times but dismissed during voir dire every time except once
That's the problem The justice system might need more intelligent people willing to participate but a lawyer defending a guilty defendant does not want them to participate.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms
Really? Wow! I'll have to tell my colleagues working on Quantum Computer research that they might as well research something else for a few years since they are not going to make any breakthroughs until 2023. Perhaps you could also tell me the hard deadline for when we are scheduled to discover the nature of Dark Matter so I too can avoid wasting my time researching it before it is due to be found?
This is where most of the journals came from. They were originally the newsletters of scientific societies which were effectively formed from letters that members would write in with when they had results to share. Hence the reason many have "letters" in the name.
As the number of letters grew it became too much effort and expense for these societies to publish all of them given the technology of the day and so they sold them off to professional publishers who organized the peer review, editing and publishing and then charged a fee to cover their costs and make a profit.
Today technology has now caught up and publishing costs and effort have both been enormously reduced to the point where a professional publisher is no longer required. What we need to see happen is journals returning to being run by professional science societies. If you make membership in the society a requirement to publish in their journals and make the journals available for free then I expect this would easily drive up income from membership dues enough to cover the modest costs of organizing peer review, editing and electronic publishing. It would also avoid the "pay-to-publish" model that causes a conflict of interest: you have to be a member to submit regardless of whether it is accepted and the cost of membership is usually rather modest so even non-professional scientists can afford it.
Universities draw lots of money from the indirect (facilities and administrative; F&A) costs that are included in grants. It's often a bit over 50% of the modified total direct costs for a grant.
Perhaps in the US but in most other countries, it is much less - about 25% IIRC in Canada and something similar in the UK. One way the US government could make its research funding go a lot further would be to set a fixed overhead rate paid to the university separate to the grant that researchers get and make it a condition that no overhead is charged on the researcher portion. This would put a stop the appallingly bloated overhead costs that US universities force their researchers to pay.
Because some people prefer reality. Simple enough?
I don't think real bishops just move diagonally.
Just because people still use it does not mean that it is not obsolete. For example, imperial units are obsolete but some people and countries still insist on using them for a variety of reasons, why should faxes be any different?
These are not, repeat not, the same thing although both called a pound.
That's my point though: using pounds for both mass and force makes imperial units unfit for use because you have no way of knowing what it is that I measured which is entirely the problem that using units is supposed to solve. It also leads to utterly stupid units, for example, you could measure acceleration in pounds per pound even though that looks like a dimensionless unit. Units of pounds-squared has three different possible interpretations etc. It is just nuts.
Indeed since you seem so enamoured with this useless system why not define a pound-length, a pound-time etc. and then you can just use pounds^n to measure everything. Of course, there will be no way for anyone to know exactly what you measured but that's already pretty much the case and at least now you'll only have one unit to remember for everything.
I've seen US news reports. The newscasters spend all their time telling you what is coming up later and then when later arrives they spend most of it telling you what is coming up tomorrow. The actual content is about 30 seconds of information which they almost apologise for having to include and which they rush through to make sure they have enough time to tell you what is coming up after the break.
Now you don't just know the demographics of a family, but of every neighborhood in every city on Earth
Not true. First you only know about neighbourhoods which have a significant number of Facebook users and secondly you only know about those demographics that use Facebook. Those at both ends of the IT spectrum will probably not show up much at all i.e. those with not enough IT knowledge to use it and those with enough IT knowledge to know better than to use it given its horrendous implications for privacy (of which this patent is an excellent example).
That might be a stupid idea but faking 2.7 million visits is even more stupid since it is physically impossible and obviously fraud. If he had faked a few thousand he might well have got away with it since it would have been a lot harder to prove that they were faked.
So jail for violating an EULA?
No, for gross stupidity in attempting fraud. If he had stopped at a few thousand visits he might have got away with it but 2.7 million visits are clearly physically impossible and simply has to be fraud.
If the assertion is that pound is not mass...
The pound cannot be a mass because otherwise "pounds per square inch" would be a unit of 2D density (like kilograms per square metre) and not a unit of pressure (like newtons per square metre). The imperial unit of mass is, according to wikipedia, the slug. If you try to use the pound for both weight and mass then you have a system of units which is inconsistent with basic physics. Indeed the fact that imperial units appear to rely on the definition of a force in terms of a mass really just demonstrates how utterly nuts they are.
Please explain the ancient unit of pressure: pounds per square inch then. You cannot measure pressure in kilograms per square metre. This is why the old imperial unit system is utterly ludicrous. It is out of step with basic physics and lacks any coherent or even consistent definition.
This is the kind of overreaction porn I come to slashdot for.
Is this an overreaction though? You could make exactly the same claim about the postal service. It sped up the interaction between people and allowed for mail-order scams etc. too. However, that same service was also used by law enforcement to transmit information about crooks rapidly e.g by sending fingerprints, crime reports and arrest warrants between jurisdictions. The same applied when the telephone came along.
In all these cases the solution has always been that you use that same reduction in friction to speed up the police e.g. now police can get arrest warrants, photographs, files etc. sent directly to them on the street. It is far better to force everyone to speed up rather than try and make everyone slow down to the speed of some authoritarian, bureaucratic department of government. Indeed if one country did this it would likely find itself left behind by those which don't have such impediments.
First thanks for the explanation, but are you sure your meant 'infinite'?
Yes, it is a definition, not a measurement. Essentially we define the fundmental, unchanging constants of the universe as so many SI units and then use measurements to precisely define the individual units. In fact, in particle physics, we actually start by defining these fundamental constants as '1' unit each and then derive units for energy, momentum, mass etc. from them creating a system known as "natural units". It's not very practical for everyday quantities but very useful if you are dealing with fundamental physics.
By it's very definition a balance in independent of gravity.
No it is not. Even a standard balance relies on the gravitational field for both sides being equal and, if you get precise enough, this may not be true. However, the watt balance balances the force of gravity with an electromagnetic force. Part of the measurement also requires determining the local gravitational field but this is something that you can measure accurately which is why this is still a far better definition than using a lump of metal outside Paris.
The international pound has been defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg.
That's interesting. Since the pound is a weight and the kilogram a mass unless they also fixed the gravitational field in that definition it's open to abuse.
A pound is a weight, not a mass which is not the same thing. While its definition may be based on the kilogram it must also be based on a value for the gravitational field since it is a force.
Just because someone is irresponsible in their personal finances doesn't mean they are incompetent or irresponsible with their professional responsibilities.
You can make that argument about anything though e.g. just because someone doesn't know which end of a computer plugs into the wall it doesn't mean that they cannot manage a government department on cyber security. The problem is though that someone like that is going to be utterly dependent on what their civil servants tell them because they have no experience of their own which is relevant. I suspect that this is what stops democracy being an unmitigated disaster.
Yes, but they usually have to get elected first to be in a position to be appointed. It is unusual for ministers, especially those in the cabinet, not to be elected MPs.
Most science ministers lack a science degree and there have certainly been some decidedly uneducated education ministers. Defence ministers have rarely served in the armed forces and we once had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who could not balance his credit card. Sadly, in a democracy, the only qualification for the job that counts is that you got more votes than anyone else and all this requires is that you look like less of a drooling idiot than the other people standing for election...and sometimes even that isn't true.
it's time to medicare lower age!
Most countries already do this and provide public health coverage from birth. However, this is not going to fix anything and health care is the crux of the crisis with an ageing population. While 60+-year-olds can certainly be extremely productive and useful members of society they need considerably more healthcare than 18-year olds. As the population ages there are fewer low-cost young people and more high-cost elderly people and so the cost per-person is going to steadily rise.
This is going to hurt every country regardless of whether or not they have a public health system. The difference is how the system will deal with it. In Canada and Europe we will end up with more and more taxes going into the health system and the quality of care will probably decline. In the US fewer and fewer people will be able to afford coverage and most people's coverage will likely get more and more restricted.
What evidence do you have that Brexit is the will of the UK people? One vote where over 2 million Brits living in the EU were not allowed to vote and others stupidly stayed home because they thought remain would win? Indeed, if you are so confident that Brexit remains the will of the people then I hope you support a second referendum on whether to accept the deal (if any) that May gets or to reverse direction and remain.
I see Bill is putting his years of experience in developing shit products to good use.
Again though I still think you have this backwards. Gender is not a term which describes how fashion choices relate to the concepts of male and female. Gender is a purely biological distinction and society then layers expectations - such as fashion choices - on top of that biological fact usually in ways that have little or nothing to do with the underlying biological differences.
As an example I can refer to the gender of animals as male or female and yet these exist largely or entirely outside society and so gender is clearly a term that describes biology, not something socially constructed like fashion. However, that underlying biology can be, and is, used by society to determine expectations for fashion.
Unfortunately I've been called a few times but dismissed during voir dire every time except once
That's the problem The justice system might need more intelligent people willing to participate but a lawyer defending a guilty defendant does not want them to participate.