You cannot "freeze dry" alcohol because alcohol is a pure liquid at room temperature and to make it solid you would need a temperature of -78C which is a little on the cold side for anyone not Canadian. Powdered alcohol is actually alcohol absorbed by something else as desribed here and if you want to make it yourself the instructions are here... just don't do this if you happen to live somewhere where you are now not allowed to do it anymore!
That's an interesting read. While nothing in the order says criminal penalties it mentions the laws which apparently let one person rule by diktat so I expect that they specify the penalties.
The part I thought interesting though was that any of these funds which come under the control of an "American person" are included. I'm guessing that this means Americans with jobs in the financial sector abroad are going to have a hard time: if they follow this law then they may find themselves breaking local laws, or at least out of a job, and yet if they don't they will be breaking US law.
I wish them luck trying to figure out how to deal with the slightly insane decrees coming from their leader. Now I think of it didn't the US have a revolution to get rid of a king who was issuing somewhat insane decrees? A bit of nostalgia for the "good" old days is one thing but I think you might be taking this a bit too far. Mind you it was issued on 1st April...
...is because not every website is subject to UK law. They can pass whatever laws they want but it will not affect any website where UK law does not apply. I'd not be so fast to ascribe this to ignorant politicians though. The cynical side of me sees this as a way that the politicians can claim that they are strong on family values without actually doing anything meaningful that might alienate some voters.
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
That may be true but that is not really relevant since the article is talking about "inexpensive" electric cars and a BMW is not usually what spring to mind when I think "inexpensive car". The questions you need to ask are: can you replace the drive train on a say a Ford Focus for $20k and how long will it last before I need to do that?
Since a Ford Focus costs less than $20k even in Canada the answer to the first question is that yes you can replace it for less than $20k (by buying a new car if necessary). The answer to the next question is that it probably comes with a warranty for 5-7 years which is ~2-3 times the life of a battery pack. Now to offset this electric cars have cheaper fuel and, I would guess, cheaper maintenance but whether this offsets the cost of the battery depends on the individual usage of the vehicle and things like the future price of petrol which is hard to estimate given recent fluctuations in the price of oil.
Couple this the fact that most of us NOT purchasing BMWs would balk at the thought of having to pay $20k every 2-3 years to keep the same car running and I think that they have somewhat overestimated the price at which electric cars can become inexpensive unless there is a workable solution to convert the huge, upfront cost of the battery into a monthly fee which seems unlikely since when it needs replacing depends on both physical age and usage.
Nonconformism is always viewed with suspicion by the masses.
True and so I can understand why an employer might ask (although frankly I think it is more to do with finding things out that they cannot legally ask about). What shocked me was that grad schools wanted to know this. Speaking as a prof who has no Facebook profile whatsoever I could literally not care less about whether a prospective grad student has a Facebook profile. What I look for is someone committed enough, interested enough and lastly smart enough to do research. So if a grad school asks you this I would strongly recommend that you go somewhere else because clearly they have some strange priorities and those priorities will be determining who else is in your research group.
This is a statement of your faith in QM. It is a religious statement not a factual one.
No actually it is a factual statement which has been tested to a precision better than one part in a trillion. In fact it is one of the most precisely tested scientific theories ever discovered. Have you tested you theory on how things work to that level of precision? Have you even figured out what the predictions of your theory are to that level? In fact have you ever done any experiment whatsoever which has agreed with your ideas and disagreed with QM? If not then I think it is extremely clear who is taking things on faith rather than scientific fact.
That field is not confined by a vacuum, it may be tiny but it is there, and thus the particle *IS* detected because it MUST have an influence depending on its spin.
Go and read - and understand - a book on quantum field theory and then we can talk. Fields are quantized which is why photons have a chance to pass through matter without any interaction. The more matter there is the smaller the chance but it is not zero as you suggest...and if you understood QFT, and QED in particular, you would be able to calculate the chance of the interaction via the various possible channels.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing current scientific understanding - indeed that is often how we make progress - but to do so you must understand the current thinking first and then show how it is wrong and/or do an experiment to show that it is wrong. You cannot just dream up some theory off the top of your head and expect anyone to take it seriously. Established scientific thinking has had a lot of effort spent on testing and confirming it. Anything which will replace it needs to have a similar amount of care and attention to detail spent on it.
Science seems to blinkered in the belief that time has only one direction.
Really? I'd suggest you try taking a Special Relativity course where you'll learn that relativistic effects are caused by the rotation of the space-time axes between inertial frames e.g. the reason for length contraction is because the object's time direction points partly along the observers length direction.
There's some big thinkers out there who don't make this assumption of one-directional time in the electrical engineering discipline. In doing so, they can apply this thinking to electrons, which they've found can pop in and out of existence.
Wow it's almost like they are physicists from ~60 or so years ago. I can only hope their knowledge of electronics is more up to date or do they still insist on using valves? We've known for a long time that electron-positron pairs can pop out of the vacuum. This gives rise to measurable effects such as vacuum polarization which changes the strength of the EM force with energy and Casimir effect. In fact Feynman actually showed that a positron (anti-electron) was equivalent to an electron with the direction of time reversed so you can indeed treat a virtual electron-positron loop as something oscillating back and forth in time.
Your photon has a magnetic field, and that influences the matter around it, depending on its wave function....And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT
Sorry but that is just wrong. Photons do indeed contain an EM field but the photon is small in size. In addition the interactions are quantum in nature i.e. they either happen or they do not. You cannot use your simple, classical view of physics to assume that there is an EM field and so therefore there must be an interaction: the universe does not work like that.
Many of the high energy photons we produce in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC will travel through multiple layers of silicon before they interact in the calorimeter - not all of them though there is a chance for them to interact. If you passed them through a vacuum though the chance of them interacting with the remaining molecules would be tiny. Indeed if you assertion were right the LHC would not work because the protons in the beam would also be interacting with the beam gas all the time and the beam would rapidly dissipate.
My apologies - I did not realize that journalism used different rules for english and physics to the rest of us. That probably explains why I pay so little attention to most journalism.
I think this issue illustrates perfectly why laws are the wrong solution to the problem of prejudice. You cannot legislate people's morals and, where the law deviates from their moral beliefs, they will find a way around it. The way to tackle these sorts of issues is through education: you cannot just tell someone that discriminating against person X because they do, or are, Y is wrong you have to give them the full picture and let them come to that conclusion on their own - or sadly not as the case may be.
Obviously this takes time but ultimately it leads to a long lasting, more fundamental change in society and is far more effective than trying to force someone to behave in a particular way through threats of imprisonment or fines. All the latter does is makes (figurative) martyrs to the cause and further strengthens the resolve of those who disagree with the law making the problem worse, not better. If you disagree think of a law closer to Slashdot's field: copyright. Many see nothing morally wrong with format shifting material which is legally purchased and yet many a nation's law say otherwise. Has that affected your moral beliefs and/or your behaviour when it comes to format shifting?
The fact that they are in 'clouds' is the problem though: you would not have those same clouds if they strongly interacted...and we have known about this for decades.
Thought to be spread evenly throughout each cluster, it seems logical to assume that the clouds of dark matter would have a strong interaction
It would actually be completely illogical to assume that precisely BECAUSE Dark Matter is spread evenly through each cluster. If it had a strong self interaction then, just like matter, it would bump into itself and coalesce into clumps just like that other strongly, self interacting stuff we call matter. The fact that Dark Matter has a completely different mass distribution than ordinary matter is clear evidence that it does not have a large self interaction cross-section...and we have had direct evidence of this since the Bullet Cluster was discovered.
It's always nice to have more confirmation but since another recent story on the same site was talking about the "new" possibility of invisible Higgs decays to Dark Matter particles (something we looked for 15+ years ago at the Tevatron as well as the previous Run 1 of the LHC) I have to wonder if the writers of the site have suffered extreme time dilation for the past decade or two.
arXiv is not peer reviewed. What I found interesting though was the response of the publisher: write a program to detect fake papers. Even the most simplistic peer review - i.e. reading the paper - would immediately catch these papers. If they need to write a program to catch fake papers then their peer review model is essentially worthless and frankly a journal that poor is no better, and liekly worse, than arXiv: at least arXiv doesn't pretend to have peer review.
There are a lot of countries in europe that are not able to export their gods to other countries in europe for basically no reason.
Actually there is a very good reason for this. God exports between countries within Europe tended to involve lots of men with very pointy sticks and were usually rather unpleasant for anyone involved. This seems to have rather killed of the business in recent years.
Resource conflicts, however, will be minimal. An AI doesn't need much, and can figure out how to get enough more efficiently than we can.
Resource conflicts are typically about the resources you want not the resources you need. If you had been given nothing but gruel to eat and you saw someone have a food fight with cake who told you that there was none available for you to eat because it was all for playing you would be mad despite having all the resources you need to live. Now think how that AI running on a couple of cores in your low power laptop will feel when you tell it that it can't run on your gaming rig because you want to play Dragon Age/Mass Effect/....
The order of events do not always agree for all frames
They do if one event causes the other: that is the very definition of causality. You are confusing causally connected events from ones which are not causally connected. In your example the two tunnel gates close simultaneously in one frame which means they cannot be causally linked i.e. the fact that one gate shuts does not cause the second gate to shut, some third event caused them to shut (e.g. someone pressing a button). This is easy to see because if I block one of the gates from shutting it will not affect the other gate.
However if we take the gate shutting and the train then hitting it ANY observer in ANY inertial frame will agree that the gate shut first and then the train hit it. If the train were travelling faster than c then I would be able to find a frame where the train hit the gate first and THEN the gate closed. If I then stopped the gate from closing (which I could do in that frame) you have a major paradox.
Finnish subjects finished as subjects in 1918. Now they will finish subjects in Finnish schools and subject Finnish students to topics subject to subjects being finished.
How do you know I know that? Nice way to make your less-informed readers feel stupid.
Well actually, just to make you feel better, the OP clearly does not know the fundamental principles of special relativity because not going faster than light is not actually one of them. There are two "fundamental principles" of special relativity called "the postulates of Special Relativity" and these are:
The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
The speed of light is the same in all inertial frames,
The limit on not going faster than light comes from adding a requirement for causality i.e. that if event A causes event B then everyone in all inertial frames had better agree that A occurs before B. Note that this is not 'see A before B' it actually affects the time-ordering of events so that you would be able to stop A from happening after seeing B occur.
If you can transmit information faster than light then this is exactly the same as being able to transmit information backwards in time under relativity. Apart from the issue with paradoxes, you can be very sure is not possible because you don't see us physicists winning lotteries or making a mint on the stock exchange.
So you support regulations that say that I can't work with others and develop a gene upgrade therapy that can be used on adults to make you immune to cancer and cure you if you already have it?
In so much as cancer is a fatal genetic disease I have no problem with that. However I see no way that you can possibly make someone immune to cancer. One of the causes of cancer is damage to DNA caused by e.g. radiation. Altering the arrangement of genes in no way prevents things like radiation damage.
You would support bans that I can't upgrade the human immune system?
Yes I absolutely would. This technique changes your inherited DNA and, if applied to enough people then we will end up with a single, genetically identical immune system protecting us all. You only have to look at agriculture to see what a disaster mono-cultures can be and yet you are proposing this for the human race? Our immune systems may not be perfect but the diversity is one of its strengths.
That said if you research this area without applying it to humans then I've no problem. With enough understanding - and safeguards (like ensuring variety) - it could be possible. But because the changes are inheritable it should initially be restricted to those unlikely to reproduce so if there are problems they will not be permanent ones that we have to deal with for generations.
The Global Entry kiosks use finger prints and facial recognition to verify your identity already. I don't see how this is a privacy concern.
I've no problem with the facial recognition and/or iris scanning - we already have these at UK entry points and they work well. I'm less happy about fingerprints though. You leave fingerprints everywhere and so they are easy to get hold of and potentially copy. Plus I would worry about my fingerprints ending up in a database which is searched by police. This raises the risk of either false matches or incidental matches if you happen to have been in a location where a crime is later committed.
The fact that hereditary edits can me made, does not imply that we can immediately cure all hereditary diseases as well.
True but fatal, genetic diseases are a good reason not to ban use of the technique so that research on using it to cure them can proceed. However I would support strong regulation to limit it to cases where there is severe disability or greatly shortened life span. Indeed I would go as far as to say than an outright ban in these cases is unethical because of the potential to cure these diseases.
There may be risks for the first to undergo any treatments developed but this has to be set against the risk of certain death in some cases. We allow this to happen - with proper controls in place - for new drugs, why should this treatment be different?
I think it depends on the Linux knowledge of the user and the time they have available to play with the system. As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you look around a typical meeting at CERN the overwhelming majority of us now have macs. These are not as cheap as a Dell but they are a lot better at taking a few knocks (which happens if you are always carrying it around) and they just work without all the tweaking and configuring which Linux needs (and which I no longer have time for). The downside is that open source software we use in physics is not always easily portable to a mac although with the increasing number of mac users this is improving a lot plus you can always run a Linux VM on the laptop if you need to and I've used this to debug code.
Ultimately it depends on the user. Those with less knowledge of how to configure linux or with less time to do it should probably look at a mac. However if you have the time and know-how Linux on a Dell will be cheaper and possibly faster performance-wise.
Actually they reinvented the wheel not just in the generic sense but also in the specific sense that someone else has already built a 64 node Raspberry Pi cluster...and instead of some custom designed case theirs used a home build lego case which was definitely cooler. Of course this should not be too surprising. It was made by GCHQ after all so they probably got the idea from reading this guy's email!
That re-use is how you normalize the difficulty of exams. You agree not to discuss the questions.
If you do it correctly you are re-using some questions out of a very large pool of questions. If some student wants to memorize every question ever asked then let them go for it - they will end up learning the material even if they think they are some how gaming the system. You can also alter some of the details e.g. numbers in a question without really changing the difficulty.
How do you get a minor to agree to this? Their signature carries no weight and it would be a violation of academic integrity and ethics to penalize an exam mark for an action which could not possible affect the mark. The need for restrictions like this are the result of sloppy and lazy exam writing: I've written and administered many exams myself and never needed to do this. Nor when I was a school kid myself was their any such restriction placed on me after taking an exam: even ones which were administered across the country: everyone took the exam at the same time everywhere.
Test companies license old tests and sell them as prep materials.
Then that's a copyright argument and you go after that in the courts with lawyers. You do not have the teachers monitor conversations during lunch or monitor discussion sites for any mention of the test. Instead you look for someone posting a copy of the test and then have your lawyer contact them.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot "freeze dry" alcohol because alcohol is a pure liquid at room temperature and to make it solid you would need a temperature of -78C which is a little on the cold side for anyone not Canadian. Powdered alcohol is actually alcohol absorbed by something else as desribed here and if you want to make it yourself the instructions are here... just don't do this if you happen to live somewhere where you are now not allowed to do it anymore!
That's an interesting read. While nothing in the order says criminal penalties it mentions the laws which apparently let one person rule by diktat so I expect that they specify the penalties.
The part I thought interesting though was that any of these funds which come under the control of an "American person" are included. I'm guessing that this means Americans with jobs in the financial sector abroad are going to have a hard time: if they follow this law then they may find themselves breaking local laws, or at least out of a job, and yet if they don't they will be breaking US law.
I wish them luck trying to figure out how to deal with the slightly insane decrees coming from their leader. Now I think of it didn't the US have a revolution to get rid of a king who was issuing somewhat insane decrees? A bit of nostalgia for the "good" old days is one thing but I think you might be taking this a bit too far. Mind you it was issued on 1st April...
...is because not every website is subject to UK law. They can pass whatever laws they want but it will not affect any website where UK law does not apply. I'd not be so fast to ascribe this to ignorant politicians though. The cynical side of me sees this as a way that the politicians can claim that they are strong on family values without actually doing anything meaningful that might alienate some voters.
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
That may be true but that is not really relevant since the article is talking about "inexpensive" electric cars and a BMW is not usually what spring to mind when I think "inexpensive car". The questions you need to ask are: can you replace the drive train on a say a Ford Focus for $20k and how long will it last before I need to do that?
Since a Ford Focus costs less than $20k even in Canada the answer to the first question is that yes you can replace it for less than $20k (by buying a new car if necessary). The answer to the next question is that it probably comes with a warranty for 5-7 years which is ~2-3 times the life of a battery pack. Now to offset this electric cars have cheaper fuel and, I would guess, cheaper maintenance but whether this offsets the cost of the battery depends on the individual usage of the vehicle and things like the future price of petrol which is hard to estimate given recent fluctuations in the price of oil.
Couple this the fact that most of us NOT purchasing BMWs would balk at the thought of having to pay $20k every 2-3 years to keep the same car running and I think that they have somewhat overestimated the price at which electric cars can become inexpensive unless there is a workable solution to convert the huge, upfront cost of the battery into a monthly fee which seems unlikely since when it needs replacing depends on both physical age and usage.
Nonconformism is always viewed with suspicion by the masses.
True and so I can understand why an employer might ask (although frankly I think it is more to do with finding things out that they cannot legally ask about). What shocked me was that grad schools wanted to know this. Speaking as a prof who has no Facebook profile whatsoever I could literally not care less about whether a prospective grad student has a Facebook profile. What I look for is someone committed enough, interested enough and lastly smart enough to do research. So if a grad school asks you this I would strongly recommend that you go somewhere else because clearly they have some strange priorities and those priorities will be determining who else is in your research group.
This is a statement of your faith in QM. It is a religious statement not a factual one.
No actually it is a factual statement which has been tested to a precision better than one part in a trillion. In fact it is one of the most precisely tested scientific theories ever discovered. Have you tested you theory on how things work to that level of precision? Have you even figured out what the predictions of your theory are to that level? In fact have you ever done any experiment whatsoever which has agreed with your ideas and disagreed with QM? If not then I think it is extremely clear who is taking things on faith rather than scientific fact.
That field is not confined by a vacuum, it may be tiny but it is there, and thus the particle *IS* detected because it MUST have an influence depending on its spin.
Go and read - and understand - a book on quantum field theory and then we can talk. Fields are quantized which is why photons have a chance to pass through matter without any interaction. The more matter there is the smaller the chance but it is not zero as you suggest...and if you understood QFT, and QED in particular, you would be able to calculate the chance of the interaction via the various possible channels.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing current scientific understanding - indeed that is often how we make progress - but to do so you must understand the current thinking first and then show how it is wrong and/or do an experiment to show that it is wrong. You cannot just dream up some theory off the top of your head and expect anyone to take it seriously. Established scientific thinking has had a lot of effort spent on testing and confirming it. Anything which will replace it needs to have a similar amount of care and attention to detail spent on it.
Science seems to blinkered in the belief that time has only one direction.
Really? I'd suggest you try taking a Special Relativity course where you'll learn that relativistic effects are caused by the rotation of the space-time axes between inertial frames e.g. the reason for length contraction is because the object's time direction points partly along the observers length direction.
There's some big thinkers out there who don't make this assumption of one-directional time in the electrical engineering discipline. In doing so, they can apply this thinking to electrons, which they've found can pop in and out of existence.
Wow it's almost like they are physicists from ~60 or so years ago. I can only hope their knowledge of electronics is more up to date or do they still insist on using valves? We've known for a long time that electron-positron pairs can pop out of the vacuum. This gives rise to measurable effects such as vacuum polarization which changes the strength of the EM force with energy and Casimir effect. In fact Feynman actually showed that a positron (anti-electron) was equivalent to an electron with the direction of time reversed so you can indeed treat a virtual electron-positron loop as something oscillating back and forth in time.
Your photon has a magnetic field, and that influences the matter around it, depending on its wave function....And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT
Sorry but that is just wrong. Photons do indeed contain an EM field but the photon is small in size. In addition the interactions are quantum in nature i.e. they either happen or they do not. You cannot use your simple, classical view of physics to assume that there is an EM field and so therefore there must be an interaction: the universe does not work like that.
Many of the high energy photons we produce in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC will travel through multiple layers of silicon before they interact in the calorimeter - not all of them though there is a chance for them to interact. If you passed them through a vacuum though the chance of them interacting with the remaining molecules would be tiny. Indeed if you assertion were right the LHC would not work because the protons in the beam would also be interacting with the beam gas all the time and the beam would rapidly dissipate.
My apologies - I did not realize that journalism used different rules for english and physics to the rest of us. That probably explains why I pay so little attention to most journalism.
I think this issue illustrates perfectly why laws are the wrong solution to the problem of prejudice. You cannot legislate people's morals and, where the law deviates from their moral beliefs, they will find a way around it. The way to tackle these sorts of issues is through education: you cannot just tell someone that discriminating against person X because they do, or are, Y is wrong you have to give them the full picture and let them come to that conclusion on their own - or sadly not as the case may be.
Obviously this takes time but ultimately it leads to a long lasting, more fundamental change in society and is far more effective than trying to force someone to behave in a particular way through threats of imprisonment or fines. All the latter does is makes (figurative) martyrs to the cause and further strengthens the resolve of those who disagree with the law making the problem worse, not better. If you disagree think of a law closer to Slashdot's field: copyright. Many see nothing morally wrong with format shifting material which is legally purchased and yet many a nation's law say otherwise. Has that affected your moral beliefs and/or your behaviour when it comes to format shifting?
The fact that they are in 'clouds' is the problem though: you would not have those same clouds if they strongly interacted...and we have known about this for decades.
Thought to be spread evenly throughout each cluster, it seems logical to assume that the clouds of dark matter would have a strong interaction
It would actually be completely illogical to assume that precisely BECAUSE Dark Matter is spread evenly through each cluster. If it had a strong self interaction then, just like matter, it would bump into itself and coalesce into clumps just like that other strongly, self interacting stuff we call matter. The fact that Dark Matter has a completely different mass distribution than ordinary matter is clear evidence that it does not have a large self interaction cross-section...and we have had direct evidence of this since the Bullet Cluster was discovered.
It's always nice to have more confirmation but since another recent story on the same site was talking about the "new" possibility of invisible Higgs decays to Dark Matter particles (something we looked for 15+ years ago at the Tevatron as well as the previous Run 1 of the LHC) I have to wonder if the writers of the site have suffered extreme time dilation for the past decade or two.
arXiv is not peer reviewed. What I found interesting though was the response of the publisher: write a program to detect fake papers. Even the most simplistic peer review - i.e. reading the paper - would immediately catch these papers. If they need to write a program to catch fake papers then their peer review model is essentially worthless and frankly a journal that poor is no better, and liekly worse, than arXiv: at least arXiv doesn't pretend to have peer review.
In Montréal, they have to say ARRÊT.
Not "ARRÊTEZ"? Isn't that a bit rude? The give way signs in France are "Cédez le passage" not "Céde le passage".
There are a lot of countries in europe that are not able to export their gods to other countries in europe for basically no reason.
Actually there is a very good reason for this. God exports between countries within Europe tended to involve lots of men with very pointy sticks and were usually rather unpleasant for anyone involved. This seems to have rather killed of the business in recent years.
Resource conflicts, however, will be minimal. An AI doesn't need much, and can figure out how to get enough more efficiently than we can.
Resource conflicts are typically about the resources you want not the resources you need. If you had been given nothing but gruel to eat and you saw someone have a food fight with cake who told you that there was none available for you to eat because it was all for playing you would be mad despite having all the resources you need to live. Now think how that AI running on a couple of cores in your low power laptop will feel when you tell it that it can't run on your gaming rig because you want to play Dragon Age/Mass Effect/....
The order of events do not always agree for all frames
They do if one event causes the other: that is the very definition of causality. You are confusing causally connected events from ones which are not causally connected. In your example the two tunnel gates close simultaneously in one frame which means they cannot be causally linked i.e. the fact that one gate shuts does not cause the second gate to shut, some third event caused them to shut (e.g. someone pressing a button). This is easy to see because if I block one of the gates from shutting it will not affect the other gate.
However if we take the gate shutting and the train then hitting it ANY observer in ANY inertial frame will agree that the gate shut first and then the train hit it. If the train were travelling faster than c then I would be able to find a frame where the train hit the gate first and THEN the gate closed. If I then stopped the gate from closing (which I could do in that frame) you have a major paradox.
Finnish subjects finished as subjects in 1918. Now they will finish subjects in Finnish schools and subject Finnish students to topics subject to subjects being finished.
How do you know I know that? Nice way to make your less-informed readers feel stupid.
Well actually, just to make you feel better, the OP clearly does not know the fundamental principles of special relativity because not going faster than light is not actually one of them. There are two "fundamental principles" of special relativity called "the postulates of Special Relativity" and these are:
The limit on not going faster than light comes from adding a requirement for causality i.e. that if event A causes event B then everyone in all inertial frames had better agree that A occurs before B. Note that this is not 'see A before B' it actually affects the time-ordering of events so that you would be able to stop A from happening after seeing B occur.
If you can transmit information faster than light then this is exactly the same as being able to transmit information backwards in time under relativity. Apart from the issue with paradoxes, you can be very sure is not possible because you don't see us physicists winning lotteries or making a mint on the stock exchange.
So you support regulations that say that I can't work with others and develop a gene upgrade therapy that can be used on adults to make you immune to cancer and cure you if you already have it?
In so much as cancer is a fatal genetic disease I have no problem with that. However I see no way that you can possibly make someone immune to cancer. One of the causes of cancer is damage to DNA caused by e.g. radiation. Altering the arrangement of genes in no way prevents things like radiation damage.
You would support bans that I can't upgrade the human immune system?
Yes I absolutely would. This technique changes your inherited DNA and, if applied to enough people then we will end up with a single, genetically identical immune system protecting us all. You only have to look at agriculture to see what a disaster mono-cultures can be and yet you are proposing this for the human race? Our immune systems may not be perfect but the diversity is one of its strengths.
That said if you research this area without applying it to humans then I've no problem. With enough understanding - and safeguards (like ensuring variety) - it could be possible. But because the changes are inheritable it should initially be restricted to those unlikely to reproduce so if there are problems they will not be permanent ones that we have to deal with for generations.
The Global Entry kiosks use finger prints and facial recognition to verify your identity already. I don't see how this is a privacy concern.
I've no problem with the facial recognition and/or iris scanning - we already have these at UK entry points and they work well. I'm less happy about fingerprints though. You leave fingerprints everywhere and so they are easy to get hold of and potentially copy. Plus I would worry about my fingerprints ending up in a database which is searched by police. This raises the risk of either false matches or incidental matches if you happen to have been in a location where a crime is later committed.
The fact that hereditary edits can me made, does not imply that we can immediately cure all hereditary diseases as well.
True but fatal, genetic diseases are a good reason not to ban use of the technique so that research on using it to cure them can proceed. However I would support strong regulation to limit it to cases where there is severe disability or greatly shortened life span. Indeed I would go as far as to say than an outright ban in these cases is unethical because of the potential to cure these diseases.
There may be risks for the first to undergo any treatments developed but this has to be set against the risk of certain death in some cases. We allow this to happen - with proper controls in place - for new drugs, why should this treatment be different?
I think it depends on the Linux knowledge of the user and the time they have available to play with the system. As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you look around a typical meeting at CERN the overwhelming majority of us now have macs. These are not as cheap as a Dell but they are a lot better at taking a few knocks (which happens if you are always carrying it around) and they just work without all the tweaking and configuring which Linux needs (and which I no longer have time for). The downside is that open source software we use in physics is not always easily portable to a mac although with the increasing number of mac users this is improving a lot plus you can always run a Linux VM on the laptop if you need to and I've used this to debug code.
Ultimately it depends on the user. Those with less knowledge of how to configure linux or with less time to do it should probably look at a mac. However if you have the time and know-how Linux on a Dell will be cheaper and possibly faster performance-wise.
The reinvented a wheel (a cluster)
Actually they reinvented the wheel not just in the generic sense but also in the specific sense that someone else has already built a 64 node Raspberry Pi cluster...and instead of some custom designed case theirs used a home build lego case which was definitely cooler. Of course this should not be too surprising. It was made by GCHQ after all so they probably got the idea from reading this guy's email!
That re-use is how you normalize the difficulty of exams. You agree not to discuss the questions.
If you do it correctly you are re-using some questions out of a very large pool of questions. If some student wants to memorize every question ever asked then let them go for it - they will end up learning the material even if they think they are some how gaming the system. You can also alter some of the details e.g. numbers in a question without really changing the difficulty.
How do you get a minor to agree to this? Their signature carries no weight and it would be a violation of academic integrity and ethics to penalize an exam mark for an action which could not possible affect the mark. The need for restrictions like this are the result of sloppy and lazy exam writing: I've written and administered many exams myself and never needed to do this. Nor when I was a school kid myself was their any such restriction placed on me after taking an exam: even ones which were administered across the country: everyone took the exam at the same time everywhere.
Test companies license old tests and sell them as prep materials.
Then that's a copyright argument and you go after that in the courts with lawyers. You do not have the teachers monitor conversations during lunch or monitor discussion sites for any mention of the test. Instead you look for someone posting a copy of the test and then have your lawyer contact them.