If the contracts are signed in Ireland, and both parties agree that the terms of the contract are to be governed by the laws of Ireland, then they are made in Ireland.
They are not signed in Ireland they are signed in the UK where both parties live and work. You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply when everything is taking place in the UK unless you are going to give individuals the same power and I can go shopping for the country with the lowest income tax rate too. The problem is that large, international companies can afford enough lawyers that they twist laws into knots to get out of paying their share of society's infrastructure costs.
surely any comment made on twitter/fb has protection under the 1st amendment? Of course not, but it'd be good if they followed their own laws now and then.
They are following their own laws: that is quite literally the problem. Despite the best efforts of the US government, and apparently to the surprise of some of its citizens, the US constitution does dot apply to other countries like the UK. It is perhaps even more surprising that it often does not seem to always apply in the US as well but that's a different issue to the one being discussed here.
My guess is that there was probably some Victorian-era law on the books passed back when international communication was a rare and uncommon thing which allowed the government to monitor such rare events. Fast forward 100 years and suddenly a huge fraction of everyone's communication is international. So for a group called "Privacy International" the sad irony is that there is no international privacy in the UK.
It's more like telling to you stop versus saying, like, the more neutral why are you using our trademark?
No a C&D is threatening you with being sued for large amounts of money and is written to be as threatening as possible in order to get you to back down. In civilized society when making a request of someone you do not normally start by immediately threatening them with the consequences of not complying. This generally tends to be counterproductive because it antagonizes people who will then either do the minimum possible to comply with your demand and/or figure out a way around your demand which causes the maximum inconvenience for you while complying with the letter of what is required by law. In addition a company which relies of customers wanting to shop there is not going to gain business by antagonizing its customers. We all understand that a company has to protect its trademarks but it does not have to be (or hire) a jerk to do so.
There is no credible evidence that early vaccinations cause issues with children.
There is always a risk of complications with a vaccine even for adults. The question is not whether there is any risk from having the vaccine but whether the risk is less than the risk from catching the disease. According to the US CDC there were 48,277 cases of Whooping Cough with 20 fatalities mainly in babies under 3 months.
The only rate of serious complications from a vaccine I could find is for the MMR where 1 in a million develop encephalitis which is a serious condition but that has to be compared to a 1 in a thousand rate of encephalitis from measles alone. Assuming the whooping cough vaccine has a similar serious complication rate that puts the likelihood of death at below 1 in a million vs. 1 in 25,000 for the disease. So I'll take my chance with the vaccine (and already did when I was a kid!).
So instead of trying to persuade people that there is zero risk from vaccines, which is simply not true, we should instead be educating them about the relative risks of the vaccine (almost none) compared to the disease (typically a far higher chance of death and/or permanent disability). One of the biggest ironies of vaccines though has to be that some people don't get vaccinated because they don't see serious diseases like measles as a threat to be worried about anymore. Doh!
As well as the vulnerabilities to early cracking you mention this approach is also very vulnerable to permanent loss. If someone does not want you to ever retrieve the data all they need to do if fire a high energy electron beam at the same target any time between you sending the signal and its return. Assuming the energy is high enough to minimize dispersion, and they fire enough electrons then you will never receive the signal and so never be able to retrieve the data.
Not to take away from what this kid did (certainly more than what I did in 7th grade), but it is far from original.
What exactly DID he do? It looks like he simply built a MindCuber and added a few tweaks. This is not at all impressive. The reason I recognized it for what it is is that my 10 year old son did almost exactly the same thing: built the MindCuber from the available instructions and ran the code. It looks like this kid added a few tweaks but other than that it is almost identical to the published plans.
Things are getting really bad if a primary school kid who can build a complex Lego kit from instructions is now such a rarity that it's newsworthy. Now if he had designed and built it from scratch including the algorithm to solve the cube then I would be impressed but building a lego robot from available instructions? Really?
$900 is one battery, you need 5 for a 15,000 km range hence you are out by a factor of five. Since, as others have pointed out, getting 6l/100 km is a bit of a stretch so it may be closer to a factor of 4 rather than 5. Really what we need is a real cost for the battery. The $900 price is just to make it the same cost as Li-ion with the huge benefit of massive range and instant recharge by replacement. If retail replacement cost is much less than this then you start to have an electric car which can really be competitive on both cost and range with a petrol one. At $225/battery you reach parity with petrol but this is barely above the cost of 100 kg of raw aluminium so it seems unlikely to be achievable.
This doesn't solve the problem in any fundamental way; but it does help.
Actually I don't think it is possible to solve it at a fundamental level. The laws of physics are invariant under time. In fact this symmetry is what gives us conservation of energy. What this means is that any physical system must work the same regardless of when it is operated. The result is that the only way to make such a temporal crypto algorithm would be to use a tamper-proof physical device which will measure the passage of time - you cannot develop a time lock algorithm which will only run when the time is X since no physical system can measure absolute time only a change in time.
Since making something like that would be exceedingly hard, if not impossible, to make tamper proof you are reliant on how securely the device is stored which is pretty much the system which already exists. All you can do, as you suggest, is make it hard to assemble the pieces before the correct time.
If the cost is about the same, it might even be worth considering, say, four 5 kg Al batteries with 600 km range.
That makes a lot of sense. The other advantage is that it also reduces the weight of the car by several 100 kg which will increase performance and efficiency.
If the battery is $900 but a recharge is only $100...
My understanding is that recharging the battery is essentially re-smelting the aluminium ore that the discharge process generates. Hence I would expect that recharging the battery is effectively no different than making it in the first place. You do not have to purchase new aluminium ore but you do have to reclaim it from the empty battery. Hence I would expect that the recharge cost will be very close to the cost of a new battery so I think it will be more like the opposite of what you suggest e.g. charge $1,000 for a new battery and get $100 off the next battery when you return the first.
If the Al battery is much more expensive than the Li-ion per km I would agree. However if it is cheaper per km that the Li-ion, or even slightly more expensive, who would not prefer an electric car which needs charging ~twice a year over one which you have to constantly remember to plug in?
When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month.
I know it is Slashdot and the summary is misleading about it "adding 100kg over a Tesla battery" but if you actually read the article you would learn that the idea is not to replace the existing Li-ion battery but to have this as well as a reserve. As you point out most people only drive short trips for which a Li-ion battery is well suited. This is just to provide a power for long distance driving.
However, depending on the cost, since this battery is only 100 kg and the current Tesla battery is 500kg you could imagine completely replacing the Li-ion battery with five of these and having a 15,000 km range which would probably do most people for the best part of a year. This would only work if it is cheap to replace compared to the cost of a Li-ion battery which lasts for 100,000 km and costs $30k. So assuming the cost of electricity to recharge the Li-ion palances with the installation costs of the multiple aluminium battery packs you would require, the cost per aluminium battery would need to be $900. The cost of 100 kg of aluminium (which seems to be the principle component) is $180 for 100 kg so this does not rule out such a price.
Sadly the killer for this, and all electric cars, is that assuming an internal combustion car uses 6l/100km of petrol the price of petrol would need to reach $5/litre before it became more expensive than the cost of battery or about a factor 4 higher than it currently is in Canada. Still give it a few more years of declining battery costs and increasing oil prices and we will finally be there!
I mean some may talk funny, but since when does that count as a "foreign language"?
Don't go blaming us Brits for treating American as a foreign language. I was in a Chicago book store several years ago and was amused to see that they had the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelves of the foreign language section.
Scientists might want to rethink the moniker "habitable zone" if it is filled with a deadly amount of stellar radiation...
The habitable zone only refers to the amount of heat radiation a planet receives it does not mean that every large rock there is habitable - just look at the moon. There are additional constraints for a habitable planet e.g. requires an atmosphere and liquid water. All this result does is to add an additional requirement near a red dwarf: you don't just need a gravitational field large enough to hold onto an atmosphere you also need a magnetic field to shield it.
There are valid medical reasons that some people can't get immunized. (Allergies, compromised immune systems, etc.) Those people benefit from herd immunity.
Correct. However I have an ethical problem with requiring someone to undergo a medical procedure for someone else's benefit because where do you stop? If it is shown that having your tonsils removed reduces the spread of tonsillitis do you mandate that everyone have their tonsils taken out? Taken to an extreme do you mandate living organ donation e.g. lobe of a liver, one kidney etc because you can survive quite well on a single kidney or reduced liver and it would save someone else's life.
The problem with taking away people's choice about which medical procedures to have is not something to be done lightly. A better approach is to immunize people from idiocy by "vaccinating" them with a good education. Like a vaccine education will never be 100% effective but if you can inoculate enough of the population you will get a herd immunity that will be proof against more than just anti-vaccine stupidity.
Late 80s and early 90s? Welcome to the 21st century! We now have CPUs with features that require compiler hints and optimization to achieve maximum performance. In fact by even the mid 90s I did optimization studies for trigger code for and experiment and found that the C++ compiler generated far more efficient code than the C compiler because that was where the company was putting its development resources.
However it is not just that. In particle physics we do a lot of I/O, reading binary data and have large code bases which need object oriented programming to manage. Fortran can do none of these things unless you use one of the many recent flavours that have tried to bolt these onto the language. In addition it is not a language that undergrads learn anymore (at least in physics).
Excuse me, but you're going to have to explain how your model is different from the one you say is wrong.
The point is that it is not the training provided by us professors it is the people in charge of the projects who used to require Fortran. However this has almost completely changed. I can't speak for other disciplines but in Particle Physics the code migration IS happening on the scale I think. All the major programs used in collider physics have migrated to C++: GEANT, PYTHIA and ROOT are all now C++. There are still some generators written by theorists which are Fortran but these are becoming increasingly rare because it is becoming harder to find anyone who understands the language which means that such programs are less likely to be used.
If you're using C++ for scientific math, then you deserve to have whatever credentials you may possess to be revoked immediately.
Really? Well I'm guessing that's it for the entire field of particle physics then.
I have PoC code that I have used to prove that C++ can produce incorrect results based on factors other than the code itself, and at the level of significance as high as 10^-15. That is a completely unacceptable level of inaccuracy for scientific exploration.
...and yet we found the Higgs with such code...or do you think it was just a rounding error in ROOT?
Perhaps it's still the best tool for the job. Why is that strange?
It's not strange it's just wrong. Particle physics does not use FORTRAN except in very limited places usually associated with theorists who have not yet migrated to C++ which is a small and diminishing number. As far as I am aware the astrophysicists down the hall from us don't seem to use it much either and the experimental condensed matter guys don't either as far as I am aware. So either things like physics research in general is not cutting edge or the OP doesn't know what s/he is talking about.
Also "legacy training". Student learns from prof. Student becomes prof. Cycle repeats.
Not really - even when I was a student we ditched F77 whenever we possibly could and used C or C++. The issue is more legacy programmers. Often the person in charge of a project is a older person who knows FORTRAN and does not want to spend the time to learn a new language like C (or even C++!). Hence they fall back into something more comfortable.
However by now even this is not the case. The software in particle physics is almost exclusively C++ and/or Python. The only things that I am aware of which are still FORTRAN are some Monte-Carlo event generators which are written by theorists. My guess is that as experimentalists even older colleagues have to learn C++ and Python to use and program modern hardware. Theorists can get by using any language they want and so are slower to change. Certainly it has probably been at least 15 years since I wrote any FORTRAN myself and even then what I wrote was the code needed to test the F77 interface to a rapid C I/O framework for events which was ~1-200 times faster than the F77 code it replaced.
If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree.
Good one - if sadly exactly one month too late!
Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment.
If you want training for a particular job you should go to a vocational training college and skip university all together. A university degree is not, and never has been, designed as vocational training (except for a few limited professions such as medicine and law). The point of a university degree is to give you a broad and deep understanding of a particular subject which can then be applied to a variety of situations. This is a benefit to both the individual and the employer. When someone encounters something new in their job they need to have that depth of knowledge and experience to figure out a solution.
Indeed but you missed a few such as: financial (needs keen data analysis skills), natural resource sector (geophysics: using physics to locate resources to extract), IT sector (R&D of new devices and data analysis again), medicine (operating and developing MRI, CT, PET etc. technologies plus even cooler things) and the whole space sector.
Then of course there is research both academic and industrial which stretches from studying the fundamental building blocks and nature of the universe to pulling apart single DNA and protein molecules to study how they fold to studying the flow properties of ice cream (I know of a PhD student who did that for a well known UK ice cream manufacturer!)...but working for Elon Musk either on electric cars or building space craft would be cool too.
Police often wont take care of it...because as he said, it's just a phone.
Today it's a phone, tomorrow it's a laptop and by next week it's an armed robbery of an electronics store. I can understand that the police do not have the resources to track down every petty criminal but when confronted with clear evidence where the criminal is they have a duty to act. It is not only a fantastic public relations opportunity ("I went to the police and they caught the criminal one hour later") it also looks good for the crime statistics and it helps to reduce future crime since many phone thefts are probably opportunistic criminals who, if not caught, will carry on with their experiment to see how many phones/laptops/etc. they can steal before it crosses the police action threshold.
This effect will not only kill at high energies but at high intensity too. With a high enough intensity you can have multi-photon interactions to achieve the same total energy. However pair production is not the only process you have to worry about compton scattering will occur as well. This will impose an intensity limit well below pair production energies.
Essentially reflected photons will have less energy than incident photons and as the energy increases so too does this energy difference. It is caused by relativistic effects when a photon is reflected from an electron. At visible wavelengths the effect still occurs but is not noticeable but crank the energy up to several keV and your photon has an energy more comparable to the electron rest mass energy and the effect kicks in.
Slashdot Mirror
Better hope they are not made in China otherwise that will be an external communication and they will be able to track exactly who ordered them!
If the contracts are signed in Ireland, and both parties agree that the terms of the contract are to be governed by the laws of Ireland, then they are made in Ireland.
They are not signed in Ireland they are signed in the UK where both parties live and work. You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply when everything is taking place in the UK unless you are going to give individuals the same power and I can go shopping for the country with the lowest income tax rate too. The problem is that large, international companies can afford enough lawyers that they twist laws into knots to get out of paying their share of society's infrastructure costs.
surely any comment made on twitter/fb has protection under the 1st amendment? Of course not, but it'd be good if they followed their own laws now and then.
They are following their own laws: that is quite literally the problem. Despite the best efforts of the US government, and apparently to the surprise of some of its citizens, the US constitution does dot apply to other countries like the UK. It is perhaps even more surprising that it often does not seem to always apply in the US as well but that's a different issue to the one being discussed here.
My guess is that there was probably some Victorian-era law on the books passed back when international communication was a rare and uncommon thing which allowed the government to monitor such rare events. Fast forward 100 years and suddenly a huge fraction of everyone's communication is international. So for a group called "Privacy International" the sad irony is that there is no international privacy in the UK.
It's more like telling to you stop versus saying, like, the more neutral why are you using our trademark?
No a C&D is threatening you with being sued for large amounts of money and is written to be as threatening as possible in order to get you to back down. In civilized society when making a request of someone you do not normally start by immediately threatening them with the consequences of not complying. This generally tends to be counterproductive because it antagonizes people who will then either do the minimum possible to comply with your demand and/or figure out a way around your demand which causes the maximum inconvenience for you while complying with the letter of what is required by law. In addition a company which relies of customers wanting to shop there is not going to gain business by antagonizing its customers. We all understand that a company has to protect its trademarks but it does not have to be (or hire) a jerk to do so.
There is no credible evidence that early vaccinations cause issues with children.
There is always a risk of complications with a vaccine even for adults. The question is not whether there is any risk from having the vaccine but whether the risk is less than the risk from catching the disease. According to the US CDC there were 48,277 cases of Whooping Cough with 20 fatalities mainly in babies under 3 months.
The only rate of serious complications from a vaccine I could find is for the MMR where 1 in a million develop encephalitis which is a serious condition but that has to be compared to a 1 in a thousand rate of encephalitis from measles alone. Assuming the whooping cough vaccine has a similar serious complication rate that puts the likelihood of death at below 1 in a million vs. 1 in 25,000 for the disease. So I'll take my chance with the vaccine (and already did when I was a kid!).
So instead of trying to persuade people that there is zero risk from vaccines, which is simply not true, we should instead be educating them about the relative risks of the vaccine (almost none) compared to the disease (typically a far higher chance of death and/or permanent disability). One of the biggest ironies of vaccines though has to be that some people don't get vaccinated because they don't see serious diseases like measles as a threat to be worried about anymore. Doh!
As well as the vulnerabilities to early cracking you mention this approach is also very vulnerable to permanent loss. If someone does not want you to ever retrieve the data all they need to do if fire a high energy electron beam at the same target any time between you sending the signal and its return. Assuming the energy is high enough to minimize dispersion, and they fire enough electrons then you will never receive the signal and so never be able to retrieve the data.
Not to take away from what this kid did (certainly more than what I did in 7th grade), but it is far from original.
What exactly DID he do? It looks like he simply built a MindCuber and added a few tweaks. This is not at all impressive. The reason I recognized it for what it is is that my 10 year old son did almost exactly the same thing: built the MindCuber from the available instructions and ran the code. It looks like this kid added a few tweaks but other than that it is almost identical to the published plans.
Things are getting really bad if a primary school kid who can build a complex Lego kit from instructions is now such a rarity that it's newsworthy. Now if he had designed and built it from scratch including the algorithm to solve the cube then I would be impressed but building a lego robot from available instructions? Really?
$900 is one battery, you need 5 for a 15,000 km range hence you are out by a factor of five. Since, as others have pointed out, getting 6l/100 km is a bit of a stretch so it may be closer to a factor of 4 rather than 5. Really what we need is a real cost for the battery. The $900 price is just to make it the same cost as Li-ion with the huge benefit of massive range and instant recharge by replacement. If retail replacement cost is much less than this then you start to have an electric car which can really be competitive on both cost and range with a petrol one. At $225/battery you reach parity with petrol but this is barely above the cost of 100 kg of raw aluminium so it seems unlikely to be achievable.
This doesn't solve the problem in any fundamental way; but it does help.
Actually I don't think it is possible to solve it at a fundamental level. The laws of physics are invariant under time. In fact this symmetry is what gives us conservation of energy. What this means is that any physical system must work the same regardless of when it is operated. The result is that the only way to make such a temporal crypto algorithm would be to use a tamper-proof physical device which will measure the passage of time - you cannot develop a time lock algorithm which will only run when the time is X since no physical system can measure absolute time only a change in time.
Since making something like that would be exceedingly hard, if not impossible, to make tamper proof you are reliant on how securely the device is stored which is pretty much the system which already exists. All you can do, as you suggest, is make it hard to assemble the pieces before the correct time.
If the cost is about the same, it might even be worth considering, say, four 5 kg Al batteries with 600 km range.
That makes a lot of sense. The other advantage is that it also reduces the weight of the car by several 100 kg which will increase performance and efficiency.
If the battery is $900 but a recharge is only $100...
My understanding is that recharging the battery is essentially re-smelting the aluminium ore that the discharge process generates. Hence I would expect that recharging the battery is effectively no different than making it in the first place. You do not have to purchase new aluminium ore but you do have to reclaim it from the empty battery. Hence I would expect that the recharge cost will be very close to the cost of a new battery so I think it will be more like the opposite of what you suggest e.g. charge $1,000 for a new battery and get $100 off the next battery when you return the first.
If the Al battery is much more expensive than the Li-ion per km I would agree. However if it is cheaper per km that the Li-ion, or even slightly more expensive, who would not prefer an electric car which needs charging ~twice a year over one which you have to constantly remember to plug in?
When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month.
I know it is Slashdot and the summary is misleading about it "adding 100kg over a Tesla battery" but if you actually read the article you would learn that the idea is not to replace the existing Li-ion battery but to have this as well as a reserve. As you point out most people only drive short trips for which a Li-ion battery is well suited. This is just to provide a power for long distance driving.
However, depending on the cost, since this battery is only 100 kg and the current Tesla battery is 500kg you could imagine completely replacing the Li-ion battery with five of these and having a 15,000 km range which would probably do most people for the best part of a year. This would only work if it is cheap to replace compared to the cost of a Li-ion battery which lasts for 100,000 km and costs $30k. So assuming the cost of electricity to recharge the Li-ion palances with the installation costs of the multiple aluminium battery packs you would require, the cost per aluminium battery would need to be $900. The cost of 100 kg of aluminium (which seems to be the principle component) is $180 for 100 kg so this does not rule out such a price.
Sadly the killer for this, and all electric cars, is that assuming an internal combustion car uses 6l/100km of petrol the price of petrol would need to reach $5/litre before it became more expensive than the cost of battery or about a factor 4 higher than it currently is in Canada. Still give it a few more years of declining battery costs and increasing oil prices and we will finally be there!
I mean some may talk funny, but since when does that count as a "foreign language"?
Don't go blaming us Brits for treating American as a foreign language. I was in a Chicago book store several years ago and was amused to see that they had the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelves of the foreign language section.
Scientists might want to rethink the moniker "habitable zone" if it is filled with a deadly amount of stellar radiation...
The habitable zone only refers to the amount of heat radiation a planet receives it does not mean that every large rock there is habitable - just look at the moon. There are additional constraints for a habitable planet e.g. requires an atmosphere and liquid water. All this result does is to add an additional requirement near a red dwarf: you don't just need a gravitational field large enough to hold onto an atmosphere you also need a magnetic field to shield it.
There are valid medical reasons that some people can't get immunized. (Allergies, compromised immune systems, etc.) Those people benefit from herd immunity.
Correct. However I have an ethical problem with requiring someone to undergo a medical procedure for someone else's benefit because where do you stop? If it is shown that having your tonsils removed reduces the spread of tonsillitis do you mandate that everyone have their tonsils taken out? Taken to an extreme do you mandate living organ donation e.g. lobe of a liver, one kidney etc because you can survive quite well on a single kidney or reduced liver and it would save someone else's life.
The problem with taking away people's choice about which medical procedures to have is not something to be done lightly. A better approach is to immunize people from idiocy by "vaccinating" them with a good education. Like a vaccine education will never be 100% effective but if you can inoculate enough of the population you will get a herd immunity that will be proof against more than just anti-vaccine stupidity.
Late 80s and early 90s? Welcome to the 21st century! We now have CPUs with features that require compiler hints and optimization to achieve maximum performance. In fact by even the mid 90s I did optimization studies for trigger code for and experiment and found that the C++ compiler generated far more efficient code than the C compiler because that was where the company was putting its development resources.
However it is not just that. In particle physics we do a lot of I/O, reading binary data and have large code bases which need object oriented programming to manage. Fortran can do none of these things unless you use one of the many recent flavours that have tried to bolt these onto the language. In addition it is not a language that undergrads learn anymore (at least in physics).
Excuse me, but you're going to have to explain how your model is different from the one you say is wrong.
The point is that it is not the training provided by us professors it is the people in charge of the projects who used to require Fortran. However this has almost completely changed. I can't speak for other disciplines but in Particle Physics the code migration IS happening on the scale I think. All the major programs used in collider physics have migrated to C++: GEANT, PYTHIA and ROOT are all now C++. There are still some generators written by theorists which are Fortran but these are becoming increasingly rare because it is becoming harder to find anyone who understands the language which means that such programs are less likely to be used.
If you're using C++ for scientific math, then you deserve to have whatever credentials you may possess to be revoked immediately.
Really? Well I'm guessing that's it for the entire field of particle physics then.
I have PoC code that I have used to prove that C++ can produce incorrect results based on factors other than the code itself, and at the level of significance as high as 10^-15. That is a completely unacceptable level of inaccuracy for scientific exploration.
Perhaps it's still the best tool for the job. Why is that strange?
It's not strange it's just wrong. Particle physics does not use FORTRAN except in very limited places usually associated with theorists who have not yet migrated to C++ which is a small and diminishing number. As far as I am aware the astrophysicists down the hall from us don't seem to use it much either and the experimental condensed matter guys don't either as far as I am aware. So either things like physics research in general is not cutting edge or the OP doesn't know what s/he is talking about.
Also "legacy training". Student learns from prof. Student becomes prof. Cycle repeats.
Not really - even when I was a student we ditched F77 whenever we possibly could and used C or C++. The issue is more legacy programmers. Often the person in charge of a project is a older person who knows FORTRAN and does not want to spend the time to learn a new language like C (or even C++!). Hence they fall back into something more comfortable.
However by now even this is not the case. The software in particle physics is almost exclusively C++ and/or Python. The only things that I am aware of which are still FORTRAN are some Monte-Carlo event generators which are written by theorists. My guess is that as experimentalists even older colleagues have to learn C++ and Python to use and program modern hardware. Theorists can get by using any language they want and so are slower to change. Certainly it has probably been at least 15 years since I wrote any FORTRAN myself and even then what I wrote was the code needed to test the F77 interface to a rapid C I/O framework for events which was ~1-200 times faster than the F77 code it replaced.
If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree.
Good one - if sadly exactly one month too late!
Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment.
If you want training for a particular job you should go to a vocational training college and skip university all together. A university degree is not, and never has been, designed as vocational training (except for a few limited professions such as medicine and law). The point of a university degree is to give you a broad and deep understanding of a particular subject which can then be applied to a variety of situations. This is a benefit to both the individual and the employer. When someone encounters something new in their job they need to have that depth of knowledge and experience to figure out a solution.
So many options...
Indeed but you missed a few such as: financial (needs keen data analysis skills), natural resource sector (geophysics: using physics to locate resources to extract), IT sector (R&D of new devices and data analysis again), medicine (operating and developing MRI, CT, PET etc. technologies plus even cooler things) and the whole space sector.
Then of course there is research both academic and industrial which stretches from studying the fundamental building blocks and nature of the universe to pulling apart single DNA and protein molecules to study how they fold to studying the flow properties of ice cream (I know of a PhD student who did that for a well known UK ice cream manufacturer!)...but working for Elon Musk either on electric cars or building space craft would be cool too.
Police often wont take care of it...because as he said, it's just a phone.
Today it's a phone, tomorrow it's a laptop and by next week it's an armed robbery of an electronics store. I can understand that the police do not have the resources to track down every petty criminal but when confronted with clear evidence where the criminal is they have a duty to act. It is not only a fantastic public relations opportunity ("I went to the police and they caught the criminal one hour later") it also looks good for the crime statistics and it helps to reduce future crime since many phone thefts are probably opportunistic criminals who, if not caught, will carry on with their experiment to see how many phones/laptops/etc. they can steal before it crosses the police action threshold.
This effect will not only kill at high energies but at high intensity too. With a high enough intensity you can have multi-photon interactions to achieve the same total energy. However pair production is not the only process you have to worry about compton scattering will occur as well. This will impose an intensity limit well below pair production energies.
Essentially reflected photons will have less energy than incident photons and as the energy increases so too does this energy difference. It is caused by relativistic effects when a photon is reflected from an electron. At visible wavelengths the effect still occurs but is not noticeable but crank the energy up to several keV and your photon has an energy more comparable to the electron rest mass energy and the effect kicks in.