This seems to be a return to some very old models of research
Not entirely. Aristotle, Da Vinci etc were given leave to "explore". They were funded to do curiosity driven research as well as the "build a better widget" kind. Today's billionaires, very like governments, are focussed on getting better widgets rather than improving mankind's knowledge. The problem is that it can take 50-100 years before our new fundamental knowledge can be applied so by the time that they all wake up to find that applied science has slowed to a crawl it will be a long time before the damage can be undone.
You are completely missing the point. That's why I would want the blood test. It tells you that you will develop the disease BEFORE you have symptoms so you have several years to go travelling and visit family before your brain starts to shut down.
If I knew you were to develop a demence, I'd suggest you settle your pending issues right away, but I don't see a reason not to do that, anyway, You don't know what awaits you at the turn of the corner.
It's not so much "pending issues" I'd want to settle it's more a case of holidays. Having had a father who died of alzheimer's last year my mum was trapped at home with him for several years and got very few trips away. If my dad had known that he was going to develop the disease in a few years then they would likely have taken more holidays, visited family etc. a lot more because there was a limited window to do so. As it was it was about a one year window from diagnosis to my dad being too confused to travel.
This is not the sort of thing that you would do without knowing knowing that you were developing alzheimer's since, if you took all that travel at once, you'd be stuck at home for several years afterwards. So if there is still no cure when I get to the age to worry about alzheimer's I would certainly find a 3 year advance warning useful - it gives you time to visit the family and travel while you know what you are doing. It's also easier to put your affairs in order before you start to suffer from the symptoms since financial matters are hard enough to get right with your full mental faculties.
Understood but there is something very wrong with the safety culture in a company if one environment is very safe and the other kills thousands. Throwing enough resources at a problem can often fix it and if you have an appalling track record of safety in one area they may well be doing this to distract from their appalling record elsewhere. Would you take advice on how to improve a lecture from a school teacher with an appalling teaching record in the classroom? These are very different teaching environments which need difference teaching skills but there is enough similarity that any advice from someone who is really terrible in one area is highly suspect.
Great, so they have very safe labs but their production facilities kill thousands? This isn't a very convincing argument that we should be listening to them in matters of safety.
I always get much more out of a lecture if the instructor is actively diagramming on the blackboard.
That might be a valid argument for an undergraduate course, it might even work for a theory research presentation but it is not possible to accurately show experimental data without being able to show slides. Even in the days before video projectors we used acetate slides created by heat transfer from a photocopy or laser printout. You cannot just sketch a data plot on a blackboard and expect anyone to take it seriously.
It seems the CTO of Dow is forgetting certain events which a company that Dow now owns caused a few years ago. If academic labs are 11 times more dangerous then somewhere we must have lost about 176,000 grad students which I think might have been noticed by now even if it were spread out over a few decades.
Besides academic labs are doing research which means that outcomes are not known and you are doing things which have not been done before. This is inherently more risky than repeating established procedures with minor variations. Even so I still don't see how academic labs can come anywhere close to the death toll from a single industrial accident, let alone 11 times it.
Wait, so the school decides what questions they want on their exam, and people are complaining?
Yes because in the UK the exams are not written by the schools but written by a central exam board so that the standard is consistent across the country. The same happens here in Alberta, Canada. By redacting the questions the school is preventing the students from being able to get any marks for those questions. I the exam board produced a paper where sufficient questions were "objectionable" then every pupil at that school would automatically fail the exam.
While the exam board might be ok with it because it offers zero advantage to the students the school inspectors ought to be all over this since it is grossly unfair to the students and may prevent them getting into university. We already have laws which limit religious freedom when it comes to refusing medical treatment for children because it harms them and frankly we should have similar ones when it comes to science education for exactly the same reason.
Not that I know of but since I am an exacerbated physicist how about I try to explain our experiment with analogies and you can just imagine appropriate gestures to go with them? First though I should say that while SUSY is in trouble the article paints an overly pessimistic picture and gets a few things wrong.
The problem SUSY is trying to solve is that nature seems to be performing an amazing balancing act with the Higgs field. Now this is not just some ordinary balancing act that generates a few "oohs" and "aahs" from the audience like Idol Rock. According to the physics we know the chance of the Higgs boson having the mass is does is about one in 10^30. Those are about the same odds as some person winning a national lottery 5 times in a row and getting a lesser prize in the 6th week. By about the third or fourth win the "oohs" and "aahs" are replaced by a call to the serious fraud squad of the local police force with a request to figure out how the person is fixing the results of the lottery because the chance that this person is just "really lucky" are so astronomically small that nobody will believe it is just chance.
This is the situation we are in now with physics and the usual way nature solves balancing problems like this is with a symmetry that requires the balance be perfect. For example it is not just dumb luck that the electrical charge in the universe happens to cancel out so precisely - we were not just "really lucky" with our Big Bang! - there is a symmetry which gives conservation of electric charge which requires that the balance be exact. To solve the problem with the Higgs mass being so tiny the symmetry is called "Supersymmetry" - not because it flies around with a big S on its chest saving us from bad symmetries but because it is an extremely high level symmetry, perhaps even the highest possible in nature. In very simple terms you could describe it as a symmetry between force and matter.
This is also why I would disagree with the article when it says that the LHC must see supersymmtery or else it cannot solve our balance problem. This would be like saying that if you win the lottery twice that's ok but win it a third time and you are automatically guilty of a crime. Winning it 3 times in a row might be very, very unlikely but this is a continuous scale. 10TeV SUSY may be less natural than 1TeV but it is not so incredibly less likely that you know it cannot be right - sometimes 0.1% chances happen e.g. the angular size of the moon being almost exactly the same as the sun on Earth.
Supersymmetry is not a perfect symmetry because otherwise all the super-particles (which have fun names likes squarks, winos and sleptons) would then have the same mass as our Standard Model particles and we would have already seen them. So it has to be broken by some unknown mechanism which gives all the super particles higher masses which is why we have not yet seen them - our colliders do not yet have enough energy.
Another possibility is that the lightest super particle cannot decay. This would give us a high mass, stable particle which is an excellent candidate for dark matter. However this where the article is not correct in saying that the particle should have been seen by direct search experiments because one possibility is that it is a gravitino (a super partner of the graviton). This would mean that it only interacts via gravity and will not be seen in direct search experiments. This would be a real pain for physics because while we would know that we had produced them in the detector (because the other particles we can see will rebound from it) it will be very hard to prove that these were the Dark Matter astronomers see.
Probably out best chance to see supersymmetry, or indeed any new physics, will be the next three year run of the LHC. We will get almost twice the energy and about 5 times the luminosity. Certainly if we do not find supersymmetry or something else then the chances of us every seeing it with the LHC are dramatically lower after this point because increasing numbers of events at the same energy only slowing increase the regions you can search. So fingers crossed!
As much as vaccines help the majority of people, other people have been crippled and killed by the same vaccines.
True but the rates of serious, life changing reactions to the vaccine are far, far smaller than the risk of serious, life changing complications from a disease like measles that can leave you blind brain damaged or 0.3% of the time dead. This horrible consequences of diseases is why we invented vaccines and why they were so widely adopted. The problem is that vaccines are now a victim of their own success because nobody gets measles now so there is no understanding of how horrible these diseases can be.
If we want to persuade people to get vaccinated educate them about what the disease the vaccine protects against will do to them. The choice is not whether or not they want to risk the vaccine the choice is whether they want to risk the disease or the vaccine. It's a lot easier to judge a relative risk like that than some nebulous promises that the vaccine is pretty safe.
The only problem (for me, certainly, no the theory) is that I don't understand how something with only 7kEv * c^2 of mass won't be seen already.
Sterile neutrinos are usually thought of as being produced by mixing with normal neutrinos. Hence the coupling to matter is extremely weak and with such low masses it is quite easy to imagine that they would have escaped detection so far. However neutrinos are produced with velocities near the speed of light in the Big Bang whereas dark matter is slow moving (it's "Cold Dark Matter") so it seems unlikely unless there is some production mechanism which can produce them at a slower velocity. Also, not that it really makes much difference but technically these are gamma rays not x-rays. The energy ranges for both overlap and the name depends on how they are produced - in physics photons from particle decay or annihilation are gamma rays.
Why would a website front end be incredibly expensive?
It wouldn't so long as all you expected was a simple file system with data files but without some explanation of the data format, where to find the associated calibration database, geometry database etc. it will be of no use to anyone. So you will need to hire someone to nicely format the data, write documentation on where to find the calibration and geometry databases, etc. etc. This is before you even start to look at the cost of storing the hundreds of petabytes of data - you are looking at about $5 million for the disks alone for 100PB data. Add in RAID arrays and extra disks for the redundancy plus the power to run it all and you are looking at tens to hundreds of millions of dollars plus salaries of the staff to run and maintain it all...just to make data available that perhaps a handful of the public will look at each year.
The data may belong to the public and we may have the means to make it available to them but is this the best way to spend public money? Even if the money came in addition to the normal research grants there are better things to spend it on that this.
By its very definition of how it's done is unnatural and the long term consequences to the gene pool unknown.
By that definition so is just about every medical treatment or procedure ever devised. Any treatment that cures someone and lets them live long enough to reproduce affects the gene pool this include vaccines, antibiotics etc. Indeed you could argue that this problem is itself unnatural since many people with genetic diseases would not live long enough to reproduce in the natural world. So, unless you want to argue that we are better off without any medicine we are already tampering with the gene pool and an increase in genetic disease is likely one consequence. So surely the logical response is to use medicine to cure this problem by getting rid of the defective genes which medicine allowed into the gene pool in the first place?
So, are you worried that everyone is going to download petabytes of data?
No, I am worried about the cost of setting up an incredibly expensive system which can serve petabytes of data to the world and then having it sit there almost unused while the hundreds of graduate students and postdocs the money could have funded move on into careers in banking instead of going on to make a major scientific breakthrough which might benefit all society.
In the case of publicly funded research, all the advantage accrues to those who receive grants
Really? That's a rather ironic argument given that you are posting it on the web which was something invented and developed at CERN using publicly funded research money.
Your idea of practicality has nothing to do with open access, it's a justification for keeping a lid on it.
So why are you also not complaining that museums with publicly owned collections are not displaying every single item they own? Do you want them to stop researching collections and making acquisitions in the public interest and instead spend money on building thousands of square metres of new display space so every item they own can be displayed?
The public may own the data but there is a cost to making that data publicly available. My own experience has shown that even when that cost is met the public actually have almost no interest in looking at that data. I absolutely zero objections to making all the data publicly accessible provided someone is going to pay for all the network bandwidth, servers, system administration, disk and tape storage, network connections etc. needed to access the data. However as a member of the public I would question whether that is a sensible way to spend all the money required to provide that access and argue that that money would be better going on research. After all that additional money going on data access corresponds to fewer postdocs and graduate students working on the experiment which, unless the data is wildly popular, probably means fewer people using it not more.
Open data is a great idea but it is not always practical. Particle physics experiments generate petabytes of extremely complex, hard to understand data. Making this publicly accessible is extremely expensive and ultimately useless since, unless you understand the innards of the detector and how it responds to particles and spend the time to really understand the complex analysis and reconstruction code there is nothing useful that you can do with the data. In fact one of the previous experiments I worked on went to great trouble to put their data online in a heavily processed and far easier to understand format in the hope that theorists or interested members of the public would look at the data. IIRC they got about 10 hits on the site per year and 1 access to the data.
So I agree with the principle that the public should be able to access all our data but for experiments with massive, complex datasets there needs to be a serious discussion about whether this is practical given the expense and complexity of the data involved. Do we best serve the public interest if we spend 25% of our research funding on making the data available to a handful of people outside the experiments with the time, skills and interest to access it given that this loss in funds would significantly hamper the rate of progress?
Personally I would regard data as something akin to a museum collection. Museums typically own far more than they can sensibly display to the public and so they select the most interested items and display these for all to see. Perhaps we should take the same approach with scientific data. Treat it as a collection of which only the most interesting selections are displayed to/accessible by the public even though the entire collection is under public ownership.
marred by the heritable-by-some-mechanism-never-fully-elucidated sin that you humans are worried about.
Sorry but you are wrong there - the mechanism to acquire a sin is clearly documented here. They even keep a SIN record - which is why Canadians are always so nice to everyone.;-)
Is the act of making the robot evil is the question
You might as well ask whether the act of making a hammer is evil. Robots are tools and, like any tool, whether they act for good or evil depends on the intent of their user. Making a tool look like a human does not make a difference. Nobody classifies doll manufacturers as evil because they make toys that look like humans.
We were working on accounting software for doctors' offices at the time. He said, "Look, say you go to the doctor for a nasty cough. He gives you some medicine, charges you, and you go home. But next week, the cough hasn't gone away, so you come back to the doctor. Does he charge you for the 2nd visit, or is it free?"
Yes, it's free. Just like the first visit. Having a national health service has its benefits!;-)
The brick builder charges accordingly. Since 90% of programming is debugging and testing, you could concur and demand a 1000% pay rise.
Actually the builder offers a guarantee that the wall will be built to industry standards. Since there are lots of people who can build walls without serious flaws the industry standard is that the wall has no serious flaws and the builder will usually offer a guarantee to that effect - or at least the contract will not contain any exceptions for serious flaws. Indeed nobody would hire a builder who's contract stated that they offered no guarantee.
In software it is not possible in practice for someone to write a non-trivial program without any bugs. Hence it is not common practice to expect completely bug-free code and contracts usually have stipulations to that effect - just look at all the exceptions and explicit non-guarantees in your typical EULA. Essentially the cost of offering a guarantee like the builder's would be so astronomical that nobody would hire you.
I was in the same situation up here in Canada when we switched over 6+ years ago. All the bank did was tell me that the new credit card with the chip used the same pin as my existing ATM card. It might be an issue if your credit card is from a different bank than the one with your account but if not it was a pretty painless process.
The bit I don't like is the new "contactless" payment system. I want any payment system to require purposeful contact on my part and not just require that my card was somewhere nearby since standing in a checkout queue I may well be near someone else making a payment. This has apparently already happened already in the UK where the system has be rolled out for longer. It may be a rare occurence but the amount of time spent getting one incorrect charge fixed will outweigh the time saved per transaction by many orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be a return to some very old models of research
Not entirely. Aristotle, Da Vinci etc were given leave to "explore". They were funded to do curiosity driven research as well as the "build a better widget" kind. Today's billionaires, very like governments, are focussed on getting better widgets rather than improving mankind's knowledge. The problem is that it can take 50-100 years before our new fundamental knowledge can be applied so by the time that they all wake up to find that applied science has slowed to a crawl it will be a long time before the damage can be undone.
You are completely missing the point. That's why I would want the blood test. It tells you that you will develop the disease BEFORE you have symptoms so you have several years to go travelling and visit family before your brain starts to shut down.
If I knew you were to develop a demence, I'd suggest you settle your pending issues right away, but I don't see a reason not to do that, anyway, You don't know what awaits you at the turn of the corner.
It's not so much "pending issues" I'd want to settle it's more a case of holidays. Having had a father who died of alzheimer's last year my mum was trapped at home with him for several years and got very few trips away. If my dad had known that he was going to develop the disease in a few years then they would likely have taken more holidays, visited family etc. a lot more because there was a limited window to do so. As it was it was about a one year window from diagnosis to my dad being too confused to travel.
This is not the sort of thing that you would do without knowing knowing that you were developing alzheimer's since, if you took all that travel at once, you'd be stuck at home for several years afterwards. So if there is still no cure when I get to the age to worry about alzheimer's I would certainly find a 3 year advance warning useful - it gives you time to visit the family and travel while you know what you are doing. It's also easier to put your affairs in order before you start to suffer from the symptoms since financial matters are hard enough to get right with your full mental faculties.
They really are two different environments
Understood but there is something very wrong with the safety culture in a company if one environment is very safe and the other kills thousands. Throwing enough resources at a problem can often fix it and if you have an appalling track record of safety in one area they may well be doing this to distract from their appalling record elsewhere. Would you take advice on how to improve a lecture from a school teacher with an appalling teaching record in the classroom? These are very different teaching environments which need difference teaching skills but there is enough similarity that any advice from someone who is really terrible in one area is highly suspect.
Great, so they have very safe labs but their production facilities kill thousands? This isn't a very convincing argument that we should be listening to them in matters of safety.
I always get much more out of a lecture if the instructor is actively diagramming on the blackboard.
That might be a valid argument for an undergraduate course, it might even work for a theory research presentation but it is not possible to accurately show experimental data without being able to show slides. Even in the days before video projectors we used acetate slides created by heat transfer from a photocopy or laser printout. You cannot just sketch a data plot on a blackboard and expect anyone to take it seriously.
It seems the CTO of Dow is forgetting certain events which a company that Dow now owns caused a few years ago. If academic labs are 11 times more dangerous then somewhere we must have lost about 176,000 grad students which I think might have been noticed by now even if it were spread out over a few decades.
Besides academic labs are doing research which means that outcomes are not known and you are doing things which have not been done before. This is inherently more risky than repeating established procedures with minor variations. Even so I still don't see how academic labs can come anywhere close to the death toll from a single industrial accident, let alone 11 times it.
Wait, so the school decides what questions they want on their exam, and people are complaining?
Yes because in the UK the exams are not written by the schools but written by a central exam board so that the standard is consistent across the country. The same happens here in Alberta, Canada. By redacting the questions the school is preventing the students from being able to get any marks for those questions. I the exam board produced a paper where sufficient questions were "objectionable" then every pupil at that school would automatically fail the exam.
While the exam board might be ok with it because it offers zero advantage to the students the school inspectors ought to be all over this since it is grossly unfair to the students and may prevent them getting into university. We already have laws which limit religious freedom when it comes to refusing medical treatment for children because it harms them and frankly we should have similar ones when it comes to science education for exactly the same reason.
Not that I know of but since I am an exacerbated physicist how about I try to explain our experiment with analogies and you can just imagine appropriate gestures to go with them? First though I should say that while SUSY is in trouble the article paints an overly pessimistic picture and gets a few things wrong.
The problem SUSY is trying to solve is that nature seems to be performing an amazing balancing act with the Higgs field. Now this is not just some ordinary balancing act that generates a few "oohs" and "aahs" from the audience like Idol Rock. According to the physics we know the chance of the Higgs boson having the mass is does is about one in 10^30. Those are about the same odds as some person winning a national lottery 5 times in a row and getting a lesser prize in the 6th week. By about the third or fourth win the "oohs" and "aahs" are replaced by a call to the serious fraud squad of the local police force with a request to figure out how the person is fixing the results of the lottery because the chance that this person is just "really lucky" are so astronomically small that nobody will believe it is just chance.
This is the situation we are in now with physics and the usual way nature solves balancing problems like this is with a symmetry that requires the balance be perfect. For example it is not just dumb luck that the electrical charge in the universe happens to cancel out so precisely - we were not just "really lucky" with our Big Bang! - there is a symmetry which gives conservation of electric charge which requires that the balance be exact. To solve the problem with the Higgs mass being so tiny the symmetry is called "Supersymmetry" - not because it flies around with a big S on its chest saving us from bad symmetries but because it is an extremely high level symmetry, perhaps even the highest possible in nature. In very simple terms you could describe it as a symmetry between force and matter.
This is also why I would disagree with the article when it says that the LHC must see supersymmtery or else it cannot solve our balance problem. This would be like saying that if you win the lottery twice that's ok but win it a third time and you are automatically guilty of a crime. Winning it 3 times in a row might be very, very unlikely but this is a continuous scale. 10TeV SUSY may be less natural than 1TeV but it is not so incredibly less likely that you know it cannot be right - sometimes 0.1% chances happen e.g. the angular size of the moon being almost exactly the same as the sun on Earth.
Supersymmetry is not a perfect symmetry because otherwise all the super-particles (which have fun names likes squarks, winos and sleptons) would then have the same mass as our Standard Model particles and we would have already seen them. So it has to be broken by some unknown mechanism which gives all the super particles higher masses which is why we have not yet seen them - our colliders do not yet have enough energy.
Another possibility is that the lightest super particle cannot decay. This would give us a high mass, stable particle which is an excellent candidate for dark matter. However this where the article is not correct in saying that the particle should have been seen by direct search experiments because one possibility is that it is a gravitino (a super partner of the graviton). This would mean that it only interacts via gravity and will not be seen in direct search experiments. This would be a real pain for physics because while we would know that we had produced them in the detector (because the other particles we can see will rebound from it) it will be very hard to prove that these were the Dark Matter astronomers see.
Probably out best chance to see supersymmetry, or indeed any new physics, will be the next three year run of the LHC. We will get almost twice the energy and about 5 times the luminosity. Certainly if we do not find supersymmetry or something else then the chances of us every seeing it with the LHC are dramatically lower after this point because increasing numbers of events at the same energy only slowing increase the regions you can search. So fingers crossed!
As much as vaccines help the majority of people, other people have been crippled and killed by the same vaccines.
True but the rates of serious, life changing reactions to the vaccine are far, far smaller than the risk of serious, life changing complications from a disease like measles that can leave you blind brain damaged or 0.3% of the time dead. This horrible consequences of diseases is why we invented vaccines and why they were so widely adopted. The problem is that vaccines are now a victim of their own success because nobody gets measles now so there is no understanding of how horrible these diseases can be.
If we want to persuade people to get vaccinated educate them about what the disease the vaccine protects against will do to them. The choice is not whether or not they want to risk the vaccine the choice is whether they want to risk the disease or the vaccine. It's a lot easier to judge a relative risk like that than some nebulous promises that the vaccine is pretty safe.
The only problem (for me, certainly, no the theory) is that I don't understand how something with only 7kEv * c^2 of mass won't be seen already.
Sterile neutrinos are usually thought of as being produced by mixing with normal neutrinos. Hence the coupling to matter is extremely weak and with such low masses it is quite easy to imagine that they would have escaped detection so far. However neutrinos are produced with velocities near the speed of light in the Big Bang whereas dark matter is slow moving (it's "Cold Dark Matter") so it seems unlikely unless there is some production mechanism which can produce them at a slower velocity. Also, not that it really makes much difference but technically these are gamma rays not x-rays. The energy ranges for both overlap and the name depends on how they are produced - in physics photons from particle decay or annihilation are gamma rays.
Why would a website front end be incredibly expensive?
It wouldn't so long as all you expected was a simple file system with data files but without some explanation of the data format, where to find the associated calibration database, geometry database etc. it will be of no use to anyone. So you will need to hire someone to nicely format the data, write documentation on where to find the calibration and geometry databases, etc. etc. This is before you even start to look at the cost of storing the hundreds of petabytes of data - you are looking at about $5 million for the disks alone for 100PB data. Add in RAID arrays and extra disks for the redundancy plus the power to run it all and you are looking at tens to hundreds of millions of dollars plus salaries of the staff to run and maintain it all...just to make data available that perhaps a handful of the public will look at each year.
The data may belong to the public and we may have the means to make it available to them but is this the best way to spend public money? Even if the money came in addition to the normal research grants there are better things to spend it on that this.
By its very definition of how it's done is unnatural and the long term consequences to the gene pool unknown.
By that definition so is just about every medical treatment or procedure ever devised. Any treatment that cures someone and lets them live long enough to reproduce affects the gene pool this include vaccines, antibiotics etc. Indeed you could argue that this problem is itself unnatural since many people with genetic diseases would not live long enough to reproduce in the natural world. So, unless you want to argue that we are better off without any medicine we are already tampering with the gene pool and an increase in genetic disease is likely one consequence. So surely the logical response is to use medicine to cure this problem by getting rid of the defective genes which medicine allowed into the gene pool in the first place?
So, are you worried that everyone is going to download petabytes of data?
No, I am worried about the cost of setting up an incredibly expensive system which can serve petabytes of data to the world and then having it sit there almost unused while the hundreds of graduate students and postdocs the money could have funded move on into careers in banking instead of going on to make a major scientific breakthrough which might benefit all society.
In the case of publicly funded research, all the advantage accrues to those who receive grants
Really? That's a rather ironic argument given that you are posting it on the web which was something invented and developed at CERN using publicly funded research money.
Your idea of practicality has nothing to do with open access, it's a justification for keeping a lid on it.
So why are you also not complaining that museums with publicly owned collections are not displaying every single item they own? Do you want them to stop researching collections and making acquisitions in the public interest and instead spend money on building thousands of square metres of new display space so every item they own can be displayed?
The public may own the data but there is a cost to making that data publicly available. My own experience has shown that even when that cost is met the public actually have almost no interest in looking at that data. I absolutely zero objections to making all the data publicly accessible provided someone is going to pay for all the network bandwidth, servers, system administration, disk and tape storage, network connections etc. needed to access the data. However as a member of the public I would question whether that is a sensible way to spend all the money required to provide that access and argue that that money would be better going on research. After all that additional money going on data access corresponds to fewer postdocs and graduate students working on the experiment which, unless the data is wildly popular, probably means fewer people using it not more.
Open data is a great idea but it is not always practical. Particle physics experiments generate petabytes of extremely complex, hard to understand data. Making this publicly accessible is extremely expensive and ultimately useless since, unless you understand the innards of the detector and how it responds to particles and spend the time to really understand the complex analysis and reconstruction code there is nothing useful that you can do with the data. In fact one of the previous experiments I worked on went to great trouble to put their data online in a heavily processed and far easier to understand format in the hope that theorists or interested members of the public would look at the data. IIRC they got about 10 hits on the site per year and 1 access to the data.
So I agree with the principle that the public should be able to access all our data but for experiments with massive, complex datasets there needs to be a serious discussion about whether this is practical given the expense and complexity of the data involved. Do we best serve the public interest if we spend 25% of our research funding on making the data available to a handful of people outside the experiments with the time, skills and interest to access it given that this loss in funds would significantly hamper the rate of progress?
Personally I would regard data as something akin to a museum collection. Museums typically own far more than they can sensibly display to the public and so they select the most interested items and display these for all to see. Perhaps we should take the same approach with scientific data. Treat it as a collection of which only the most interesting selections are displayed to/accessible by the public even though the entire collection is under public ownership.
marred by the heritable-by-some-mechanism-never-fully-elucidated sin that you humans are worried about.
Sorry but you are wrong there - the mechanism to acquire a sin is clearly documented here. They even keep a SIN record - which is why Canadians are always so nice to everyone. ;-)
Is the act of making the robot evil is the question
You might as well ask whether the act of making a hammer is evil. Robots are tools and, like any tool, whether they act for good or evil depends on the intent of their user. Making a tool look like a human does not make a difference. Nobody classifies doll manufacturers as evil because they make toys that look like humans.
We were working on accounting software for doctors' offices at the time. He said, "Look, say you go to the doctor for a nasty cough. He gives you some medicine, charges you, and you go home. But next week, the cough hasn't gone away, so you come back to the doctor. Does he charge you for the 2nd visit, or is it free?"
Yes, it's free. Just like the first visit. Having a national health service has its benefits! ;-)
Arghh bridge, not bride!
I am not a construction worker. I am a civil engineer.
Not really. Would you hire a civil engineer who gave no guarantee that his bride would not fall down?
How many who could correctly define astronomy still believe that it can be used to predict your future. Because that's astrophysics.
Surely that's more the area of cosmetology? It can answer fascinating questions like will the universe end in heat death due to hair dryer misuse.
The brick builder charges accordingly. Since 90% of programming is debugging and testing, you could concur and demand a 1000% pay rise.
Actually the builder offers a guarantee that the wall will be built to industry standards. Since there are lots of people who can build walls without serious flaws the industry standard is that the wall has no serious flaws and the builder will usually offer a guarantee to that effect - or at least the contract will not contain any exceptions for serious flaws. Indeed nobody would hire a builder who's contract stated that they offered no guarantee.
In software it is not possible in practice for someone to write a non-trivial program without any bugs. Hence it is not common practice to expect completely bug-free code and contracts usually have stipulations to that effect - just look at all the exceptions and explicit non-guarantees in your typical EULA. Essentially the cost of offering a guarantee like the builder's would be so astronomical that nobody would hire you.
This is why they call it the _united_ states: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, QGP, BEC - it's all the same to them. ;-)
At The Moment my credit card doesn't have a PIN
I was in the same situation up here in Canada when we switched over 6+ years ago. All the bank did was tell me that the new credit card with the chip used the same pin as my existing ATM card. It might be an issue if your credit card is from a different bank than the one with your account but if not it was a pretty painless process.
The bit I don't like is the new "contactless" payment system. I want any payment system to require purposeful contact on my part and not just require that my card was somewhere nearby since standing in a checkout queue I may well be near someone else making a payment. This has apparently already happened already in the UK where the system has be rolled out for longer. It may be a rare occurence but the amount of time spent getting one incorrect charge fixed will outweigh the time saved per transaction by many orders of magnitude.