And why do we care who has our medical information?
Because in the US, we've decided that the only people that get health care are those with jobs. So getting a job is deeply tied to one's state of health. Accidental leaking of your health care information could lead to losing your job, or failure to obtain one. Other laws try to tackle that, but nonetheless, we all have the fear that if our potential employer (especially) knew how much we might really cost, we wouldn't get that job. And the fact of the matter is that no employer wants to employ a sick person if they can help it.
We'd be better off decoupling health care from employment. One side effect would be that medical information wouldn't be so secret. This is rather important when you consider that that information should perhaps be shared among health care providers, patients with the same ailments, and especially, family (possibly distantly related but genetically susceptable, for instance).
I first drove my car in YKXz93W4MSGVn93z. You know it, it's 120 miles south of KrnummZF82cB5XXn. At least with these kinds of text entry fields, they're not going to require me to use one letter, one number, 2 forms of punctuation (but not an ampersand or dash!) and put a max length limit on the stupid thing.
For 99% of internet applications, authentication is sufficient. Google, Apple, or any vendor doesn't need to know who I am, and they damn well don't need to link that info to my bank or tax records. It's none of their damn business. I don't want to identify myself.
All that is required is to identify that the person making the request is the same one that established the account. Pure authentication, no identification. We've all done ourselves a major disservice by muddling the two. Of course, Google and Facebook love it. Their profit model is based on selling identifying data.
So I very strongly disagree with your claim that authentication should work by using identification. ID isn't necessary. In fact we'd be a lot safer if the two were totally decoupled. Then one compromised account could not lead to escalating compromises (unless you're foolish enough to use the same authentication credentials in multiple places -- or have chosen to let your identification be your authentication).
Hey, I have an idea. Let's stop using non-secret information as authentication credentials. Address, birthday, mother's maiden name, last 4 digits of CC or SSN, CVV, childhood pet's name are NOT AUTHENTICATION. Authentication information should never be printed, emailed, or typed in the clear.
Personally, I've been putting random numbers in all those fields for years, and if the account contains sensitive information, recording that information in an encrypted way in the event that it is ever needed. So far, I've never needed such information (because I also record and encrypt my randomly-generated passwords).
Get KeePass and enable two factor authentication. Then, call your bank and CC company and tell them the security on your credit card is absurd. Because who cares how good your Google password is if the guy standing behind you at 7/11 can get all the info he needs to defraud you by holding out his camera-phone while you buy your Gatorade?
And you know what happens? They'll select their students, or people working on their favorite topics. They'll amplify the noise in the echo chamber, and there still won't be any new ideas in physics.
The set of ideas promoted by the top people in the field doesn't need extra help. They're the top people in the field because they're already successful at promoting their favorite set of ideas. What we need are new ideas, not amplification of old ideas.
Postdocs and often junior professor positions are fixed-term contracts. It's not about money or paying the mortgage, it's about having a job next year and the freedom that knowledge affords a scientist.
"Excellent work" in physics means "having something to do with reality". That is the standard upon which the Nobel is based, and the very definition of Physics. The vast majority of the work these guys have done has nothing to do with reality. At least, it has not yet been demonstrated to have anything to do with our universe. We have not proven the existence of supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or anti-de Sitter space. Absent that, their work is nothing more than a mathematical curiosity. Physicists will always speculate, and that speculation itself is not deserving of reward outside the career paths available to physicists. True achievement lies in predicting what will be measured, and thereby explaining the nature of the universe. None of theses guys have done that. They've gotten the prize for making a lot of noise, and being the loudest voice in the echo chamber that is modern theoretical physics.
If you disagree, then describe to me exactly what a young person is supposed to do, to achieve such a prize.
How exactly does this award help anyone? He's given a prize to a bunch of professors who already have tenure. They do not need incentives to do original work. Meanwhile, grad students and postdocs (who do most of the real work in the field and are the most capable, and motivated) live hand to mouth, have no sense of job stability, and no possibility to pursue truly creative work. Instead they live under the thumb of just those kind of people that received this award. They're forced to pursue old, dead ideas that have not gone anywhere (but are favorites of their advisers/supervisors). Theoretical physics has been stagnating for decades. The Higgs boson is a 40-50 year old idea, and virtually all new ideas in the meantime have been utter bullshit (string theory, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc). The field is grasping at straws because the majority of the people working cannot pursue long-term goals, or risky ideas.
A better award would be to give say $500k to 54 promising postdocs who do not have tenure, to encourage them to go in new directions.
More and more I feel as though I'm the mark of the information age, rather than benefiting from it. Google, Facebook, 100 advertising sites, are all busy trying to gather as much information about me as possible, and not giving me any control over it. I've long been a fan of augmented reality appearing, but it's coming in an age where user control is removed, and the information sources to which it has access are filtered, censored, and engineered by others, who have their own agenda. Soon we'll all be living in a reality distortion field, carefully engineered to make sure we keep buying a certain set of products, vote a particular way, or perform certain tasks for our overlords. Media distortion already works by selective omission of information, as the information becomes closer to us and higher volume, it will work the same way. Advertisement will become pervasive, more subconscious, and much harder to avoid. Just wait until they start correlating the placement of their corporate logo in your visual field with purchasing habits. They'll optimize it for human learning: show their ad/logo in an optimal learning pattern spatially and in time, so you won't forget it. We really will be programmed consumer-bots.
"It's an emergency -- there's no time for a court order" is an excuse to violate people's rights, and get access to things no court would give an order for. There is always time for a court order, and courts are set up to handle emergency situations. The clause is unjustified.
Society has entrusted one organization with auditing the lawful access to other people's information -- courts. I would not trust LastPass, or anyone else with that responsibility.
That's about as useful as saying magic unicorns protect your security.
Unless it's open source, you're still depending on the good graces of a third party to not do something else with your password. A black box with AES stamped on the outside garners the same level of trust as a black box with ROT13 stamped on the outside. How do you know they're not AES encrypting the username, and keeping passwords in plaintext? (through incompetence, malice, or just simply a bug)
Go with KeePass instead, and keep everything on your computer. Upload the KeePass database to cloud storage, if you desire. The database itself is encrypted.
It seems the lack of use of user certificates comes down to laziness: 1) in implementing a simple user certificate management system 2) in distributing certificates.
When I was in middle school they taught us how to fill out a check. In this day and age, we should be teaching how PKI works and how to manage your keychain.
Imagine if we were not putting locks on doors because no one knew how keys worked, people forgot their keys, and you have to actually hand out keys. I think "not putting locks on doors" would be considered a ridiculous proposition. Educate the users.
I've long been frustrated that the SSL gods decided to authenticate only servers but not users. This kind of authentication works to protect the user from fraudulent sites, but does not protect sites from fraudulent users. Hence, we have massive bank and credit card fraud that operates by stealing user's credentials. "Public key cryptography" is not by itself a magic bullet. There is then the issue of where to put the keys how they are exchanged. In my opinion, browser SSL only solves half the problem.
A secure system would be two-way. Browsers have long had support for user certificates, but I've never seen them used for anything in the US.
I was impressed that the Spanish government runs a CA and issues certificates to citizens, in order to access government sites and services. To get a certificate you have to go to a government office or embassy, and show your passport or other credentials. Now that's the right thing to be doing.
Anyone know of a bank that assigns users browser certificates? I'd switch banks today. Imagine if you could invalidate a stolen certificate, and then law enforcement could use evidence of a stolen certificate's usage to track down criminals?
Presumably your prviate key(s) are encrypted (with a passphrase), as they are with ssl, pgp, etc. Encrypted keychains are safe to store in the cloud. It does open them to brute force attacks though, so the outer encryption should have a very long key.
Bullfucking shit. When the exploding car is on the left side of the screen in one frame, in the middle in the next and on the right side in the 3rd frame, and all of them are blurry, I CAN SEE IT. It's a fuzzy mess and the brain will not piece it together. I don't give a shit about your worthless studies, because I have two of my own embedded in my skull.
The fact of the matter is that most viewers aren't sophisticated enough to know about various kinds of video artifacts. Doesn't mean they can't see it, it just means that they are either used to it, or don't have the vocabulary or experience to identify it. Asking unsophisticated viewers is useless. If you increase the frame rate, in the short run everyone will either not notice or think it looks weird, but in the long run everyone will love it and think older 24fps looks weird, and they won't be able to tell you why. And it will have its largest impact on action movies with fast motion. You can do a similar thing with audio: most people can't tell you whether one recording sounds better than another. But if you show them what MP3 recording artifacts sound like, suddenly they'll notice it all over the place.
I, for one, will pay for higher frame rate. 48fps is even too low. I can see each achingly slow 1/24s frame as it crawls across the screen. Explosions and fast motion in action movies generally only take a handful of frames, and the illusion of motion is lost when I can see each one individually. No amount of motion blur will fix this. To me, watching action movies at a theater where I'm closer to the screen is an epilepsy-inducing stroboscopic nightmare that I generally avoid. It's moderately tolerable on the small screen, when the angle subtended by motion is smaller, but I can still see the frames.
Back in the days of CRT monitors I played with refresh rate a lot to figure out what I could notice and what bothered me. 60Hz was tolerable, but above 80 was best. So, Hollywood: double it again, bring us 96fps films. Or, hey, you could really go hog wild and pick a refresh rate already in common use like 60Hz or 120Hz. Nah, the'll never do that.
Clearly I was talking more about post-docs leading scientific endeavors. But don't underestimate grad students. They have not yet been trained in what can't be done, and not yet indoctrinated in how things should be done, and they're even more likely than post-docs to try something truly new and innovative. Of course they will fail most of the time, but failure is valuable. You say "vauge and unrealistic", I say you've been indoctrinated into a set of things which are "unrealistic". Naivety can be valuable...
A good postdoc cannot generate original ideas that would take more time than roughly 1/4 their postdoc length to complete. Hence, we just encourage post-docs to chase low hanging fruit harder and faster, rather than encouraging them to pursue more difficult (and important) goals. So their ideas end up being derivative too, because they depend on that recommendation letter for their next job. No one wants to be in the position of searching for a new job with a half-finished project that their mentor isn't quite sure about, it's career suicide.
The solution is to give them academic freedom, something like tenure.
No way, "biomedical" is far too narrow. These recommendations are valid across all the sciences. I think the solution is simple: abolish post-docs (fixed-term contracts for scientists), and reduce the number of grants for grad students, replacing both with "permanent scientist" jobs. We've created an indentured underclass of scientists who have neither the job stability, nor funding to actually do science. Instead they're beholden to the latest shiny object everyone else is fascinated by, because that's what will get them the next post-doc. The entire system is organized around training professors, not doing science. Like any field with 10 times more applicants than jobs, the primary activity becomes culling the herd, not selecting the best science. As any professor will tell you, it's about finding ways to veto candidates, not selecting the best one. So we end up with everyone playing follow the leader, and searching for ever low-hanging fruit, and no one in all of science is in a position to make a long-term commitment to pursue a difficult idea.
Yeah, grad students and post-docs are cheap, but they can't actually do science. They're our best and brightest, and we only allow them to do other people's science. You better hope that the PI with 10 minutes today to think about his project between meetings has the right idea. Because, you know, people with 10 minutes between meetings are the best ones to think deeply about things and decide the best course of action. We'd be better off if we inverted the hierarchy in science. We need to give people in their late 20's and early 30's the majority of the power in the field, because that's when our minds are sharpest, and we are most capable. Hire them into permanent positions, and promote from within instead of heavily recruiting from outside.
Wrong. Values for the mass which would be observable with OPERA were ruled out by several experiments, long before OPERA was built.
The modification of the velocity is approximately v/c=1-m^2/E^2 =~ c*1e-18. OPERA has nowhere near a precision of 1e-18 on the velocity measurement. A large enough mass to be visible in the velocity measurement would be so large that certain radioactive decays would not occur, and it would be visible in the kinematics of others (such as Tritium decay).
OPERA does not directly measure mass. It measures mixing. The mass difference is then computed from the rate of mixing. The link you posted explains this very well. They added the velocity measurement just because they could, but there's no way that measurement could have any bearing on their mass (mixing) measurement.
The precision of the velocity measurement is nowhere near what would be required to measure mass using it. Neutrino mass is very, very small compared to the energy of these neutrinos.
The velocity measurement was a side-project. The main OPERA experiment measures the rate at which neutrinos switch "flavors". The rate of that flavor oscillation can be used to compute the mass difference of neutrinos.
You seem to be living under the illusion that the government is here to help and has your best interests at heart. The government only bends to the people's will by direct action of the people. If you want to petition the government to come to the people, more power to you. Until then however, we will have to go sit in their offices and bitch at them to get what we need, and we need to ensure that we can all do that.
That is a stupid and ridiculous statement. This is the 21st century, and air travel is the most common form of transportation for nearly all people is by air, to exercise their constitutional right to petition the government. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that horse and buggy is still an option is simply stupid. The government must change with the times, and these times predominantly use air travel.
These "permanent injunctions" are rather stupid. They do no one any good. The only question in cases like these is: "how much does the infringer owe?" If someone figures out how to make more money with your patent than you do, then they should be allowed to do it, but they should have to pay for it. Presumably they'd pay less if they got a license first rather than going to court. Never, ever, should a court grant a permanent injunction, or stop the sale of anything. It harms the market, harms innovation, harms the free flow of ideas.
We need compulsory licensing of patents. (And copyrighted material too, for that matter, now that the marginal cost of distribution is zero)
Why are we not doing this for passwords too? Every site on the internet shouldn't need to store a plaintext password. Does there exist an algorithm by which a site owner could send the salt, the user hashes with his password, and the site owner can tell the password is the same, without actually having the password?
You're right on most of that. Oh well, ad-blockers for half-finished weekend projects it is... and using Android will continue to be a miserable experience.
P.S. I think I've been isolated, using only FOSS since about 1995. Android was my first re-introduction to the bad-old-world of closed source. It's a chaotic shit-show and I hate it.
P.P.S. I thought everyone on Android was using Google's AdMob? Which made me think Google could force some improvements to the situation...
Slashdot Mirror
And why do we care who has our medical information?
Because in the US, we've decided that the only people that get health care are those with jobs. So getting a job is deeply tied to one's state of health. Accidental leaking of your health care information could lead to losing your job, or failure to obtain one. Other laws try to tackle that, but nonetheless, we all have the fear that if our potential employer (especially) knew how much we might really cost, we wouldn't get that job. And the fact of the matter is that no employer wants to employ a sick person if they can help it.
We'd be better off decoupling health care from employment. One side effect would be that medical information wouldn't be so secret. This is rather important when you consider that that information should perhaps be shared among health care providers, patients with the same ailments, and especially, family (possibly distantly related but genetically susceptable, for instance).
I first drove my car in YKXz93W4MSGVn93z. You know it, it's 120 miles south of KrnummZF82cB5XXn. At least with these kinds of text entry fields, they're not going to require me to use one letter, one number, 2 forms of punctuation (but not an ampersand or dash!) and put a max length limit on the stupid thing.
For 99% of internet applications, authentication is sufficient. Google, Apple, or any vendor doesn't need to know who I am, and they damn well don't need to link that info to my bank or tax records. It's none of their damn business. I don't want to identify myself.
All that is required is to identify that the person making the request is the same one that established the account. Pure authentication, no identification. We've all done ourselves a major disservice by muddling the two. Of course, Google and Facebook love it. Their profit model is based on selling identifying data.
So I very strongly disagree with your claim that authentication should work by using identification. ID isn't necessary. In fact we'd be a lot safer if the two were totally decoupled. Then one compromised account could not lead to escalating compromises (unless you're foolish enough to use the same authentication credentials in multiple places -- or have chosen to let your identification be your authentication).
Hey, I have an idea. Let's stop using non-secret information as authentication credentials. Address, birthday, mother's maiden name, last 4 digits of CC or SSN, CVV, childhood pet's name are NOT AUTHENTICATION. Authentication information should never be printed, emailed, or typed in the clear.
Personally, I've been putting random numbers in all those fields for years, and if the account contains sensitive information, recording that information in an encrypted way in the event that it is ever needed. So far, I've never needed such information (because I also record and encrypt my randomly-generated passwords).
Get KeePass and enable two factor authentication. Then, call your bank and CC company and tell them the security on your credit card is absurd. Because who cares how good your Google password is if the guy standing behind you at 7/11 can get all the info he needs to defraud you by holding out his camera-phone while you buy your Gatorade?
And you know what happens? They'll select their students, or people working on their favorite topics. They'll amplify the noise in the echo chamber, and there still won't be any new ideas in physics.
The set of ideas promoted by the top people in the field doesn't need extra help. They're the top people in the field because they're already successful at promoting their favorite set of ideas. What we need are new ideas, not amplification of old ideas.
Postdocs and often junior professor positions are fixed-term contracts. It's not about money or paying the mortgage, it's about having a job next year and the freedom that knowledge affords a scientist.
"Excellent work" in physics means "having something to do with reality". That is the standard upon which the Nobel is based, and the very definition of Physics. The vast majority of the work these guys have done has nothing to do with reality. At least, it has not yet been demonstrated to have anything to do with our universe. We have not proven the existence of supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or anti-de Sitter space. Absent that, their work is nothing more than a mathematical curiosity. Physicists will always speculate, and that speculation itself is not deserving of reward outside the career paths available to physicists. True achievement lies in predicting what will be measured, and thereby explaining the nature of the universe. None of theses guys have done that. They've gotten the prize for making a lot of noise, and being the loudest voice in the echo chamber that is modern theoretical physics.
If you disagree, then describe to me exactly what a young person is supposed to do, to achieve such a prize.
How exactly does this award help anyone? He's given a prize to a bunch of professors who already have tenure. They do not need incentives to do original work. Meanwhile, grad students and postdocs (who do most of the real work in the field and are the most capable, and motivated) live hand to mouth, have no sense of job stability, and no possibility to pursue truly creative work. Instead they live under the thumb of just those kind of people that received this award. They're forced to pursue old, dead ideas that have not gone anywhere (but are favorites of their advisers/supervisors). Theoretical physics has been stagnating for decades. The Higgs boson is a 40-50 year old idea, and virtually all new ideas in the meantime have been utter bullshit (string theory, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc). The field is grasping at straws because the majority of the people working cannot pursue long-term goals, or risky ideas.
A better award would be to give say $500k to 54 promising postdocs who do not have tenure, to encourage them to go in new directions.
More and more I feel as though I'm the mark of the information age, rather than benefiting from it. Google, Facebook, 100 advertising sites, are all busy trying to gather as much information about me as possible, and not giving me any control over it. I've long been a fan of augmented reality appearing, but it's coming in an age where user control is removed, and the information sources to which it has access are filtered, censored, and engineered by others, who have their own agenda. Soon we'll all be living in a reality distortion field, carefully engineered to make sure we keep buying a certain set of products, vote a particular way, or perform certain tasks for our overlords. Media distortion already works by selective omission of information, as the information becomes closer to us and higher volume, it will work the same way. Advertisement will become pervasive, more subconscious, and much harder to avoid. Just wait until they start correlating the placement of their corporate logo in your visual field with purchasing habits. They'll optimize it for human learning: show their ad/logo in an optimal learning pattern spatially and in time, so you won't forget it. We really will be programmed consumer-bots.
How do we prevent that dystopia?
"It's an emergency -- there's no time for a court order" is an excuse to violate people's rights, and get access to things no court would give an order for. There is always time for a court order, and courts are set up to handle emergency situations. The clause is unjustified.
Society has entrusted one organization with auditing the lawful access to other people's information -- courts. I would not trust LastPass, or anyone else with that responsibility.
That's about as useful as saying magic unicorns protect your security.
Unless it's open source, you're still depending on the good graces of a third party to not do something else with your password. A black box with AES stamped on the outside garners the same level of trust as a black box with ROT13 stamped on the outside. How do you know they're not AES encrypting the username, and keeping passwords in plaintext? (through incompetence, malice, or just simply a bug)
Go with KeePass instead, and keep everything on your computer. Upload the KeePass database to cloud storage, if you desire. The database itself is encrypted.
This stackexchange question is very good: Is anybody using client browser certificates?
It seems the lack of use of user certificates comes down to laziness: 1) in implementing a simple user certificate management system 2) in distributing certificates.
When I was in middle school they taught us how to fill out a check. In this day and age, we should be teaching how PKI works and how to manage your keychain.
Imagine if we were not putting locks on doors because no one knew how keys worked, people forgot their keys, and you have to actually hand out keys. I think "not putting locks on doors" would be considered a ridiculous proposition. Educate the users.
I've long been frustrated that the SSL gods decided to authenticate only servers but not users. This kind of authentication works to protect the user from fraudulent sites, but does not protect sites from fraudulent users. Hence, we have massive bank and credit card fraud that operates by stealing user's credentials. "Public key cryptography" is not by itself a magic bullet. There is then the issue of where to put the keys how they are exchanged. In my opinion, browser SSL only solves half the problem.
A secure system would be two-way. Browsers have long had support for user certificates, but I've never seen them used for anything in the US.
I was impressed that the Spanish government runs a CA and issues certificates to citizens, in order to access government sites and services. To get a certificate you have to go to a government office or embassy, and show your passport or other credentials. Now that's the right thing to be doing.
Anyone know of a bank that assigns users browser certificates? I'd switch banks today. Imagine if you could invalidate a stolen certificate, and then law enforcement could use evidence of a stolen certificate's usage to track down criminals?
Presumably your prviate key(s) are encrypted (with a passphrase), as they are with ssl, pgp, etc. Encrypted keychains are safe to store in the cloud. It does open them to brute force attacks though, so the outer encryption should have a very long key.
Bullfucking shit. When the exploding car is on the left side of the screen in one frame, in the middle in the next and on the right side in the 3rd frame, and all of them are blurry, I CAN SEE IT. It's a fuzzy mess and the brain will not piece it together. I don't give a shit about your worthless studies, because I have two of my own embedded in my skull.
The fact of the matter is that most viewers aren't sophisticated enough to know about various kinds of video artifacts. Doesn't mean they can't see it, it just means that they are either used to it, or don't have the vocabulary or experience to identify it. Asking unsophisticated viewers is useless. If you increase the frame rate, in the short run everyone will either not notice or think it looks weird, but in the long run everyone will love it and think older 24fps looks weird, and they won't be able to tell you why. And it will have its largest impact on action movies with fast motion. You can do a similar thing with audio: most people can't tell you whether one recording sounds better than another. But if you show them what MP3 recording artifacts sound like, suddenly they'll notice it all over the place.
I, for one, will pay for higher frame rate. 48fps is even too low. I can see each achingly slow 1/24s frame as it crawls across the screen. Explosions and fast motion in action movies generally only take a handful of frames, and the illusion of motion is lost when I can see each one individually. No amount of motion blur will fix this. To me, watching action movies at a theater where I'm closer to the screen is an epilepsy-inducing stroboscopic nightmare that I generally avoid. It's moderately tolerable on the small screen, when the angle subtended by motion is smaller, but I can still see the frames.
Back in the days of CRT monitors I played with refresh rate a lot to figure out what I could notice and what bothered me. 60Hz was tolerable, but above 80 was best. So, Hollywood: double it again, bring us 96fps films. Or, hey, you could really go hog wild and pick a refresh rate already in common use like 60Hz or 120Hz. Nah, the'll never do that.
Clearly I was talking more about post-docs leading scientific endeavors. But don't underestimate grad students. They have not yet been trained in what can't be done, and not yet indoctrinated in how things should be done, and they're even more likely than post-docs to try something truly new and innovative. Of course they will fail most of the time, but failure is valuable. You say "vauge and unrealistic", I say you've been indoctrinated into a set of things which are "unrealistic". Naivety can be valuable...
A good postdoc cannot generate original ideas that would take more time than roughly 1/4 their postdoc length to complete. Hence, we just encourage post-docs to chase low hanging fruit harder and faster, rather than encouraging them to pursue more difficult (and important) goals. So their ideas end up being derivative too, because they depend on that recommendation letter for their next job. No one wants to be in the position of searching for a new job with a half-finished project that their mentor isn't quite sure about, it's career suicide.
The solution is to give them academic freedom, something like tenure.
No way, "biomedical" is far too narrow. These recommendations are valid across all the sciences. I think the solution is simple: abolish post-docs (fixed-term contracts for scientists), and reduce the number of grants for grad students, replacing both with "permanent scientist" jobs. We've created an indentured underclass of scientists who have neither the job stability, nor funding to actually do science. Instead they're beholden to the latest shiny object everyone else is fascinated by, because that's what will get them the next post-doc. The entire system is organized around training professors, not doing science. Like any field with 10 times more applicants than jobs, the primary activity becomes culling the herd, not selecting the best science. As any professor will tell you, it's about finding ways to veto candidates, not selecting the best one. So we end up with everyone playing follow the leader, and searching for ever low-hanging fruit, and no one in all of science is in a position to make a long-term commitment to pursue a difficult idea.
Yeah, grad students and post-docs are cheap, but they can't actually do science. They're our best and brightest, and we only allow them to do other people's science. You better hope that the PI with 10 minutes today to think about his project between meetings has the right idea. Because, you know, people with 10 minutes between meetings are the best ones to think deeply about things and decide the best course of action. We'd be better off if we inverted the hierarchy in science. We need to give people in their late 20's and early 30's the majority of the power in the field, because that's when our minds are sharpest, and we are most capable. Hire them into permanent positions, and promote from within instead of heavily recruiting from outside.
Wrong. Values for the mass which would be observable with OPERA were ruled out by several experiments, long before OPERA was built.
The modification of the velocity is approximately v/c=1-m^2/E^2 =~ c*1e-18. OPERA has nowhere near a precision of 1e-18 on the velocity measurement. A large enough mass to be visible in the velocity measurement would be so large that certain radioactive decays would not occur, and it would be visible in the kinematics of others (such as Tritium decay).
OPERA does not directly measure mass. It measures mixing. The mass difference is then computed from the rate of mixing. The link you posted explains this very well. They added the velocity measurement just because they could, but there's no way that measurement could have any bearing on their mass (mixing) measurement.
The precision of the velocity measurement is nowhere near what would be required to measure mass using it. Neutrino mass is very, very small compared to the energy of these neutrinos.
The velocity measurement was a side-project. The main OPERA experiment measures the rate at which neutrinos switch "flavors". The rate of that flavor oscillation can be used to compute the mass difference of neutrinos.
You seem to be living under the illusion that the government is here to help and has your best interests at heart. The government only bends to the people's will by direct action of the people. If you want to petition the government to come to the people, more power to you. Until then however, we will have to go sit in their offices and bitch at them to get what we need, and we need to ensure that we can all do that.
That is a stupid and ridiculous statement. This is the 21st century, and air travel is the most common form of transportation for nearly all people is by air, to exercise their constitutional right to petition the government. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that horse and buggy is still an option is simply stupid. The government must change with the times, and these times predominantly use air travel.
These "permanent injunctions" are rather stupid. They do no one any good. The only question in cases like these is: "how much does the infringer owe?" If someone figures out how to make more money with your patent than you do, then they should be allowed to do it, but they should have to pay for it. Presumably they'd pay less if they got a license first rather than going to court. Never, ever, should a court grant a permanent injunction, or stop the sale of anything. It harms the market, harms innovation, harms the free flow of ideas.
We need compulsory licensing of patents. (And copyrighted material too, for that matter, now that the marginal cost of distribution is zero)
Why are we not doing this for passwords too? Every site on the internet shouldn't need to store a plaintext password. Does there exist an algorithm by which a site owner could send the salt, the user hashes with his password, and the site owner can tell the password is the same, without actually having the password?
You're right on most of that. Oh well, ad-blockers for half-finished weekend projects it is... and using Android will continue to be a miserable experience.
P.S. I think I've been isolated, using only FOSS since about 1995. Android was my first re-introduction to the bad-old-world of closed source. It's a chaotic shit-show and I hate it.
P.P.S. I thought everyone on Android was using Google's AdMob? Which made me think Google could force some improvements to the situation...