The most compelling argument for me was this:
"Countries that don't have gene patents actually offer better gene testing than we do, because when multiple labs are allowed to do testing, more mutations are discovered, leading to higher-quality tests."
Making an economic argument, that other countries will gain an advantage over us, is the only way to convince the people who actually have the power to change the situation.
This is a specious argument. The countries offering great gene testing are not doing the research to develop the tests, but rather using the fruits of research produced by countries that do have patent protection. Biological research is an expensive and time-consuming process; without some way to recoup costs, it just won't get done on the required scale.
Actually the best way to go off the grid is to expat to another country. If your destination is a place with a non-Roman alphabet, I doubt any databases will be able to link your name to anything without human intervention. Provided that you don't make the $80,000 required to be eligible for US taxes, you'll be able to sign contracts, use credit cards, etc. without the US or its corporations finding anything out. As far as the multinationals are concerned, 'you' are two different people.
Provided you don't take out an American credit card (think Visa Europe doesn't talk to Visa US?), or fly on a US carrier (data provided to US Immigration) or perform a wire transfer through a bank (data is monitored by the US to help with the war on drugs) or make a phone call to someone on the NSAs watchlist (no right to privacy for foreigners).
I'm afraid Uncle Sam really is watching, even if you do live overseas.
I'm not a climatologist so maybe someone here can help... Is there a way to explain extreme cold spells generated by global warming?
(I'm not trying to be an ass, I really want to know.)
I can't comment on the US, but parts of Europe stand to become quite cold as a result of global warming. Northern Europe's climate is favourably affected by warm water from the Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic and ending up around northern Europe. One model suggests melting Arctic ice dumps large quantities of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic and disrupts the Gulf Stream enough to prevent warm water from reaching Europe. In northern Europe, this would result in widespread crop failure.
BT throttling is already done in a net neutral manner--all torrents, regardless of legality or origin are throttled equally. There is no attempt (as far as I know) to throttle torrents originating from one company but not others.
Throttling BT downloads generally falls as a quality of service/defense of network integrity issue to rather than a censorship for profit issue.
If someone can't be bothered to walk or drive half a mile to a polling station and put a cross in a box, do they really *care* who they are voting for? Far too many people treat voting flippantly (I don't like the look of him, I never vote for a woman, He has horrible hair etc) as it is. Would we be any worse of if voters had to take a simple test before voting? If you can't name the leaders of the main 3 parties, and pick their faces out of a lineup, are you really informed enough about the issues to vote sensibly?
The second someone gets it in their head that the right to vote must be "earned" or can stripped in some way it sets a dangerous precedent. Once a test of some sort is involved, it becomes all too easy to tweak the requirements to disenfranchise entire population demographics. Don't like immigrants? Require a reading test. Don't like the poor? Poll taxes. Don't like geeks? Demand they bring a date to the polling station (*ducks for cover*).
Voting must be an absolute right of citizenship, not subject to the prevailing whims of the day.
Re:I still haven't been sold on electronic voting
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Seems to me it is a solution without a problem. Couldn't you avoid vote-counting concerns entirely by casting paper ballots, then allowing anyone with an interest in the counting process to witness the tally. Count the votes publicly, perhaps in a gymnasium or library, with a camera to record the counting process as well as to transmit a feed to an internet site. I believe they do something similar in Canada now. I would gladly exchange the additional time necessary to conduct the count manually with witnesses for a repeat of the Florida fiasco during the Presidential election in 2000.
They've always done this in Canada.
In Canada, polling stations usually service a few hundred households. They are typically set up in local school gymnasiums, church halls, the basements of apartment blocks etc. Voters show up, are checked off the list of registered voter and are handed a (paper) ballot. The voter's list is taken from the national tax records and so is generally quite accurate. For those who aren't on the voter's list because they moved (or declined to have the tax office register them), they can register at the polling station by showing the appropriate ID.
The actual voting is done behind a cardboard screen, and the ballot is put into the ballot box. For federal and provincial elections, the ballot box consists of a standard Elections Canada cardboard box whose sides have been sealed and certified. The box design is remarkably simple and inexpensive, enough so that boxes are often sent to new democracies running their first elections. Municipal elections in large cities often use optical recognition counters, but the ballots themselves are still paper. Voters mark their X for each vote, and an optical scanner does the tallies; the paper ballots are retained in case manual recounts are required.
When the polling stations close, the boxes are opened up and the counting begins. Each polling station reports its results to a central clearinghouse, and the totals are tallied. Candidates may appoint scrutineers for each polling station, but in fact anyone may watch (but not interfere with) the counting provided they are inside the counting room before the poll closes and the room is shut. Counting the votes for the entire election generally takes only a few hours; when the country goes to bed there will be roughly five races out of three hundred that are too close to call.
Of course, if you REALLY want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is measured, and the meter is defined as being the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second.
While this is Slashdot, we still encourage pedantic comments to be correct.:)
Your definition of the metre is correct, but you may notice that it fixes the speed of light at precisely 299792458 m/s, with no room for measurement. What you actually do in modern science is measure a second with a very precise clock, and calibrate your meter bar appropriately. Any errors you make are in the length of the metre, not the speed of light.
It didn't always used to be this way; for about eighty years the meter was defined in terms of atomic transition lines, so that the speed of light was the measured value. In 1983, however, timekeeping was accurate enough that the definition of the metre changed over so that the metre was a derived quantity.
The "absolute" speed of light is measured in a vacuum. As soon as light travels through any material it slows down to less then the absolute speed of light.
If you really want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is not measured but rather defined to be 299,792,458 m/s.
Ok Blue tooth has been around since 1998-ish, Why wait till now to make a fuss? Any Idea's I work on, I research heavily to see if there are alternatives out there. Blue tooth has been in the news for a long time, seriously why wait till now? I wish there was a law that says if you hate a better part of a decade to sue for your patent, you should lose out. But then again, I want a law that says no vaguely worded patents, be precise, and not have it describe 15 million things.
Two things. Bluetooth may have come out in 1998-ish, but it wasn't commecially interesting right away. If we take the article at face value and the plaintiffs were in talks with the defendants for the past two years, that would put the timeframe in 2004-05, around the time wireless really seemed to be taking off. Likely before that the plaintiffs either didn't realise they had IP in the relevant area or (more likely, I would guess) the value of a potential court judgement didn't justify the cost of starting a lawsuit.
Regarding the issue of researching patents before starting work, you may do it, but the big corporate types don't. The penalties for *willfully* infringing on a patent are substantially more than normal infringement (I seem to recall hearing, triple damages in the U.S., someone correct me if I'm wrong). No doubt the bean counters and lawyers of the corporate world crunched the numbers and figured it was cheaper to ignore prior patents and deal with IP issues as they came up rather than risk being on the end of a truly massive court judgement.
Dust and dirt from Earth have generally been exposed to natural erosion forces that round off the corners from the rock fragments. The stuff coming from the Moon has not experienced equivalent weathering, and so it is much more abrasive than one might expect. As NASA begins to design new lunar equipment, it needs to test just how the prototypes will hold up to the Moon's "environment."
It is certainly believable that drug companies will patent minor changes to drugs to gain more protection, but I don't quite see how that stiffles competition. Consider a drug company that makes a genuinely new drug, labelled A, and patents it. A little while later, they also patent a slight variant on the drug, call it B.
17 years(?) later, the patent on drug A expires and anyone who wants to can create copies. The patent on the "me too" drugs are still in effect, but does that matter? As long as I only want to copy the original formulation, the patent on the original drug A would seem to be the only one of relevance.
Can someone who knows about the drug industry enlighten me?
Earlier in the week/. had a story about NASA's new mission to the moon. A lot of conjecture in the comments was about if it would get enough funding. Now this story talks about funding contests and other shit like that. Bzzzt wrong answer. What the government should fund to get kids interested in science again (and as per your point exploration) is the Moon mission. We have to see exploration in scientific frontiers as the way to the future and I believe the kids will follow suit and learn this stuff.
Though it won't be popular, I would submit that the last thing we need to improve our scientific competitiveness is another moon mission. *ducks for cover*
The last time we had a major space program, it created a huge buzz and interest in space, and the best and brightest decided to become rocket scientists. By contrast, in other countries the best and brightest put their energies into solid-state physics, polymer chemistry, materials science and other fields that boosted their country's competitiveness in future decades.
To be sure a space mission would be sexy, it focuses the dreams and imagination like nothing else and gives us a goal to strive for. But as a cure for our declining science talent, I'm not convinced that using our most talented scientists to shoot a few tons of metal into zero-gravity is the way to go.
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda. It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Would the people that determine the known list of terrorists be the same ones who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
...Suppose I have a retail copy of XP Professional, which I really like. Sometime down the road my computer gets struck by lightning and M$ has determined that the life cycle of XP is complete and will no longer activate it. Then I am stuck with a worthless piece of plastic...
There is no expiry date on the EULA; if you have a retail version that allows you to reinstall and Microsoft refuses to do so, you have grounds and standing to sue. I have read elsewhere that the plan is to release a WGA removal patch once maintaining the activations process becomes too burdensome for MS.
So I suppose the Zeeman effect is that energy consumed by keeping the magnetic field at strength while the spin is changed. Does your book (or other source) indicate whether the spin flips back when the magfield is removed? Does it emit the energy difference? Or does an external stimulus have to force the flip back?
The energy is a one-shot deal, only required to flip the spin. In principle, the magnetic field doesn't need to stay on after the spins are flipped. In practice, once the field is removed, thermal effects take over and the spin population relaxes towards a random distribution again. Energy would be reemitted as photons for transitions to a lower energy level.
I must correct my previous posting. As a responder pointed out, we are talking about nuclear spins rather than electronic. The energy required to flip a spin will be lower, but the nuclear spins do not couple as strongly to the outside world. The lifetime of a spin polarized system could be substantial because thermal interactions with other stuff is more attenuated.
As for useful textbooks, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas. Dealing with spin is a higher-level concept; I didn't touch it until my third term of QM. As such, it's tough to find a book that won't have a lot of math along the way.
What's the net potential energy difference between the difference between the different spin states, if any? And what does the curve look like - is there a big hump between them, or a small hump relative to any energy difference? If it's a hump, is it a trough to flip the states back?
I had to pull out my quantum mechanics book for this one. As a rough estimate for the energy difference between "up" and "down" spins, you can use the energy of the Zeeman effect (energy level splitting in an atom when in a magnetic field). The magnitude of that effect is (B/2.4e9 gauss) * 13.6 eV, where B is the size of the applied magnetic field. A supermagnet would produce fields on the order of 1e5 gauss, so we're not talking very much energy here. As another very crude estimate, consider that random thermal effects have enough energy to flip spins randomly, which is one of the big problems facing spintronics.
As to the humping issue, this is quantum mechanics; there is no curve. Only discrete states are allowed, with nothing in between.
Antiguasoft Vista would be copyright infringement as well as being trademark and possibly patent infringement. Are they able to ignore copyright laws too?
If the US is found to be violating WTO rules with its gambling legislation and refuses to change them, Antigua is entitled to apply to the WTO for relief (i.e. punishment for the US). Generally this would take the form of tariffs on US products, but retaliation can also take the form of suspending IP protection for American goods. In this case, within the jurisdiction of Antigua, it would be open season on American IP. Software, movies and TV, along with patents (trademarks too?) would all lose protection until the US complied with WTO rules again.
This would apply exclusively to American IP, and would be totally legal under the WTO rules. It is designed to put pressure on American companies, so that they will in turn put pressure on their Congress critters.
You might want to read this before claiming the infallibility of judges. Did you ever read the Jackson findings? From a technical perspective, his findings are completely misguided. This Slate commentary offers a history of the appellate court thinking, which overruled much of his findings.
From the Slate article:
If Microsoft won the day, the Justice Department won some moments. The court upheld the monopoly maintenance claim against Microsoft, finding that the company did in fact possess monopoly power and that it willfully maintained that power by playing nastily with the other kids.
And as we all know, once the state says something, that is the truth. There cannot be another opinion about it.
In the U.S., the state said that Microsoft was an abusive monopoly, and eight federal court judges (one trial, seven appeal) agreed. That's good enough for me.
...I remember borrowing tapes and making copies. I never bought music, I bought blank tapes. If a friend didn't have a song I wanted, I listened for it on the radio and recorded it off that (granted the quality sucked). This is basically the same thing as file sharing. Why were they not tracking down the millions of kids that did this in the 80's?
Do you really need to ask? Widespread copying was a harder task in the 80s. You had to find someone who owned a copy of said music, which meant a local friend. The quality of the copy was degraded, often being quite poor after many iterations of copying. Compare with today, where you can make an exact replica of music from someone on another continent, on nothing more than a whim.
Music companies cared in the 1980s, but piracy was at a nuisance level rather than threatening the entire business model.
Looking at Lehigh University's Math department website, this woman got her PhD at, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, 1978.
While she seems to have some interesting research, it just seems odd that a mathematician on the verge of solving one of the great outstanding problems in mathematics attended such a no name school. Does anyone know something about the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn that I don't?
She was a woman getting a PhD in mathematics in 1978. It is entirely possible that the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn was a more welcoming environment than some of the big league schools. Even today some women complain about the atmosphere at some of the "big-name" schools.
I have never found a really good explanation for this: How do we know a blackhole truly has an infinite density, and not just so incredibly dense that it, in fact, has a stronger gravity than even light can escape? My mind has a difficult time with something becoming infinitely small. I can understand it becoming so tight that there is no space between the smallest particles, but cannot fathom something smaller than that.
In some sense, you have to trust that physicists know what they're doing. Absent an understanding of the math, it really is an act of faith that black holes are not one big practical joke.
That being said, you may remember the Exclusion Princple from high school chemistry, which basically says particles like electrons and neutrons can't occupy the same (quantum) states. When you try and push them together, they push back. It is possible to calculate the maximum force (pressure actually) that such a system can produce. After that, there's nothing can keep a star from collapsing.
If you're interested in reading, check out "Electron degeneracy pressure" in an undergrad quantum mechanics textbook or on the Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
The most compelling argument for me was this: "Countries that don't have gene patents actually offer better gene testing than we do, because when multiple labs are allowed to do testing, more mutations are discovered, leading to higher-quality tests."
Making an economic argument, that other countries will gain an advantage over us, is the only way to convince the people who actually have the power to change the situation.
This is a specious argument. The countries offering great gene testing are not doing the research to develop the tests, but rather using the fruits of research produced by countries that do have patent protection. Biological research is an expensive and time-consuming process; without some way to recoup costs, it just won't get done on the required scale.
Actually the best way to go off the grid is to expat to another country. If your destination is a place with a non-Roman alphabet, I doubt any databases will be able to link your name to anything without human intervention. Provided that you don't make the $80,000 required to be eligible for US taxes, you'll be able to sign contracts, use credit cards, etc. without the US or its corporations finding anything out. As far as the multinationals are concerned, 'you' are two different people.
Provided you don't take out an American credit card (think Visa Europe doesn't talk to Visa US?), or fly on a US carrier (data provided to US Immigration) or perform a wire transfer through a bank (data is monitored by the US to help with the war on drugs) or make a phone call to someone on the NSAs watchlist (no right to privacy for foreigners).
I'm afraid Uncle Sam really is watching, even if you do live overseas.
I'm not a climatologist so maybe someone here can help... Is there a way to explain extreme cold spells generated by global warming? (I'm not trying to be an ass, I really want to know.)
I can't comment on the US, but parts of Europe stand to become quite cold as a result of global warming. Northern Europe's climate is favourably affected by warm water from the Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic and ending up around northern Europe. One model suggests melting Arctic ice dumps large quantities of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic and disrupts the Gulf Stream enough to prevent warm water from reaching Europe. In northern Europe, this would result in widespread crop failure.
BT throttling is already done in a net neutral manner--all torrents, regardless of legality or origin are throttled equally. There is no attempt (as far as I know) to throttle torrents originating from one company but not others.
Throttling BT downloads generally falls as a quality of service/defense of network integrity issue to rather than a censorship for profit issue.
If someone can't be bothered to walk or drive half a mile to a polling station and put a cross in a box, do they really *care* who they are voting for? Far too many people treat voting flippantly (I don't like the look of him, I never vote for a woman, He has horrible hair etc) as it is. Would we be any worse of if voters had to take a simple test before voting? If you can't name the leaders of the main 3 parties, and pick their faces out of a lineup, are you really informed enough about the issues to vote sensibly?
The second someone gets it in their head that the right to vote must be "earned" or can stripped in some way it sets a dangerous precedent. Once a test of some sort is involved, it becomes all too easy to tweak the requirements to disenfranchise entire population demographics. Don't like immigrants? Require a reading test. Don't like the poor? Poll taxes. Don't like geeks? Demand they bring a date to the polling station (*ducks for cover*).
Voting must be an absolute right of citizenship, not subject to the prevailing whims of the day.
Seems to me it is a solution without a problem. Couldn't you avoid vote-counting concerns entirely by casting paper ballots, then allowing anyone with an interest in the counting process to witness the tally. Count the votes publicly, perhaps in a gymnasium or library, with a camera to record the counting process as well as to transmit a feed to an internet site. I believe they do something similar in Canada now. I would gladly exchange the additional time necessary to conduct the count manually with witnesses for a repeat of the Florida fiasco during the Presidential election in 2000.
They've always done this in Canada.
In Canada, polling stations usually service a few hundred households. They are typically set up in local school gymnasiums, church halls, the basements of apartment blocks etc. Voters show up, are checked off the list of registered voter and are handed a (paper) ballot. The voter's list is taken from the national tax records and so is generally quite accurate. For those who aren't on the voter's list because they moved (or declined to have the tax office register them), they can register at the polling station by showing the appropriate ID.
The actual voting is done behind a cardboard screen, and the ballot is put into the ballot box. For federal and provincial elections, the ballot box consists of a standard Elections Canada cardboard box whose sides have been sealed and certified. The box design is remarkably simple and inexpensive, enough so that boxes are often sent to new democracies running their first elections. Municipal elections in large cities often use optical recognition counters, but the ballots themselves are still paper. Voters mark their X for each vote, and an optical scanner does the tallies; the paper ballots are retained in case manual recounts are required.
When the polling stations close, the boxes are opened up and the counting begins. Each polling station reports its results to a central clearinghouse, and the totals are tallied. Candidates may appoint scrutineers for each polling station, but in fact anyone may watch (but not interfere with) the counting provided they are inside the counting room before the poll closes and the room is shut. Counting the votes for the entire election generally takes only a few hours; when the country goes to bed there will be roughly five races out of three hundred that are too close to call.
Of course, if you REALLY want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is measured, and the meter is defined as being the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second.
While this is Slashdot, we still encourage pedantic comments to be correct. :)
Your definition of the metre is correct, but you may notice that it fixes the speed of light at precisely 299792458 m/s, with no room for measurement. What you actually do in modern science is measure a second with a very precise clock, and calibrate your meter bar appropriately. Any errors you make are in the length of the metre, not the speed of light.
It didn't always used to be this way; for about eighty years the meter was defined in terms of atomic transition lines, so that the speed of light was the measured value. In 1983, however, timekeeping was accurate enough that the definition of the metre changed over so that the metre was a derived quantity.
The "absolute" speed of light is measured in a vacuum. As soon as light travels through any material it slows down to less then the absolute speed of light.
If you really want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is not measured but rather defined to be 299,792,458 m/s.
Ok Blue tooth has been around since 1998-ish, Why wait till now to make a fuss? Any Idea's I work on, I research heavily to see if there are alternatives out there. Blue tooth has been in the news for a long time, seriously why wait till now? I wish there was a law that says if you hate a better part of a decade to sue for your patent, you should lose out. But then again, I want a law that says no vaguely worded patents, be precise, and not have it describe 15 million things.
Two things. Bluetooth may have come out in 1998-ish, but it wasn't commecially interesting right away. If we take the article at face value and the plaintiffs were in talks with the defendants for the past two years, that would put the timeframe in 2004-05, around the time wireless really seemed to be taking off. Likely before that the plaintiffs either didn't realise they had IP in the relevant area or (more likely, I would guess) the value of a potential court judgement didn't justify the cost of starting a lawsuit.
Regarding the issue of researching patents before starting work, you may do it, but the big corporate types don't. The penalties for *willfully* infringing on a patent are substantially more than normal infringement (I seem to recall hearing, triple damages in the U.S., someone correct me if I'm wrong). No doubt the bean counters and lawyers of the corporate world crunched the numbers and figured it was cheaper to ignore prior patents and deal with IP issues as they came up rather than risk being on the end of a truly massive court judgement.
Dust and dirt from Earth have generally been exposed to natural erosion forces that round off the corners from the rock fragments. The stuff coming from the Moon has not experienced equivalent weathering, and so it is much more abrasive than one might expect. As NASA begins to design new lunar equipment, it needs to test just how the prototypes will hold up to the Moon's "environment."
It is certainly believable that drug companies will patent minor changes to drugs to gain more protection, but I don't quite see how that stiffles competition. Consider a drug company that makes a genuinely new drug, labelled A, and patents it. A little while later, they also patent a slight variant on the drug, call it B.
17 years(?) later, the patent on drug A expires and anyone who wants to can create copies. The patent on the "me too" drugs are still in effect, but does that matter? As long as I only want to copy the original formulation, the patent on the original drug A would seem to be the only one of relevance.
Can someone who knows about the drug industry enlighten me?
Earlier in the week /. had a story about NASA's new mission to the moon. A lot of conjecture in the comments was about if it would get enough funding. Now this story talks about funding contests and other shit like that. Bzzzt wrong answer. What the government should fund to get kids interested in science again (and as per your point exploration) is the Moon mission. We have to see exploration in scientific frontiers as the way to the future and I believe the kids will follow suit and learn this stuff.
Though it won't be popular, I would submit that the last thing we need to improve our scientific competitiveness is another moon mission. *ducks for cover*
The last time we had a major space program, it created a huge buzz and interest in space, and the best and brightest decided to become rocket scientists. By contrast, in other countries the best and brightest put their energies into solid-state physics, polymer chemistry, materials science and other fields that boosted their country's competitiveness in future decades.
To be sure a space mission would be sexy, it focuses the dreams and imagination like nothing else and gives us a goal to strive for. But as a cure for our declining science talent, I'm not convinced that using our most talented scientists to shoot a few tons of metal into zero-gravity is the way to go.
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda. It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Would the people that determine the known list of terrorists be the same ones who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
There is no expiry date on the EULA; if you have a retail version that allows you to reinstall and Microsoft refuses to do so, you have grounds and standing to sue. I have read elsewhere that the plan is to release a WGA removal patch once maintaining the activations process becomes too burdensome for MS.
So I suppose the Zeeman effect is that energy consumed by keeping the magnetic field at strength while the spin is changed. Does your book (or other source) indicate whether the spin flips back when the magfield is removed? Does it emit the energy difference? Or does an external stimulus have to force the flip back?
The energy is a one-shot deal, only required to flip the spin. In principle, the magnetic field doesn't need to stay on after the spins are flipped. In practice, once the field is removed, thermal effects take over and the spin population relaxes towards a random distribution again. Energy would be reemitted as photons for transitions to a lower energy level.
I must correct my previous posting. As a responder pointed out, we are talking about nuclear spins rather than electronic. The energy required to flip a spin will be lower, but the nuclear spins do not couple as strongly to the outside world. The lifetime of a spin polarized system could be substantial because thermal interactions with other stuff is more attenuated.
As for useful textbooks, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas. Dealing with spin is a higher-level concept; I didn't touch it until my third term of QM. As such, it's tough to find a book that won't have a lot of math along the way.
What's the net potential energy difference between the difference between the different spin states, if any? And what does the curve look like - is there a big hump between them, or a small hump relative to any energy difference? If it's a hump, is it a trough to flip the states back?
I had to pull out my quantum mechanics book for this one. As a rough estimate for the energy difference between "up" and "down" spins, you can use the energy of the Zeeman effect (energy level splitting in an atom when in a magnetic field). The magnitude of that effect is (B/2.4e9 gauss) * 13.6 eV, where B is the size of the applied magnetic field. A supermagnet would produce fields on the order of 1e5 gauss, so we're not talking very much energy here. As another very crude estimate, consider that random thermal effects have enough energy to flip spins randomly, which is one of the big problems facing spintronics.
As to the humping issue, this is quantum mechanics; there is no curve. Only discrete states are allowed, with nothing in between.
Antiguasoft Vista would be copyright infringement as well as being trademark and possibly patent infringement. Are they able to ignore copyright laws too?
If the US is found to be violating WTO rules with its gambling legislation and refuses to change them, Antigua is entitled to apply to the WTO for relief (i.e. punishment for the US). Generally this would take the form of tariffs on US products, but retaliation can also take the form of suspending IP protection for American goods. In this case, within the jurisdiction of Antigua, it would be open season on American IP. Software, movies and TV, along with patents (trademarks too?) would all lose protection until the US complied with WTO rules again.
This would apply exclusively to American IP, and would be totally legal under the WTO rules. It is designed to put pressure on American companies, so that they will in turn put pressure on their Congress critters.
You might want to read this before claiming the infallibility of judges. Did you ever read the Jackson findings? From a technical perspective, his findings are completely misguided. This Slate commentary offers a history of the appellate court thinking, which overruled much of his findings.
From the Slate article:
If Microsoft won the day, the Justice Department won some moments. The court upheld the monopoly maintenance claim against Microsoft, finding that the company did in fact possess monopoly power and that it willfully maintained that power by playing nastily with the other kids.
And as we all know, once the state says something, that is the truth. There cannot be another opinion about it.
In the U.S., the state said that Microsoft was an abusive monopoly, and eight federal court judges (one trial, seven appeal) agreed. That's good enough for me.
...everybody signed the declaration except the actual people doing and paying for the drug research.
In other news, Slashdot readers signed a petition for free computers while drivers signed another for free gas.
...I remember borrowing tapes and making copies. I never bought music, I bought blank tapes. If a friend didn't have a song I wanted, I listened for it on the radio and recorded it off that (granted the quality sucked). This is basically the same thing as file sharing. Why were they not tracking down the millions of kids that did this in the 80's?
Do you really need to ask? Widespread copying was a harder task in the 80s. You had to find someone who owned a copy of said music, which meant a local friend. The quality of the copy was degraded, often being quite poor after many iterations of copying. Compare with today, where you can make an exact replica of music from someone on another continent, on nothing more than a whim.
Music companies cared in the 1980s, but piracy was at a nuisance level rather than threatening the entire business model.
Looking at Lehigh University's Math department website, this woman got her PhD at, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, 1978.
While she seems to have some interesting research, it just seems odd that a mathematician on the verge of solving one of the great outstanding problems in mathematics attended such a no name school. Does anyone know something about the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn that I don't?
She was a woman getting a PhD in mathematics in 1978. It is entirely possible that the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn was a more welcoming environment than some of the big league schools. Even today some women complain about the atmosphere at some of the "big-name" schools.
...the voting machines pwn you!
In some sense, you have to trust that physicists know what they're doing. Absent an understanding of the math, it really is an act of faith that black holes are not one big practical joke.
That being said, you may remember the Exclusion Princple from high school chemistry, which basically says particles like electrons and neutrons can't occupy the same (quantum) states. When you try and push them together, they push back. It is possible to calculate the maximum force (pressure actually) that such a system can produce. After that, there's nothing can keep a star from collapsing.
If you're interested in reading, check out "Electron degeneracy pressure" in an undergrad quantum mechanics textbook or on the Wikipedia.
Once it gets out into space, wouldn't the long carbon tether become charged?
Like the static we discharge walking around the office, any critters setting up home will be in for a nasty shock.
The wildlife will be fine, for the same reason that they don't get toasted when sitting on power line.