Yeah but in the US they then add tax on top (which presumably varies between the types of item) which is not displayed in advance, and sometimes add an arbitrary 'bottle deposit' as well. Thus a crate of beer marked 12 dollars ends up costing 18! I much prefer the system in the UK where you pay exactly what is displayed on the tag, no more no less. Why should I care how much the thing costs before tax?
Copyright is a misnomer. It is *not* a right like free speech. It is a privilege granted by the people to an artist to allow them a time limited monopoly on their artistic work before it is submitted to the public domain. It was meant to encourage the arts to produce more works, thus benefitting the world in the long run.
In the modern world, copyright has been twisted and abused by those companies that leached off the artists and got rich, and now it no longer fulfills its function and must be changed.
As many people have stated before, your free market ideals only make sense in a market with lots of competition. Then if a company decides to stop doing business with someone they can use an alternative, and customers can follow. When you have what amounts to a monopoly, those freedoms must be limited because the company can and will abuse its position to shut down anyone it doesn't like.
Imagine you lived in the mid-1800s and were visiting a small town in the mid-west. There is only one practical means to travel in and out of this town, which is by railroad. Imagine one day the train company decided that they didn't like you, say because you won a game of cards against a friend of the station owner during your stay. They then deny you the use of their trains, effectively cutting off your ability to travel around the country. What if you are a traveling salesman and your livelihood depends on those trains? Should the railway company be able to do this? The answer is clearly no.
Perhaps he released the US govt cables because they are the only ones that he had? Your opinion will only be justified if Assange gets hold of similar material from another government and refuses to release it.
This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.
Clearly this is why the headline story on BBC news today is about China's thinking on North Korea, and the headline story in The Independent is about missiles in Iran, both of which are sourced from the Wikileaks cables and neither of which is remotely 'anti-US'. I'm sure there are numerous other examples. It seems that you are being deceived by the US government propaganda machine, which attempts to bias (US) public opinion against things it doesn't like by claiming that they are attacking the democratic beacon of justice and humanity, the great and powerful USA, land of the free etc etc.
Isn't spending money to invest in the future exactly what governments are supposed to do? The fact that it is unpopular is irrelevant. Someone has to think ahead and spend accordingly, otherwise in ten years time when the economy has sorted itself out naturally, people will be wondering why the US has fallen behind on science and all of their best university lecturers, researchers and high-tech engineering companies have left for greener pastures. They realise that it will cost more in the long term to entice those people and industries back over.
I think you're missing the point. You seem to have this image in your mind of some guys in white coats loading $6 billion dollar bills into a capsule and firing it off into space. In reality, at least from my experience as a physicist in contact with researchers involved in the LHC, this is far from the truth.
I would wager that a large percentage of the project costs go into the R&D ; the material costs are likely to be very small in comparison. A small part of the R&D money goes to the researchers, who then spend it on rent and food etc, i.e. boosting the local economy and creating jobs. The rest is likely spent on co-developing technology with high-tech industry, an area of the economy that seems to me to be a very sound investment considering the number of out of work graduates that are being churned out each year.
Publicity 101 for leveraging a strong market position:
1) Impose unnecessary and draconian restrictions
2) Lots of anger in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: publicity)
3) Remove unnecessary and draconian restrictions
4) Lots of praise in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: more publicity)
5)....
6) Profits!
The energy required to make time stop completely for the entire universe would be, literally, astronomical.
Of course in relativity if you accelerate yourself to c with respect to the universe, the effect on the elapsed time between two events measured by each observer would be exactly the same as if you accelerated the whole universe up to c with respect to you. Why bother wasting the energy?
You do realise who Stephen Hawking is? Look him up on Wikipedia. He has more letters after his name than you do in yours, and almost certainly does more thinking in a day than many of us do in a week. Personally i'm glad that someone on this planet has decided to look past his own selfish interests and actually think about our future as a species. The funny thing is that as soon as something threatening does appear, people like you will be whining about why the government didn't pour more money into contingency planning.
Funny thing is, even John Hemming (BPI, Performing Right Society and the Musicians Union) seems to think this bill needs proper scrutiny:
Commons Hansard
My uni has workshop sessions where the idea is to work together as a group to solve a set of exam-style questions. I TA in these sessions, and in fact the hardest thing is getting the students to work together rather than sitting there and solving the questions alone. These count as a small percentage to the final year grade.
IMO the only marks that go towards your final grade should be projects (long-term, different project per person) and exams. In both of these cases it is much more difficult to cheat.
I think you're being a bit unjust to the physics community. I agree that the observation of Hawking radiation from a simulated BEC is not an `observation' as such, but the model, which the paper states involves no gravitational physics concepts and has shown to be a valid model based on current data, shows the presence of Hawking radiation. The fact that it is demonstrated in a system that is considerably better understood than quantum gravity is important for the following reason: Although i am not a cosmologist, i believe that the event horizon is a prediction of general relativity (not quantum gravity) which, as a model, has very strong experimental support. Therefore showing that a BEC event horizon (which has the same properties) shows Hawking radiation is sound evidence that a black hole should also produce Hawking radiation.
I would agree that the article was somewhat lacking in details about which processes they analysed. I am not connected with the research group, but I was hoping someone here could fill us in on which processes the group was concentrating on.
We have several flagship projects, including the calculation of the neutral kaon mixing parameter called B_K http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0702/0702042v4.pdf which allows us to look at CP violation (a symmetry involving particle charge and parity which has been shown to be slightly broken); the non-perturbative renormalisation of some important operators http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.1061v1.pdf allowing them to be used in various calculations; and KL3 http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.5136v1.pdf which allows us to study some important quark flavour mixing parameters. We also have projects on baryon and meson physics, in which we can calculate particle masses from first principles.
For those who are interested about the method, ill give a little summary: We start from the Quantum Chromodynamics Path Integral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation which (in Euclidean space) describes a probability distribution for the particle fields (with particles described as essentially ripples in the fields). Normally this is expanded as a power series in some small coupling constants, but at low energies (the energies at which quarks form bound states as protons, neutrons, pions, kaons etc) this coupling is large and we can no longer do this expansion. Instead we sample the probability distribution using a Monte Carlo method on our supercomputer, which gives us a set of snapshots of the vacuum, and upon which we perform measurements.
A very sad story, my small violin is being played as i type.
However, most companies/organisations are having to adapt to the digital age, and most do it without too much complaint (with notable exceptions). Abusing the legal system because your company didn't have the foresight to predict the rise of the Internet is not a good way of dealing with things.
So in order to work as a farmer one must be an expert in microbiology and climate physics. Otherwise how would they know what research to fund? How would they be able to judge the integrity of the data?
Also, who is going to fund less practical research such as astrophysics and particle physics if not the government? These avenues of research are not going to be funded by joe blogs on the street caring only about gas prices and the housing market.
I know a lot of people working on LHC projects, and they seem to think its worthwhile. Discovering the Higgs, and thus completing the Standard Model, would alone make the thing worthwhile. And then there are all of the possible supersymmetric decay signatures which, if seen, would go a long way towards explaining some of the problems with the standard model (hierarchy problem, etc). I am a particle physicist, and thus i may be biased, but i consider that particle physics research (tied into the cosmology you mention) is the best avenue towards furthering our understanding of the universe(s).
Superconductivity is (theorised to be) caused by the matter making a phase transition where two electrons become bound together by phonons (quanta of vibrational energy) in what are known as Cooper pairs. I dont know for sure but i imagine that most materials can do this, although the binding energy of the Cooper pair will vary from material to material, and hence the critical temperature.
However the temperature at the core of a star is stupidly high and thus Cooper pairs will not form.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone recommend a major bank that is not likely to do something similar over the next few months?
Yeah but in the US they then add tax on top (which presumably varies between the types of item) which is not displayed in advance, and sometimes add an arbitrary 'bottle deposit' as well. Thus a crate of beer marked 12 dollars ends up costing 18! I much prefer the system in the UK where you pay exactly what is displayed on the tag, no more no less. Why should I care how much the thing costs before tax?
Copyright is a misnomer. It is *not* a right like free speech. It is a privilege granted by the people to an artist to allow them a time limited monopoly on their artistic work before it is submitted to the public domain. It was meant to encourage the arts to produce more works, thus benefitting the world in the long run.
In the modern world, copyright has been twisted and abused by those companies that leached off the artists and got rich, and now it no longer fulfills its function and must be changed.
As many people have stated before, your free market ideals only make sense in a market with lots of competition. Then if a company decides to stop doing business with someone they can use an alternative, and customers can follow. When you have what amounts to a monopoly, those freedoms must be limited because the company can and will abuse its position to shut down anyone it doesn't like.
Imagine you lived in the mid-1800s and were visiting a small town in the mid-west. There is only one practical means to travel in and out of this town, which is by railroad. Imagine one day the train company decided that they didn't like you, say because you won a game of cards against a friend of the station owner during your stay. They then deny you the use of their trains, effectively cutting off your ability to travel around the country. What if you are a traveling salesman and your livelihood depends on those trains? Should the railway company be able to do this? The answer is clearly no.
Perhaps he released the US govt cables because they are the only ones that he had? Your opinion will only be justified if Assange gets hold of similar material from another government and refuses to release it.
Studies suggest that giving people facts that contradict their beliefs only serves to make them hold more tightly to that belief.
This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.
Clearly this is why the headline story on BBC news today is about China's thinking on North Korea, and the headline story in The Independent is about missiles in Iran, both of which are sourced from the Wikileaks cables and neither of which is remotely 'anti-US'. I'm sure there are numerous other examples. It seems that you are being deceived by the US government propaganda machine, which attempts to bias (US) public opinion against things it doesn't like by claiming that they are attacking the democratic beacon of justice and humanity, the great and powerful USA, land of the free etc etc.
Isn't spending money to invest in the future exactly what governments are supposed to do? The fact that it is unpopular is irrelevant. Someone has to think ahead and spend accordingly, otherwise in ten years time when the economy has sorted itself out naturally, people will be wondering why the US has fallen behind on science and all of their best university lecturers, researchers and high-tech engineering companies have left for greener pastures. They realise that it will cost more in the long term to entice those people and industries back over.
I think you're missing the point. You seem to have this image in your mind of some guys in white coats loading $6 billion dollar bills into a capsule and firing it off into space. In reality, at least from my experience as a physicist in contact with researchers involved in the LHC, this is far from the truth.
I would wager that a large percentage of the project costs go into the R&D ; the material costs are likely to be very small in comparison. A small part of the R&D money goes to the researchers, who then spend it on rent and food etc, i.e. boosting the local economy and creating jobs. The rest is likely spent on co-developing technology with high-tech industry, an area of the economy that seems to me to be a very sound investment considering the number of out of work graduates that are being churned out each year.
Publicity 101 for leveraging a strong market position:
....
1) Impose unnecessary and draconian restrictions
2) Lots of anger in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: publicity)
3) Remove unnecessary and draconian restrictions
4) Lots of praise in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: more publicity)
5)
6) Profits!
The energy required to make time stop completely for the entire universe would be, literally, astronomical.
Of course in relativity if you accelerate yourself to c with respect to the universe, the effect on the elapsed time between two events measured by each observer would be exactly the same as if you accelerated the whole universe up to c with respect to you. Why bother wasting the energy?
You do realise who Stephen Hawking is? Look him up on Wikipedia. He has more letters after his name than you do in yours, and almost certainly does more thinking in a day than many of us do in a week. Personally i'm glad that someone on this planet has decided to look past his own selfish interests and actually think about our future as a species. The funny thing is that as soon as something threatening does appear, people like you will be whining about why the government didn't pour more money into contingency planning.
Don't forget that the lessons learned building the first plant will make all subsequent plants cheaper, and more reliable. Money well spent I say.
Funny thing is, even John Hemming (BPI, Performing Right Society and the Musicians Union) seems to think this bill needs proper scrutiny: Commons Hansard
My uni has workshop sessions where the idea is to work together as a group to solve a set of exam-style questions. I TA in these sessions, and in fact the hardest thing is getting the students to work together rather than sitting there and solving the questions alone. These count as a small percentage to the final year grade.
IMO the only marks that go towards your final grade should be projects (long-term, different project per person) and exams. In both of these cases it is much more difficult to cheat.
I think you're being a bit unjust to the physics community. I agree that the observation of Hawking radiation from a simulated BEC is not an `observation' as such, but the model, which the paper states involves no gravitational physics concepts and has shown to be a valid model based on current data, shows the presence of Hawking radiation. The fact that it is demonstrated in a system that is considerably better understood than quantum gravity is important for the following reason: Although i am not a cosmologist, i believe that the event horizon is a prediction of general relativity (not quantum gravity) which, as a model, has very strong experimental support. Therefore showing that a BEC event horizon (which has the same properties) shows Hawking radiation is sound evidence that a black hole should also produce Hawking radiation.
We have several flagship projects, including the calculation of the neutral kaon mixing parameter called B_K http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0702/0702042v4.pdf which allows us to look at CP violation (a symmetry involving particle charge and parity which has been shown to be slightly broken); the non-perturbative renormalisation of some important operators http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.1061v1.pdf allowing them to be used in various calculations; and KL3 http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.5136v1.pdf which allows us to study some important quark flavour mixing parameters. We also have projects on baryon and meson physics, in which we can calculate particle masses from first principles.
For those who are interested about the method, ill give a little summary: We start from the Quantum Chromodynamics Path Integral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation which (in Euclidean space) describes a probability distribution for the particle fields (with particles described as essentially ripples in the fields). Normally this is expanded as a power series in some small coupling constants, but at low energies (the energies at which quarks form bound states as protons, neutrons, pions, kaons etc) this coupling is large and we can no longer do this expansion. Instead we sample the probability distribution using a Monte Carlo method on our supercomputer, which gives us a set of snapshots of the vacuum, and upon which we perform measurements.
A very sad story, my small violin is being played as i type.
However, most companies/organisations are having to adapt to the digital age, and most do it without too much complaint (with notable exceptions). Abusing the legal system because your company didn't have the foresight to predict the rise of the Internet is not a good way of dealing with things.
So in order to work as a farmer one must be an expert in microbiology and climate physics. Otherwise how would they know what research to fund? How would they be able to judge the integrity of the data?
Also, who is going to fund less practical research such as astrophysics and particle physics if not the government? These avenues of research are not going to be funded by joe blogs on the street caring only about gas prices and the housing market.
I know a lot of people working on LHC projects, and they seem to think its worthwhile. Discovering the Higgs, and thus completing the Standard Model, would alone make the thing worthwhile. And then there are all of the possible supersymmetric decay signatures which, if seen, would go a long way towards explaining some of the problems with the standard model (hierarchy problem, etc). I am a particle physicist, and thus i may be biased, but i consider that particle physics research (tied into the cosmology you mention) is the best avenue towards furthering our understanding of the universe(s).
Heck, with this you would have an internal combustion engine without even having to moderate the fuel input!
Superconductivity is (theorised to be) caused by the matter making a phase transition where two electrons become bound together by phonons (quanta of vibrational energy) in what are known as Cooper pairs. I dont know for sure but i imagine that most materials can do this, although the binding energy of the Cooper pair will vary from material to material, and hence the critical temperature. However the temperature at the core of a star is stupidly high and thus Cooper pairs will not form.