If this code of conduct is anywhere near sensible that practice would have to cease. This code of conduct will only have any real effect if the companies involved agree that human rights should take precedence over local law, which will most likely mean having to accept fines or closure of operations in some parts of the world. I somehow doubt that many will be prepared to do that.
The problem with that is that you have to know the aircraft's orientation. This is done with a gyroscope in a manned aircraft, but such a system would be somewhat costly for a model plane. To be honest, the prop is probably the greatest danger, so a throttle cut followed by a spin is the safest option.
That's actually not a bad idea. You'd want a very good failsafe system though (eg. pressure from flight acts to remove the parachute hatch parachute hatch, the only thing holding it in place being an electromagnet powered by the engine).
I appreciate how you can think that this would be the case, but I would disagree. I'm a pilot in the UK, and did my training near Manchester, which isn't exactly known for its clear weather, so this may be a worst case scenario, but an aircraft is not necessarilly an easy object to see on a slightly hazy day. Whether you're looking towards the sun or not can make things far worse.
You would need a relatively high resolution camera to be able to make out aircraft at any reasonable distance. The UAV would also require (assuming it is autonomous) software processing to identify objects as aircraft, and assertain information such as type and velocity. Also remember that aircraft often have a large number of sources of vibration, so backups of most systems would be wise. You would also have to devise a seperate system for interaction with air traffic control, who have a stressful enough job as it is.
What concerns me most, however, is the possibility of an engine failure. Civil aviation practically assumes that your engine will fail (you have to be able to glide clear of a built up area with an engine failure, and my instructor would always ask me during circuits "ok, where would you go if the engine failed right now?"). With a UAV, an engine failure will probably require it to act autonomously (straight line radio transmissions would be unreliable at low altittude, satellite relay would have some lag). This requires software that can identify the wind direction near the ground (not too hard), identify a suitable field for landing (would possibly need a colour camera), evaluate the risk to others (identity humans, livestock, buildings in the vicinity) and actually perform a landing in a field of unknown altittude and pitch. Whilst I'm prepared to believe software can be written to perform such a task, I would have concerns regarding its reliability. Actually, I would suggest that a better idea would be to bring the aircraft down into a low velocity 'crash' into a safe area, rather than trying to land it intact.
Regrettably, given the influence of business in modern government, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. The best we can do is attempt to ensure that we are responsible for as little money as possible making its way to such countries. Need to us AOL messenger service? Use a third party programme to avoid any advertising provided by AOL. Need software made by any of the above? Use an open source alternative. Or a pirated version. It's more moral than giving any money to then.
It doesn't take much to work out that, roughly speaking, a large reactor will be more energy efficient than a small one, for a similar design. The surface area to volume ratio decreases as 1 over x, x being some dimension of your reactor. Heat escapes from the plasma at a lower rate, so above some characteristic size you retain sufficient heat to sustain the reaction. That's not to say there cannot exist a smaller design which will work, but that this basic design is not feasible on small scales.
It is a fundamental principle of science that you can not prove a negative. Sorry, can't be done.
False. For instance, we can prove that you cannot simultaneously measure a particle's position and momentum to arbitray accuaracy, you cannot determine the direction of its angular momentum vector to within arbitrary precision. We can prove that an isolated system cannot change the velocity of its centre of mass, etc.
If I understand correctly he isn't really innovating in the sense that the experiment is new or anything. But presumably he's done it on a relatively tight budget, and it could get other kids interested in science. Wish I'd had the get up and go to try and build a fusion reactor when I was 17!
One would hope that large companies would consider close collaroration with the government of a country on the list something of a blemish on their character. However, I doubt this will be the case. What is needed is for consumers to start considering the ethics of those they purchase from. We need to give companies a choice - you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
There is a very fundamental difference between a blastocyst and a 9 month pregnancy in that the former does not have a brain, whereas the latter does.
Any human embryo is a human, just an underdeveloped one. We shouldn't play with that stuff. Each of us was at that stage at one point in our lives. Some of the greatest people that have ever existed had genetic problems... We shouldn't go around playing God.
The first sentence is debatable. I'm not sure when a biologist would begin to define something as "a human", but it would probably not be at this stage. Yes, we were all blastocysts once. We were also each an unfertilized egg at some stage as well. It is not usually considered a tragedy that an egg goes unfertilized and dies at the end of a woman's cycle. Some of the greatest people have indeed had genetic problems, however this research does not concern denying life to enbryos with such problems. Stem cell therapy is concerned with treating disorders in living people. It is distinct from selecting embryos based on desirable qualities.
So far, fetal stem cell research has not proven any real use... no real developments are apparent from it. Adult stem cell research on the other hand has all sorts of possibilities, and is an area that's been studied a lot more. Adult stem cell research is pretty much what we have so far, and it works. Why kill potential babies in order to do research that probably won't save any lives for any time in the near future.
Fetal stem cell research is at an early stage. There was a time only a few centuries ago when the same could have been said of electrical science (and there were people killed in the process). Science tends to be concerned with pure research first, and often a later time will arrive when that research can be translated into useful developments. It is unreasonable to expect stem cell research to have produced cures at this stage.
Adult stem cell therapies do indeed have potential to cure certain disorders, and I am all for research in this area. However fetal stem cells are far more versatile, and offer the possibilities of cures for a far greater number of such disorders. In response to you last sentence about "potential babies" I would refer you to what I said earlier. Every possible sperm-egg combination is a potential baby. By your definition, every unfertilized egg is a potential baby killed.
Another problem with fetal stem cell research is that it creates a need for egg donations.
There are currently proposals that would dramatically reduce the number of human eggs required for such research by removing all the DNA (except mitochondrial) from an egg of another animal, for instance cows, and replacing it with human DNA. Whilst there are issues with whether this will be sufficiently safe to use in treatments, it certainly avoids some ethical problems during the reseach stages.
Sorry, my mistake, the experiment was done at the start of this year and I didn't remember the details. I've now got my lab notes in front of me , and it was only really accurate to 4 significant figures, although I think the error was small enough that we recorded 5 figures. The experiment is done in the first year of the natural sciences tripos in Cambridge, I'm not sure if you can find details on line though. No, the pendulum was not simple, its moment of inertia had to be measured using it as a torsion pendulum first. However, I think I have to defer to your superior expertise in this area, I'm no longer doing physics, I'm in the maths tripos now.
This reminds me a little of a physics practical I did this year. It was supposed to be the first practical where we would get a decent accuracy, measuring g using a pendulum to about 6 significant figures.
We were also told at the end of the practical about far more accuarte ways of measuring g, and that a university in Germany several decades ago had used this regularly as experimental training for graduate students. However, when the experiment was performed at different times of the year, a small but definte increase in g was noticed during the winter. More accurate measurements showed a sudden spike near the start of winter, followed by a slow decrease until the summer.
Professors were baffled, until someone remembered that the lab in which the experiments were carried out was above a coal cellar used to store a huge quantity of coal for burning during the winter.
Well I would certainly feel that my privacy was being violated. My DNA is private, thank you very much, and the state most certainly does not have a right to the details of it. It would be nice to think that this is the sort of suggestion that would lose a politician his job, but I have a bad feeling that some will find it rather popular.
The mentally ill don't have the vote in the UK, on the grounds that they're incapable of absorbing a large amount of information and making a rational decision. The royal family are also unable to vote, I suspect for similar reasons.
They were suspended not expelled. It's true that the head teacher didn't particularly like the girl in question, however the school staff explicitly stated that she was removed because her haircut had been considered "inappropriate."
Hmm, I'm interested by your comment, as it's actually quite relevant to the UK at the moment. Are you suggesting that people should be given the right to vote at a younger age? There was discussion a short time ago in parliament about lowering the voting age to 16. I don't remember if it ever came to anything though. Personally I think 16 is too young to vote, but you can marry, join the armed forces, fly an aircraft solo and have to pay taxes by the time you're 16.
Don't be so sure they wouldn't try. You're correct about it being difficult to expell a genuinely disruptive pupil, however that doesn't stop staff paranoia regarding the net. We once got a letter sent round out school from the senior staff full of some crap about the internet and posting of comments considered embarassing to school officials, with a vague suggestion that the police could become involved and a reminder that libel was illegal. Nothing ever came of it that I know of, but they were still prepared to suggest the threat.
I think the problem here is power. During school hours a student is of course a student has to be expected to obey school rules, conform to standards of behaviour, respect staff etc. Unfortunately, the teachers at this school appear to have got it into their heads that this includes complete control over the student's communications. I remember at my old highschool our headteacher once suspended a pupil for having a mohican haircut, despite the school's published unifrom code stating nothing about haircuts. When parents complained she didn't seem to understand why anyone objected to her making up and enforcing rules at will.
The student should be commended for what he did. If he is genuinely being "threatened" and "bullied" by his school then he not only had a right but something of a duty to inform others of that, and yes, he should be in court, but as a plaintiff, not a defendant.
Yes they are, they have rotational and reflective symmetries, they just aren't axially symmetric, which is the odd part, as the system is. Anyone here with a decent knowledge of dynamics?
Think of it as a sum of infintely many infitesimal terms. You'd normally use it to find the area under curves, masses of bodies etc. Basically, it's absolutely essential for electronics (or indeed any form of engineering).
Management -never- seem to know what the hell they're doing. Companies seem to make the constant mistake of believing that you can manage something you know nothing about. Take the following example. I know a guy who used to work in computing and electrical engineering, in around the 60s, 70s, so pretty primitive stuff. Apparently at the time it was common to approximate integrals electronically by building up a charge on a capacitor over some time, representing the range of the integral, with the current behaving as the function to be integrated. He had to try and explain this concept to a member of senior management one day. The first question he was ask was "what the hell's an integral?".
It would hand the FCC the power to set standards and regulate digital and satellite radio receivers, and RIAA Chairman Mitch Bainwol says it strikes "a balance that's good for the music, good for the fans, and good for business.
No, lad. You want to transmit an audio signal, you accept that I'm gonna do whatever I damn well like when I recieve it. Is it just me, or does anyone else think the RIAA is becoming a bit "precious"?
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If this code of conduct is anywhere near sensible that practice would have to cease. This code of conduct will only have any real effect if the companies involved agree that human rights should take precedence over local law, which will most likely mean having to accept fines or closure of operations in some parts of the world. I somehow doubt that many will be prepared to do that.
The problem with that is that you have to know the aircraft's orientation. This is done with a gyroscope in a manned aircraft, but such a system would be somewhat costly for a model plane. To be honest, the prop is probably the greatest danger, so a throttle cut followed by a spin is the safest option.
That's actually not a bad idea. You'd want a very good failsafe system though (eg. pressure from flight acts to remove the parachute hatch parachute hatch, the only thing holding it in place being an electromagnet powered by the engine).
I appreciate how you can think that this would be the case, but I would disagree. I'm a pilot in the UK, and did my training near Manchester, which isn't exactly known for its clear weather, so this may be a worst case scenario, but an aircraft is not necessarilly an easy object to see on a slightly hazy day. Whether you're looking towards the sun or not can make things far worse.
You would need a relatively high resolution camera to be able to make out aircraft at any reasonable distance. The UAV would also require (assuming it is autonomous) software processing to identify objects as aircraft, and assertain information such as type and velocity. Also remember that aircraft often have a large number of sources of vibration, so backups of most systems would be wise. You would also have to devise a seperate system for interaction with air traffic control, who have a stressful enough job as it is.
What concerns me most, however, is the possibility of an engine failure. Civil aviation practically assumes that your engine will fail (you have to be able to glide clear of a built up area with an engine failure, and my instructor would always ask me during circuits "ok, where would you go if the engine failed right now?"). With a UAV, an engine failure will probably require it to act autonomously (straight line radio transmissions would be unreliable at low altittude, satellite relay would have some lag). This requires software that can identify the wind direction near the ground (not too hard), identify a suitable field for landing (would possibly need a colour camera), evaluate the risk to others (identity humans, livestock, buildings in the vicinity) and actually perform a landing in a field of unknown altittude and pitch. Whilst I'm prepared to believe software can be written to perform such a task, I would have concerns regarding its reliability. Actually, I would suggest that a better idea would be to bring the aircraft down into a low velocity 'crash' into a safe area, rather than trying to land it intact.
Regrettably, given the influence of business in modern government, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. The best we can do is attempt to ensure that we are responsible for as little money as possible making its way to such countries. Need to us AOL messenger service? Use a third party programme to avoid any advertising provided by AOL. Need software made by any of the above? Use an open source alternative. Or a pirated version. It's more moral than giving any money to then.
It doesn't take much to work out that, roughly speaking, a large reactor will be more energy efficient than a small one, for a similar design. The surface area to volume ratio decreases as 1 over x, x being some dimension of your reactor. Heat escapes from the plasma at a lower rate, so above some characteristic size you retain sufficient heat to sustain the reaction. That's not to say there cannot exist a smaller design which will work, but that this basic design is not feasible on small scales.
False. For instance, we can prove that you cannot simultaneously measure a particle's position and momentum to arbitray accuaracy, you cannot determine the direction of its angular momentum vector to within arbitrary precision. We can prove that an isolated system cannot change the velocity of its centre of mass, etc.
If I understand correctly he isn't really innovating in the sense that the experiment is new or anything. But presumably he's done it on a relatively tight budget, and it could get other kids interested in science. Wish I'd had the get up and go to try and build a fusion reactor when I was 17!
That really is rather vague. My family are able to "impair the operation of any computer system" just by being left alone with it for 10 minutes.
One would hope that large companies would consider close collaroration with the government of a country on the list something of a blemish on their character. However, I doubt this will be the case. What is needed is for consumers to start considering the ethics of those they purchase from. We need to give companies a choice - you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
The first sentence is debatable. I'm not sure when a biologist would begin to define something as "a human", but it would probably not be at this stage. Yes, we were all blastocysts once. We were also each an unfertilized egg at some stage as well. It is not usually considered a tragedy that an egg goes unfertilized and dies at the end of a woman's cycle. Some of the greatest people have indeed had genetic problems, however this research does not concern denying life to enbryos with such problems. Stem cell therapy is concerned with treating disorders in living people. It is distinct from selecting embryos based on desirable qualities.
Fetal stem cell research is at an early stage. There was a time only a few centuries ago when the same could have been said of electrical science (and there were people killed in the process). Science tends to be concerned with pure research first, and often a later time will arrive when that research can be translated into useful developments. It is unreasonable to expect stem cell research to have produced cures at this stage.
Adult stem cell therapies do indeed have potential to cure certain disorders, and I am all for research in this area. However fetal stem cells are far more versatile, and offer the possibilities of cures for a far greater number of such disorders. In response to you last sentence about "potential babies" I would refer you to what I said earlier. Every possible sperm-egg combination is a potential baby. By your definition, every unfertilized egg is a potential baby killed.
There are currently proposals that would dramatically reduce the number of human eggs required for such research by removing all the DNA (except mitochondrial) from an egg of another animal, for instance cows, and replacing it with human DNA. Whilst there are issues with whether this will be sufficiently safe to use in treatments, it certainly avoids some ethical problems during the reseach stages.
Sorry, my mistake, the experiment was done at the start of this year and I didn't remember the details. I've now got my lab notes in front of me , and it was only really accurate to 4 significant figures, although I think the error was small enough that we recorded 5 figures. The experiment is done in the first year of the natural sciences tripos in Cambridge, I'm not sure if you can find details on line though. No, the pendulum was not simple, its moment of inertia had to be measured using it as a torsion pendulum first. However, I think I have to defer to your superior expertise in this area, I'm no longer doing physics, I'm in the maths tripos now.
You don't need uniform density. Only spherical symmetry.
This reminds me a little of a physics practical I did this year. It was supposed to be the first practical where we would get a decent accuracy, measuring g using a pendulum to about 6 significant figures.
We were also told at the end of the practical about far more accuarte ways of measuring g, and that a university in Germany several decades ago had used this regularly as experimental training for graduate students. However, when the experiment was performed at different times of the year, a small but definte increase in g was noticed during the winter. More accurate measurements showed a sudden spike near the start of winter, followed by a slow decrease until the summer.
Professors were baffled, until someone remembered that the lab in which the experiments were carried out was above a coal cellar used to store a huge quantity of coal for burning during the winter.
Well I would certainly feel that my privacy was being violated. My DNA is private, thank you very much, and the state most certainly does not have a right to the details of it. It would be nice to think that this is the sort of suggestion that would lose a politician his job, but I have a bad feeling that some will find it rather popular.
Is this not exactly the sort of problem public key cryptography is well-suited to combatting?
The mentally ill don't have the vote in the UK, on the grounds that they're incapable of absorbing a large amount of information and making a rational decision. The royal family are also unable to vote, I suspect for similar reasons.
They were suspended not expelled. It's true that the head teacher didn't particularly like the girl in question, however the school staff explicitly stated that she was removed because her haircut had been considered "inappropriate."
Hmm, I'm interested by your comment, as it's actually quite relevant to the UK at the moment. Are you suggesting that people should be given the right to vote at a younger age? There was discussion a short time ago in parliament about lowering the voting age to 16. I don't remember if it ever came to anything though. Personally I think 16 is too young to vote, but you can marry, join the armed forces, fly an aircraft solo and have to pay taxes by the time you're 16.
Don't be so sure they wouldn't try. You're correct about it being difficult to expell a genuinely disruptive pupil, however that doesn't stop staff paranoia regarding the net. We once got a letter sent round out school from the senior staff full of some crap about the internet and posting of comments considered embarassing to school officials, with a vague suggestion that the police could become involved and a reminder that libel was illegal. Nothing ever came of it that I know of, but they were still prepared to suggest the threat.
I think the problem here is power. During school hours a student is of course a student has to be expected to obey school rules, conform to standards of behaviour, respect staff etc. Unfortunately, the teachers at this school appear to have got it into their heads that this includes complete control over the student's communications. I remember at my old highschool our headteacher once suspended a pupil for having a mohican haircut, despite the school's published unifrom code stating nothing about haircuts. When parents complained she didn't seem to understand why anyone objected to her making up and enforcing rules at will.
The student should be commended for what he did. If he is genuinely being "threatened" and "bullied" by his school then he not only had a right but something of a duty to inform others of that, and yes, he should be in court, but as a plaintiff, not a defendant.
Yes they are, they have rotational and reflective symmetries, they just aren't axially symmetric, which is the odd part, as the system is. Anyone here with a decent knowledge of dynamics?
Think of it as a sum of infintely many infitesimal terms. You'd normally use it to find the area under curves, masses of bodies etc. Basically, it's absolutely essential for electronics (or indeed any form of engineering).
Management -never- seem to know what the hell they're doing. Companies seem to make the constant mistake of believing that you can manage something you know nothing about. Take the following example. I know a guy who used to work in computing and electrical engineering, in around the 60s, 70s, so pretty primitive stuff. Apparently at the time it was common to approximate integrals electronically by building up a charge on a capacitor over some time, representing the range of the integral, with the current behaving as the function to be integrated. He had to try and explain this concept to a member of senior management one day. The first question he was ask was "what the hell's an integral?".
Hehe, yey, Facebook! Although if you're not at Oxbridge, the chance of your uni in the UK being on it are slim.
It would hand the FCC the power to set standards and regulate digital and satellite radio receivers, and RIAA Chairman Mitch Bainwol says it strikes "a balance that's good for the music, good for the fans, and good for business.
No, lad. You want to transmit an audio signal, you accept that I'm gonna do whatever I damn well like when I recieve it. Is it just me, or does anyone else think the RIAA is becoming a bit "precious"?