Jumping on someone to stop battery is, itself, battery. So all one of these drunk little hooligans needed to do was tell the cop they wanted to press charges.
Not all battery is unjustified though. Washington state law provides the use of force to prevent force, but only as long as that force is not an escalation of force. Thus, I can commit battery on you to keep you from committing battery on another person (so I can use it to prevent a crime) but I cannot commit battery with a weapon (mace/pepper spray) to keep you from committing unarmed battery on another person. That would be an escalation of force.
Also, the force needs to be no more than that necessary to stop the crime from occurring. (Namely, holding someone back is technically battery, but we all accept that it is reasonable application of force to stop someone from committing a serious crime.)
While I'm kind of down with Phoenix Jones, because the SPD really doesn't care about or care to respond to "petty" crime, he needs to have some legal training to understand why he cannot walk into a fight with pepper spray to break it up, and what his proper procedure should be to ensure he is operating within the law.
This prosecutor sounds more like he was trying to enforce Apple Justice than Real Justice. I'd like to see an investigation of his bank accounts for any recent large deposits.
Note to Apple: If you want to keep your secrets, keep them on your campus and don't let them out into the Real World.
Yeah, the prosecutor was totally acting as a de facto Apple corporate officer. The DA would have no reason to otherwise prosecute someone who stole a ~$500 piece of property, and then knowing that he is not the legitimate owner, sold it to another person for $5000... I mean, come on, it's obvious that there is no social good to be done by pursuing such a case.
When you maintain control over something that is not your property and you make it your property with no intent to return it to the owner, that is a crime, and it's called "conversion". It's like embezzlement, but without money - you've been trusted with something and you misappropriated it. The fact that he then SOLD the goods that were unlawfully converted constitutes a second crime, the sale of stolen property.
The difference is in subject-matter jurisdiction. No DA in his right mind, and no court in its right mind(s) would pursue criminal charges over theft of $.99 french fries. An $800 electronic device that was illegally trafficked for $5000 is a different story. It's illegal all the same but subject-matter jurisdiction also has elements of common sense.
I was in court when a guy was being charged with a misdemeanor of theft for shoplifting a 99 cent candy bar... the courts will pursue it, if the DAs choose pursue it. The courts don't really have the same prosecutorial discretion that the DAs have, namely, a judge can't just be all "well, I don't think a crime was committed here, so we're not going to have this trial."
I also don't really get how a criminal court in full competence to hear a misdemeanor theft case would lack subject matter jurisdiction because the value of the theft was only 99 cents. Misdemeanor theft is misdemeanor theft is misdemeanor theft. It's up to the DA and his prosecutorial discretion to decide its not worth the court's time... but that doesn't take the case out of the subject matter jurisdiction of the court.
"Conversion is like embezzlement but without money."... wha? Embezzlement isn't just about money either. Embezzlement is a quirk of common law, whereby a bank teller got out of a criminal theft charge by arguing that the money was given to them freely and without coercion, and thus no theft. Embezzlement is a criminal offense designed to close that loophole. (It's stealing anything when no actual theft is involved.) Conversion however is a civil tort, and can be brought in parallel to a theft charge, or if a theft charge fails to find a guilty verdict. (Analogy: the various unlawful homicides is to wrongful death, as theft is to conversion.)
IANAL, but what you're talking about is just a little too off... it honestly sounds like something I would right up... namely, close to the facts, but ill-researched.
On the other hand, there may be a principle that a deed falls under the jurisdiction of the place where it took effect. If he had stolen the camera from his fellow astronaut on the moon, that would have happened on the moon and not be under US jurisdiction. Same as the US can't throw you into jail if you steal jewellery in Germany and take it into the USA (as long as you do everything strictly by the book when you import the stolen goods). Even if you stole from an American. But it may be that he was legally allowed to bring the camera back to earth, but was obliged to hand it back to the NASA. In that case, the action would have happened on earth.
Just because you leave the US, does not mean that the US has let go of all jurisdiction over you. The US federal law has a provision that having sex with a person who is underage (specific age left as problem for reader) is a crime, even if it is outside of US jurisdiction. "How can they do that?" Well, as a US citizen, it's likely that you will come back to the US at some point. You then return to US jurisdiction, and they prosecute you for the crime. "But the crime didn't happen in the US" doesn't matter, you're a US citizen, so they continue to exert extraterritorial jurisdiction over you.
It is however true that most US federal crimes do not apply when you're extraterritorial, but it is by no means a guarantee.
How much of that altitude is due to ice? I seem to remember that the Antarctic ice sheet is 2 miles thick in parts, but since that's already more than 10,000 feet, is the antarctic plains lowlands?
Um.... I don't know... I just read her blog post about being acclimated to the 10k-12k range, and then went to wikipedia to back it up. I honestly have no idea what the geographic features of an ice-free Antarctica would be...
Yeah, I see people talking about "surprise surprise, the Germans are doing this nasty shit", and I'm like, uh... they're not going to get away with it. The US government has done some outright horrible crap as well, but no one jumps on their case for NSA warrant-less wiretaps (just as bad as this) because they were never ruled by a fascist government.
The fact is that Germany has learned its lesson well, and the German people aren't going to just lay down and take this. If anything there is a strong reaction of: "Never again!" in the German people.
I certainly expect, like you, that this will have a damning effect upon anyone who was involved. The German people won't let this go, and the outrage will hopefully push down the conservatives from power.
Apparently, according to her own words, Renee is already acclimated at about 10,000 feet. Wikipedia confirms that Amundsen-Scott station is at an altitude of 9,301 feet.
For that kind of scale, I think turning it into a package system and using something like OBS could help. And, of course, proper architecture management could help not to recompile the world every time you change something that's supposed to be an internal detail of some subsystem.
Couldn't have used OBS, the company was deathly afraid of using GPL software that was not pre-approved, and the legal team was highly unlikely to approve any new GPL programs. (Even getting some Perl modules was like pulling teeth.) Standing orders were "you can't even look at GPL code," out of fear that a developer might "taint" themselves. Also, seems like OBS does not support the version control that the company was using. Not to mention the amount of time necessary to rewrite everything to support a different build system would make it near impossible... or at least Herculean, and there was not a chance in hell that the company was going to pay for a complete rewrite.
The build process did split into various architectures, and then different locales, and each was processed by a distributed build farm, so that much was covered. Beyond that, it was already working as fine-grained as it really could.
As for "internal detail of some subsystem", the original design of the software (some 10 years ago) has crufted up the process so that without a total rewrite of the build process, even the newer versions were destined to be treated as a nearly monolithic block of code. (There were subsystems, but they exported symbols that then other internal processes of other subsystems could utilize directly, thus the unknown quality of dependencies.)
Trust me, if there were a better way to do it, we would have done it, but then there was massive amounts of inertia in the project, and since we were only support of the older versions, we had to deal with all the hacks and workarounds thrown into the build process to ship the project, and there wasn't a chance in heck that we would be able to justify spending all our time reworking the entire build process. (I rewrote big parts of it, or rather reorganized it, and even that was like pulling teeth to get worked through.)
And before someone suggests that there would have been a better way to handle things, no. It was a 14 hour build time
Either you used bad tools, or your project was improperly designed, or both. Let me guess: C++ with everything templated to Nth degree? Rebuild-the-world project with not much modularization or intelligence in the build system?
No, it wasn't anything like that. Although we did have to build everything from scratch every time because we didn't have any sort of dependency information in order to be able to perform incremental builds, the project was simply just that massive. I'll add that this 14 hour build process was split over about 10 machines, and you'll start getting an idea of scale.
So we can laugh at this judge who probably looks pretty stupid right now, making rules for what he so clearly does not understand, but the deeper problems it brings up are neither easy to solve nor limited to Belgium.
... Why would we make fun of the judge? He most likely didn't write the order, the moving party usually drafts an order and presents it to the judge, who then signs it.
Because if you bring something to me that is fatally flawed and cannot possibly fulfill its stated purpose, I won't sign it?
You might or might not agree with that, but it isn't exactly difficult to discern.
It's not his job to read the order and ensure that the order is not fatally flawed. Why? Because if it is fatally flawed, you're only hurting yourself. It's YOUR responsibility to ensure that your purposed orders are going to do what you want them to do. It's not the judge's place (usually) to hand-hold you and make sure you're getting what you want.
I work at a large software company too, but I decided that my work life is not so miserable yet that I need to check my smartphone every time an email comes into my inbox.
Awesome for you... but I was part of a build team. When we were the builder on duty, we had to work pretty much 24-hours a day to ensure that our build was still running, and hadn't hit any snags. I remember waking up 2 or 3 times a night to check that the build was still running smoothly, usually just to find out that something was broken, and needed a half hour of work to fix.
And before someone suggests that there would have been a better way to handle things, no. It was a 14 hour build time, and that was on top-of-the-line hardware, and after I had cut out a ton of unnecessary dependencies in the build process, so that it would actually be busy more often, and thus take less time over all.
Sometimes it is your job to be a "Pavlovian dog" to your email.
Email Noise is almost as bad as spam. All those automated emails do no "communicating" at all, even though that is what they are supposed to do.
eh... this particular email noise was more like a running log, and actually when I was in charge of the build, it was nice to receive those messages (because it would email you if it hit a build break). Sure most of the time I didn't want to see the emails, but having them as a record helped significantly.
Burn out is really the problem, that a lot of folks don't consider when it comes to prodigies. At some point they all hit a point where the abilities they had aren't sufficient to keep moving on to bigger challenges, if they haven't been provided with the same tools that the rest use to organize and get things done, that's where it sits.
A normal school is perfectly fine, provided that the school is teaching the organizational skills necessary to manage work, and that the student isn't required to do everything super slow just because the rest of the class is.
I was personally, fortunate enough not to get that fast tracked, but I was in college by 16 and even with time off and screwing around graduated by 22. Which isn't bad considering that I was deliberately dragging it out and didn't know what I wanted and took time off in the middle to do other things.
The other bit there, is that just because they're intellectually advanced doesn't mean that they should be permitted to completely waste their childhoods without a bit of screwing around and goofing off. In the long run they'll need to have something that isn't related to their primary work, otherwise there's much less opportunity to cope with the inevitable burn out that comes later on.
The spot on here is allowing him to go at his own pace. I was intentionally slowed down in math growing up, when I was going through school, in the 5th grade, I used an 8th grade math book on independent study. Then, come the 6th grade and moved up to middle school, they wanted to put me into a 6th grade math book, I refused, and kicked and screamed until I finally got placed in a 7th grade enriched course. (Although enriched courses are advanced, they do not seem to exceed the next grade. We were shown scientific notation only for multiplication and division, even though I had done addition and subtraction as well in the 8th grade normal book.) So, I paid my dues, and was the best performing student in the class, that means I get to go with the rest of the top students in that class into Pre-Algebra the next year, right? Nope. I got placed in 8th grade enriched. The teacher of that class said to us that there was no reason why we shouldn't be placed immediately into a gifted level Geometry class in High School the next year, even the lowest performing students. Guess what I got? Pre-Algebra. Finally, into High School, they put me in honors Geometry, where I still performed the best of any student on all of the tests, but surprise surprise, I never did my homework. (I was the only person I know of to stay in an honors course with a C, because they knew dropping me lower yet, would have just made me perform worse.)
So, anyways, bit of a ramble of my story there, but to put it in context, child genius at least, but I never liked the term "prodigy". But held back so much that I became lazy. Starting at the 5th grade, I didn't do any new math at all until the 9th grade... why bother learning how to study or work hard... I can pass all my courses nearly in my sleep. Truly in terms of difficulty, because of the slow learning curve I approached all the new maths at, starting at the 5th grade, I didn't take another math class that made me break a sweat until I took Combinatorics my final semester of college.
So, push the kid at least a little bit, and do everything you can to present at least nominal challenges in front of him, otherwise you'll end up with a child who is lazy and has subpar work ethic.
When I was working for a Particularly Large Software Company, I received a large number of automated emails every day from automated build processes. These emails were automatically filed into a special folder, so that they didn't clutter my inbox, and ping my smart phone every single time I got one of them. This followed through later for "Out of Office" emails, and a few others.
Of course, as such, the only reason why I had folders was to keep a particular set of emails from pinging my smart phone, and bugging me all day, every day constantly with email build progress updates.
So we can laugh at this judge who probably looks pretty stupid right now, making rules for what he so clearly does not understand, but the deeper problems it brings up are neither easy to solve nor limited to Belgium.
... Why would we make fun of the judge? He most likely didn't write the order, the moving party usually drafts an order and presents it to the judge, who then signs it.
Well, if you formulate relativity properly in 4 dimensions, nowhere does a "relativistic mass", a "longitudinal mass" or a "transversal mass" show up. Indeed, the relation between 4-velocity and 4-momentum is p=mu, where p is the 4-momentum, u is the 4-velocity and m is the Lorentz-invariant "rest" mass.
Huh, I hadn't thought about it that way yet. It can be difficult to fully scrape the "time is different than space" misconception off the bottom of the skillet...
Well, I will grant you that the notion of "rest mass" is as odd a notion as distinguishing between spacial and temporal dimensions. But the distinction is there (even if only by archaic categorization).
From what I was reading there is a distinction made between rest mass and relativistic mass. Rest mass being a hypothetical value that represents the minimum mass that a particle could possibly have, while everything else in reality deals with the relativistic mass.
But I take all your criticism to heart, you're absolutely right, but the pedant in me still notes that rest mass is a distinct category from "relativistic" mass, which sure varies transverse vs. longitudinal, but then both of those are distinct categories of relativistic mass.... What can I say? Pedants are overly obsessed with details...
Are they using some other measurement of "speed" that isn't distance / time? It seems that slowing time down and going the same "speed" has the same net effect as going faster than the speed of light.
To your first question,... yes, kind of. But to point, the article apparently suggests that they made an error in measuring the amount of time that the particles traveled the distance. This isn't much different than my acknowledgement that a 60 ns error could be accounted for by an ~60 foot discrepancy in the distance measurement. (Note: when I say "measurement" here, I'm really meaning more "calculation"... at these exacting standards measurement alone is insufficient, you need to make multiple measurements, and then produce a statistical model explaining your measurement, and the likely error rate as the statistical aberrations.)
Slashdot Mirror
Jumping on someone to stop battery is, itself, battery. So all one of these drunk little hooligans needed to do was tell the cop they wanted to press charges.
Not all battery is unjustified though. Washington state law provides the use of force to prevent force, but only as long as that force is not an escalation of force. Thus, I can commit battery on you to keep you from committing battery on another person (so I can use it to prevent a crime) but I cannot commit battery with a weapon (mace/pepper spray) to keep you from committing unarmed battery on another person. That would be an escalation of force.
Also, the force needs to be no more than that necessary to stop the crime from occurring. (Namely, holding someone back is technically battery, but we all accept that it is reasonable application of force to stop someone from committing a serious crime.)
While I'm kind of down with Phoenix Jones, because the SPD really doesn't care about or care to respond to "petty" crime, he needs to have some legal training to understand why he cannot walk into a fight with pepper spray to break it up, and what his proper procedure should be to ensure he is operating within the law.
This prosecutor sounds more like he was trying to enforce Apple Justice than Real Justice. I'd like to see an investigation of his bank accounts for any recent large deposits.
Note to Apple: If you want to keep your secrets, keep them on your campus and don't let them out into the Real World.
Yeah, the prosecutor was totally acting as a de facto Apple corporate officer. The DA would have no reason to otherwise prosecute someone who stole a ~$500 piece of property, and then knowing that he is not the legitimate owner, sold it to another person for $5000... I mean, come on, it's obvious that there is no social good to be done by pursuing such a case.
When you maintain control over something that is not your property and you make it your property with no intent to return it to the owner, that is a crime, and it's called "conversion". It's like embezzlement, but without money - you've been trusted with something and you misappropriated it. The fact that he then SOLD the goods that were unlawfully converted constitutes a second crime, the sale of stolen property.
CONVERSION IS NOT A CRIME. It is a civil tort.
The criminal counterpart to conversion is THEFT.
The difference is in subject-matter jurisdiction. No DA in his right mind, and no court in its right mind(s) would pursue criminal charges over theft of $.99 french fries. An $800 electronic device that was illegally trafficked for $5000 is a different story. It's illegal all the same but subject-matter jurisdiction also has elements of common sense.
I was in court when a guy was being charged with a misdemeanor of theft for shoplifting a 99 cent candy bar... the courts will pursue it, if the DAs choose pursue it. The courts don't really have the same prosecutorial discretion that the DAs have, namely, a judge can't just be all "well, I don't think a crime was committed here, so we're not going to have this trial."
I also don't really get how a criminal court in full competence to hear a misdemeanor theft case would lack subject matter jurisdiction because the value of the theft was only 99 cents. Misdemeanor theft is misdemeanor theft is misdemeanor theft. It's up to the DA and his prosecutorial discretion to decide its not worth the court's time... but that doesn't take the case out of the subject matter jurisdiction of the court.
"Conversion is like embezzlement but without money." ... wha? Embezzlement isn't just about money either. Embezzlement is a quirk of common law, whereby a bank teller got out of a criminal theft charge by arguing that the money was given to them freely and without coercion, and thus no theft. Embezzlement is a criminal offense designed to close that loophole. (It's stealing anything when no actual theft is involved.) Conversion however is a civil tort, and can be brought in parallel to a theft charge, or if a theft charge fails to find a guilty verdict. (Analogy: the various unlawful homicides is to wrongful death, as theft is to conversion.)
IANAL, but what you're talking about is just a little too off... it honestly sounds like something I would right up... namely, close to the facts, but ill-researched.
*WOOSH!*
I bet he also believes the moon landings were faked!
On the other hand, there may be a principle that a deed falls under the jurisdiction of the place where it took effect. If he had stolen the camera from his fellow astronaut on the moon, that would have happened on the moon and not be under US jurisdiction. Same as the US can't throw you into jail if you steal jewellery in Germany and take it into the USA (as long as you do everything strictly by the book when you import the stolen goods). Even if you stole from an American. But it may be that he was legally allowed to bring the camera back to earth, but was obliged to hand it back to the NASA. In that case, the action would have happened on earth.
Just because you leave the US, does not mean that the US has let go of all jurisdiction over you. The US federal law has a provision that having sex with a person who is underage (specific age left as problem for reader) is a crime, even if it is outside of US jurisdiction. "How can they do that?" Well, as a US citizen, it's likely that you will come back to the US at some point. You then return to US jurisdiction, and they prosecute you for the crime. "But the crime didn't happen in the US" doesn't matter, you're a US citizen, so they continue to exert extraterritorial jurisdiction over you.
It is however true that most US federal crimes do not apply when you're extraterritorial, but it is by no means a guarantee.
How much of that altitude is due to ice? I seem to remember that the Antarctic ice sheet is 2 miles thick in parts, but since that's already more than 10,000 feet, is the antarctic plains lowlands?
Um.... I don't know... I just read her blog post about being acclimated to the 10k-12k range, and then went to wikipedia to back it up. I honestly have no idea what the geographic features of an ice-free Antarctica would be...
Yeah, I see people talking about "surprise surprise, the Germans are doing this nasty shit", and I'm like, uh... they're not going to get away with it. The US government has done some outright horrible crap as well, but no one jumps on their case for NSA warrant-less wiretaps (just as bad as this) because they were never ruled by a fascist government.
The fact is that Germany has learned its lesson well, and the German people aren't going to just lay down and take this. If anything there is a strong reaction of: "Never again!" in the German people.
I certainly expect, like you, that this will have a damning effect upon anyone who was involved. The German people won't let this go, and the outrage will hopefully push down the conservatives from power.
Apparently, according to her own words, Renee is already acclimated at about 10,000 feet. Wikipedia confirms that Amundsen-Scott station is at an altitude of 9,301 feet.
For that kind of scale, I think turning it into a package system and using something like OBS could help. And, of course, proper architecture management could help not to recompile the world every time you change something that's supposed to be an internal detail of some subsystem.
Couldn't have used OBS, the company was deathly afraid of using GPL software that was not pre-approved, and the legal team was highly unlikely to approve any new GPL programs. (Even getting some Perl modules was like pulling teeth.) Standing orders were "you can't even look at GPL code," out of fear that a developer might "taint" themselves. Also, seems like OBS does not support the version control that the company was using. Not to mention the amount of time necessary to rewrite everything to support a different build system would make it near impossible... or at least Herculean, and there was not a chance in hell that the company was going to pay for a complete rewrite.
The build process did split into various architectures, and then different locales, and each was processed by a distributed build farm, so that much was covered. Beyond that, it was already working as fine-grained as it really could.
As for "internal detail of some subsystem", the original design of the software (some 10 years ago) has crufted up the process so that without a total rewrite of the build process, even the newer versions were destined to be treated as a nearly monolithic block of code. (There were subsystems, but they exported symbols that then other internal processes of other subsystems could utilize directly, thus the unknown quality of dependencies.)
Trust me, if there were a better way to do it, we would have done it, but then there was massive amounts of inertia in the project, and since we were only support of the older versions, we had to deal with all the hacks and workarounds thrown into the build process to ship the project, and there wasn't a chance in heck that we would be able to justify spending all our time reworking the entire build process. (I rewrote big parts of it, or rather reorganized it, and even that was like pulling teeth to get worked through.)
And before someone suggests that there would have been a better way to handle things, no. It was a 14 hour build time
Either you used bad tools, or your project was improperly designed, or both. Let me guess: C++ with everything templated to Nth degree? Rebuild-the-world project with not much modularization or intelligence in the build system?
No, it wasn't anything like that. Although we did have to build everything from scratch every time because we didn't have any sort of dependency information in order to be able to perform incremental builds, the project was simply just that massive. I'll add that this 14 hour build process was split over about 10 machines, and you'll start getting an idea of scale.
So we can laugh at this judge who probably looks pretty stupid right now, making rules for what he so clearly does not understand, but the deeper problems it brings up are neither easy to solve nor limited to Belgium.
... Why would we make fun of the judge? He most likely didn't write the order, the moving party usually drafts an order and presents it to the judge, who then signs it.
Because if you bring something to me that is fatally flawed and cannot possibly fulfill its stated purpose, I won't sign it?
You might or might not agree with that, but it isn't exactly difficult to discern.
It's not his job to read the order and ensure that the order is not fatally flawed. Why? Because if it is fatally flawed, you're only hurting yourself. It's YOUR responsibility to ensure that your purposed orders are going to do what you want them to do. It's not the judge's place (usually) to hand-hold you and make sure you're getting what you want.
I work at a large software company too, but I decided that my work life is not so miserable yet that I need to check my smartphone every time an email comes into my inbox.
Awesome for you... but I was part of a build team. When we were the builder on duty, we had to work pretty much 24-hours a day to ensure that our build was still running, and hadn't hit any snags. I remember waking up 2 or 3 times a night to check that the build was still running smoothly, usually just to find out that something was broken, and needed a half hour of work to fix.
And before someone suggests that there would have been a better way to handle things, no. It was a 14 hour build time, and that was on top-of-the-line hardware, and after I had cut out a ton of unnecessary dependencies in the build process, so that it would actually be busy more often, and thus take less time over all.
Sometimes it is your job to be a "Pavlovian dog" to your email.
Email Noise is almost as bad as spam. All those automated emails do no "communicating" at all, even though that is what they are supposed to do.
eh... this particular email noise was more like a running log, and actually when I was in charge of the build, it was nice to receive those messages (because it would email you if it hit a build break). Sure most of the time I didn't want to see the emails, but having them as a record helped significantly.
Cheap and effective counter to bad PR is worse PR that goes away!
Ah... the New Coke theory... I've heard much of this theory before. :)
*WOOSH!*
Please reference Good Will Hunting.
Burn out is really the problem, that a lot of folks don't consider when it comes to prodigies. At some point they all hit a point where the abilities they had aren't sufficient to keep moving on to bigger challenges, if they haven't been provided with the same tools that the rest use to organize and get things done, that's where it sits.
A normal school is perfectly fine, provided that the school is teaching the organizational skills necessary to manage work, and that the student isn't required to do everything super slow just because the rest of the class is.
I was personally, fortunate enough not to get that fast tracked, but I was in college by 16 and even with time off and screwing around graduated by 22. Which isn't bad considering that I was deliberately dragging it out and didn't know what I wanted and took time off in the middle to do other things.
The other bit there, is that just because they're intellectually advanced doesn't mean that they should be permitted to completely waste their childhoods without a bit of screwing around and goofing off. In the long run they'll need to have something that isn't related to their primary work, otherwise there's much less opportunity to cope with the inevitable burn out that comes later on.
The spot on here is allowing him to go at his own pace. I was intentionally slowed down in math growing up, when I was going through school, in the 5th grade, I used an 8th grade math book on independent study. Then, come the 6th grade and moved up to middle school, they wanted to put me into a 6th grade math book, I refused, and kicked and screamed until I finally got placed in a 7th grade enriched course. (Although enriched courses are advanced, they do not seem to exceed the next grade. We were shown scientific notation only for multiplication and division, even though I had done addition and subtraction as well in the 8th grade normal book.) So, I paid my dues, and was the best performing student in the class, that means I get to go with the rest of the top students in that class into Pre-Algebra the next year, right? Nope. I got placed in 8th grade enriched. The teacher of that class said to us that there was no reason why we shouldn't be placed immediately into a gifted level Geometry class in High School the next year, even the lowest performing students. Guess what I got? Pre-Algebra. Finally, into High School, they put me in honors Geometry, where I still performed the best of any student on all of the tests, but surprise surprise, I never did my homework. (I was the only person I know of to stay in an honors course with a C, because they knew dropping me lower yet, would have just made me perform worse.)
So, anyways, bit of a ramble of my story there, but to put it in context, child genius at least, but I never liked the term "prodigy". But held back so much that I became lazy. Starting at the 5th grade, I didn't do any new math at all until the 9th grade... why bother learning how to study or work hard... I can pass all my courses nearly in my sleep. Truly in terms of difficulty, because of the slow learning curve I approached all the new maths at, starting at the 5th grade, I didn't take another math class that made me break a sweat until I took Combinatorics my final semester of college.
So, push the kid at least a little bit, and do everything you can to present at least nominal challenges in front of him, otherwise you'll end up with a child who is lazy and has subpar work ethic.
When I was working for a Particularly Large Software Company, I received a large number of automated emails every day from automated build processes. These emails were automatically filed into a special folder, so that they didn't clutter my inbox, and ping my smart phone every single time I got one of them. This followed through later for "Out of Office" emails, and a few others.
Of course, as such, the only reason why I had folders was to keep a particular set of emails from pinging my smart phone, and bugging me all day, every day constantly with email build progress updates.
So we can laugh at this judge who probably looks pretty stupid right now, making rules for what he so clearly does not understand, but the deeper problems it brings up are neither easy to solve nor limited to Belgium.
... Why would we make fun of the judge? He most likely didn't write the order, the moving party usually drafts an order and presents it to the judge, who then signs it.
Well, if you formulate relativity properly in 4 dimensions, nowhere does a "relativistic mass", a "longitudinal mass" or a "transversal mass" show up. Indeed, the relation between 4-velocity and 4-momentum is p=mu, where p is the 4-momentum, u is the 4-velocity and m is the Lorentz-invariant "rest" mass.
Huh, I hadn't thought about it that way yet. It can be difficult to fully scrape the "time is different than space" misconception off the bottom of the skillet...
I'm wondering if this is pedantry, or just nit-picking...
The two are nearly synonymous... I could go into the differences, but that would just be pedantic...
Well, I will grant you that the notion of "rest mass" is as odd a notion as distinguishing between spacial and temporal dimensions. But the distinction is there (even if only by archaic categorization).
From what I was reading there is a distinction made between rest mass and relativistic mass. Rest mass being a hypothetical value that represents the minimum mass that a particle could possibly have, while everything else in reality deals with the relativistic mass.
But I take all your criticism to heart, you're absolutely right, but the pedant in me still notes that rest mass is a distinct category from "relativistic" mass, which sure varies transverse vs. longitudinal, but then both of those are distinct categories of relativistic mass. ... What can I say? Pedants are overly obsessed with details...
Are they using some other measurement of "speed" that isn't distance / time? It seems that slowing time down and going the same "speed" has the same net effect as going faster than the speed of light.
To your first question, ... yes, kind of. But to point, the article apparently suggests that they made an error in measuring the amount of time that the particles traveled the distance. This isn't much different than my acknowledgement that a 60 ns error could be accounted for by an ~60 foot discrepancy in the distance measurement. (Note: when I say "measurement" here, I'm really meaning more "calculation"... at these exacting standards measurement alone is insufficient, you need to make multiple measurements, and then produce a statistical model explaining your measurement, and the likely error rate as the statistical aberrations.)
If a particle has mass, its velocity will be less than C. If a particle has no mass, its velocity will equal C.
REST mass... </pedantic>