It covers much more than even the Lockdown article and the questions from the audience at the end are both interesting and lead to even more interesting responses.
Ordinary users only care about cost, choice and being limited - in that order.
Not only are Android phones cheaper than Apple, including pricing plans, but there are a lot more Android than Windows phones.
Finally, even the most casual smartphone buyer understands apps are key to not being limited. The perception is that Apple and (then?) Android are the leaders.
"Openness" as a concept is simply not on the radar for most users, but the consequences very much are.
Fake IP poisoning from the tracker? Unless "YouHaveDownloaded.com" actually connected to this IP as part of that torrent, this seems highly unlikely to be real.
Informative, but strange circular arguments in that article, especially from a scientific process perspective.
There are a ton of questions that Higgs cannot answer already and yet if we find Higgs precisely, research comes to a stop?
It almost feels like there's a split between theoretical physcists and everyone else, with theoreticians saying if you take away our broken toy, you better replace it with something we can play with!
Given Nature already trumped Einstein, his contemporaries, and all since, I think we can be fairly secure that we will ALWAYS having find something new to learn or discover from practical science.
After all, that's how we used to almost exclusively learn before scientists went a bit crazy with maths. These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me. :)
The meta-point is more that we need to find a deviation from the current Standard Model. Further confirmations of the Standard Model are in a sense bad news; we want it to come apart so we can examine the pieces. It is true that if we can produce the Higgs we can then study it, but if it then turns out to precisely fit the parameters predicted by the SM, that's bad.
This argument should also be read along with the fact that last I knew, none of the accelerators have been able to turn up anything else particularly interesting either. Some of the supersymmetry theories predicted particles in ranges that we should be able to see (barely) and none of them have appeared. We're down to hoping that there's something else to find in the extra room the LHC will give us at full blast or we really will be up a creek.
"These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me."
And in fact your observation is connected; particle physics has been starved for data and in the interim have come up with all kinds of things, trying to find things that may have testable consequences. This would go a lot better with some data.
There are irreconcilable differences between general relativity and quantum mechanics. A lot of thought has gone into the problem, with little success. But even if someone did come up with something concrete, what then? Try to come up with an interesting experiment that combines gravity and quantum mechanics.
I know of only one, and whether it tests anything at all depends on which interpretation of QM you have. Based on a Geiger counter, either place, or don't place a heavy weight. Try to measure its gravitational pull regardless of what you do. It only measures a pull if you placed the object. If you believe in the Everett interpretation, this says that gravity, at least to a first order approximation, splits with the universe. We do not have sensitive enough instruments to measure non-linear differences from GR.
History tells us that theoretical science done in the absence of experiment is unlikely to lead to useful knowledge.
I once saw a lecture by Freeman Dyson where he said that if one were to build a graviton detector with the cross-sectional area of the Earth and point it at the sun for the age of the Earth, the number of gravitons one would expect to detect:
Four.
So, whether there's science still to be done and whether we'll ever be capable of building apparatus that can actually test it are two different questions. For instance, what if the next interesting thing post-Higgs Boson happens at energies 1000 times bigger? There's a good chance we'll never build an accelerator that powerful.
We may not need a more powerful accelerator. Remember: The cosmic rays contain much more energetic particles than that can be produced in accelerators so far.
It is possible that we will discover new phenomena and new ways to test gravitational theories once we can observe gravitational waves. I expect we will detect gravitational waves in ~10 years and identify a specific source in ~20 years; sooner, if there are some powerful sources that we did not think of yet.
As someone who does astrophysics right now, trust me, we want to wring everything we can out of accelerators before we start trying to use cosmic objects to probe the laws of physics.
Yes, he's trying to wean China off molten salt reactor development, specifically reactors like the LFTR.
China is basically the only market for fission reactors left. They are the only ones purchasing new external nuclear reactor technology as well as aggressively pursuing their own.
Bill Gates realises if China produces anything successfully independent from the West, then even if TWR functioned and functioned well, it would be a dead investment from a market (and personal legacy) perspective.
You are generalising and taking too much at face value.
I went to Oxbridge (not going to say which) for my first uni and also interviewed at several colleges, as well as many of my friends also going to Oxford or Cambridge.
1. Neither Oxford or Cambridge university have an open policy to discriminate against privately educated students. This is just a public perception due to political pressure. In fact, in the 1960s, 30% of domestic intake was from private schools, it is now holding at roughly 45%.
2. You are largely correct that you need better exam results if you're from a private school compared to maintained schools. But within that large group, you are actually differentiated mainly by your entrance exam (70% of all admissions), application and interview.
3. Oxbridge has no inate preference for diversity. Academic excellence in general matters far more:
i. Your first critical generalisation is that preferences are expressed from a university level. This is not the case. Every college has its own admissions office and select based on their own college preferences which vary significantly from college to college and can be surprisingly strong and consistent across time.
ii. Therefore, your resume matters far less than you think, depending on which college you apply to and even what subject. For example, for the most competitive subjects, the academic bar is extremely high and in the interview they will be looking for additional indications of the nature of this intelligence such as quick or lateral thinking as well as confidence of expression. For the least competitive subjects, the academic requirement is far more flexible and you can get in largely based on how well you fit in with that specific college's ethos or how much they value diversity.
4. Oxbridge DOES effectively discriminate, not on any illegal basis, but on your "class". Almost all Oxbridge students have a background from upper or upper middle/professional classes, even those from state maintained schools. It is rare to find lower middle or working class kids who go to Oxford. This is likely due to the heavy emphasis on education from an early age as well as the Oxbridge staff, culture and traditions all being from the same cut.
Since this tends to cover a large proportion of immigrant groups, this means you will rarely find such pupils at Oxbridge. For example, there was a notorious article that exactly ONE Black-Carribean student had been admitted to Oxford in 2009. Even the British Prime Minister got involved. Oxford vociferously denied this and said there had been 26 "Black" students out of 3,202.
5. As for Europe, I dare not generalise. This is especially the case since many European countries have lower proportion and diversity of immigrants as well as strongly integrationist rather than the multicultural policies of the UK and US. Also, difficulty of access to tertiary education tends to be much lower in Continental Europe because it is heavily subsidised publically. For example, many courses in many German universities are effectively free, even for foreigners. When things are that different, there's little point trying to compare directly on one specific issue.
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So, Britain does not do "tick box" discrimination even for the most competitive universities. Quite the contrary, at least for Oxbridge, they will take academic quality even if that means sourcing from a monoculture. Only political pressure has stemmed the further reduction in state school access.
In short, you could say that Oxbridge is almost a perfect example of the minimum you could expect without legalised "positive" discrimination in a university system of a multicultural anglo-capitalist society.
Sorry, I realise I am guilty of over generalising privately educated people. I think your point 2 contradicts point 1 but you are, of course, correct that you have to have the academic excellence to get in. No amount of teaching DJ'ing to gangstas at youth clubs in Tottenham is going to get you into Natural Sciences at Cambridge if you can't do the maths. The critical point here is the application and interview. Given two candidates with similar results they will pick the 'trumpet playing circus performer' over the 'quiet grey blazer wearer' because they are more likely to have a rounded personality which will allow them to thrive amongst all the other things that university life entails. A real world example of this: Two guys in my A-level physics class at school were given offers to study natural sciences at Cambridge. One who was quite shy and introverted without much social life but very hard working with a natural genius for maths and physics. He had a difficult interview and was made a very tough offer conditional on getting the highest possible grade in all his A-levels and two STEP papers. The other guy was more outgoing and I don't remember what his requirements were but they were more lenient. I remember us all discussing the injustice of it in school and the admissions coach said that in his experience they did this as a test to see if he was brilliant enough that they would take him despite the risk that he wouldn't integrate well. They both got in by the way.
I have to say though, I think the current lack of poorer kids from more ethnically diverse backgrounds is more a reflection on the terrible quality of the state education system in inner cities than it is on the universities themselves. When I was thinking about which A-levels I wanted to do (~20 years ago) it wasn't possible at any school in my borough to study the required combination of A-level subjects for a science or engineering degree at say Cambridge, Imperial or equivalent. I switched to the private system for the last 2 years of school because of this and my fellow pupils were light years ahead of me, it was a real struggle to catch up. Their GCSE maths exam (taken at age 15) was set by a different exam board than the state school I left. The first question in their exam was "Factorise the quadratic", the first question in mine had been "Whats the time?" followed by a picture of a digital clock at a railway station. I could hardly answer any of the questions in their GCSE maths exam, I'm sure they would have been able to answer all the questions in mine.
Based on Leynos's well-written post, I initially thought the exact same thing.
Then, I realised that Google runs Youtube, remembered all the recent changes in particular, my face turned green and I puked up a little inside...
If they can mess up such good service when it was handed to them on a plate, I have zero confidence in them in any new endeavours online, especially when the cost is my privacy for perpetuity.
So, thanks but I'll continue to stay well away from social networking sites.
It covers much more than even the Lockdown article and the questions from the audience at the end are both interesting and lead to even more interesting responses.