I'm pretty sure that at least in the U.S., deciding whether to give people a special offer based on their age is illegal. It's called age discrimination.

Let's see, 16 years ago was 1998. Smartphones didn't exist yet. Tablet computers didn't exist yet. Even the iPod wouldn't be released for three years. The very first hybrid car had just gone on sale in Japan, but none would be available in the rest of the world for a year or two. Mining of oil shale in the United States was nonexistent.

Not to comment on this particular prediction, but just as a general comment, a lot more can change in 16 years than you think.

Of course, the SF Bay Area and the greater LA area together contain half the population of the state, so that's not a very strong statement.

I did follow the link. You're misinterpreting it. This is a data coverage map, that is, a map of how much data they have in different places. It has nothing to do with cell phone coverage.

I'm not sure what your point is. This isn't supposed to be a map of cell phone coverage. It's a map showing all the data points in their database. The goal of this project is to let people identify their location based on the visible networks, not to tell them what kind of network coverage they'll have in any location.

No no no. It's generally accepted that each one of these theories taken individually is the best currently known description within its particular domain. It is not generally accepted that you can just throw them together and get an accurate description of the fundamental nature of the universe! In fact, we know you can't do that because general relativity and quantum field theory are deeply incompatible with each other. People have been working for half a century to find a single consistent theory that can reproduce the predictions of both. They've made a lot of progress, but we're still a long way from having any confidence about what the true fundamental theory is.

The picture of eternal inflation described in this article is plausible based on what we know. But it's still very speculative. That's true of any discussion of cosmology. Our current knowledge is just way too limited to have any confidence about it.

Actually that's not true. Only some very limited classes of hidden variable theories have been excluded. Bell's theorem is based on a set of very doubtful assumptions that weren't well understood until decades after it was first introduced. For example, it requires locality (which is now widely suspected to be false) and no retrocausality (which, assuming CPT invariance really is an exact symmetry, is almost definitely false). It also requires a really wacky assumption that your choice of what measurement to perform is uncorrelated with the values of hidden variables at the place and time where you make the choice - basically treating the experimenter and/or experimental apparatus as not subject to the laws of physics.

Yes, I simplified a bit to keep my post from getting too long. There are tons of interpretations of QM: dozens we know about, and probably lots of others that no one has thought of yet. Some are "pure interpretations", meaning they make no predictions beyond the ones made by QM itself. No experiment can ever distinguish between two pure interpretations. But a lot of them aren't pure interpretations. They still reproduce the prediction of QM to high accuracy, but in principle an experiment could distinguish between them.

If we ever learn which interpretation is correct, it will be based on evidence. But right now that evidence doesn't exist, which is why I said this is more philosophy than science. Occam's razor says we should prefer a simpler explanation over a more complicated one, but that doesn't prove the simpler explanation is actually correct. But maybe some day we'll know.

As far as we can tell, CPT invariance is an exact symmetry of the universe. So the details are slightly more complicated, but time, charge, and parity are elements of a single symmetry.

Here's a more familiar example of a weak measurement. QM says you can't measure the magnetic moment of a single particle along two perpendicular axes at the same time. And yet, you can easily measure the magnetic moment of a bar magnet along two perpendicular axes at the same time. How is that possible? The bar magnet's moment is just the sum of the ones from all the particles that make it up. So by measuring the total magnetic moment, aren't you measuring the moments of all the individual particles, and hence violating the uncertainty principle?

The answer is no. When you measure the total moment of a macroscopic magnet, you only need to interact very very weakly with any individual particle, so the experiment only has a tiny effect on the state of each one. The more particles you sum over, the less information you need about each one, so the less restrictive the uncertainty principle becomes.

But the mathematical details of the explanation are curious. Weak measurements were originally proposed based on time reversible interpretations of QM, in which the future can affect the past and it's basically arbitrary which direction you call "forward in time". It was later shown that other interpretations also predicted them - of course they must, since the interpretations are mathematically equivalent. But the explanations are very different. Other interpretations explain them through an incredibly complicated series of cancellations, whereas in time reversible QM the explanation is straightforward, almost obvious. So is this evidence that time reversible QM is correct? At the moment, that question is more philosophy than science, but it's interesting to think about.

The Python version included with RHEL 6 (that's the very latest version): 2.6
The Python version included with RHEL 5 (still widely used): 2.4

Thank them for forcing us to keep supporting old versions.

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

We're in the very early stages, but it's already happening.

Here are some examples of things you said that are totally false:

Nonsense. We're entirely capable of understanding the climate.

This is total BS.

Climate researchers are doing fantastic science.

The two groups are about as unlike as you can get. Climate scientists are dedicating their lives to working really hard, trying to solve really hard problems and figure out how the real world actually works. So called "climate skeptics" are, as a rule, willfully ignorant of the state of knowledge. They've just decided what they want to believe, make no effort to actually study climatology, and just go around making claims that are simply false. LIke, "We're too stupid to understand the climate and anyone who claims to is a liar."

So how much time have you spent actually studying climatology? And no, I don't mean reading books and websites written by self-proclaimed climate skeptics out to expose the massive fraud being perpetuated on an unsuspecting public. I mean actual climate science. Studying basic physics, reading scientific papers, understanding the math behind climate models, studying the experiments used to parametrize and validate those models, and so on. Not so much? Then maybe you should assume that you know less about the subject than people who spend their entire lives doing that.