Wooooooooooooooooooooooooosh.

This is a canard. Nobody in his right mind, even on this site, contends that free speech ought to allow one to break laws.

Google is breaking the law in Europe. The European court didn't make a new law, the European court merely ruled that *EXISTING* laws require google to delete the information when requested.

QED.

In Europe, it's common for people who travel frequently abroad to have a sim for a local provider in each country they visit.

On some bits of the south coast of England, some people get better (or only) reception from France. They have a sim for France which they put in their phone when they're at home and a UK sim for when they're out to avoid accidental roaming charges when at home.

The EU does cherish freedom of speech. But it also cherishes the privacy of the individual.

The US - based on comments on this site - appears to have decided that freedom of speech trumps everything else. You can lie, cheat, shout fire in a crowded theatre, call in fake bomb scares, basically anything at all because it's all "freedom of speech."

The EU takes a much more nuanced view. Sometimes there's an overwhelming reason why freedom of speech should trump privacy. Sometimes privacy should trump freedom of speech, and sometimes it's a grey area that has to be litigated through the courts.

In this particular case, the court hasn't ruled that the information has to disappear - all they've ruled is that google (and presumably other search engines) need to give people the right to remove search results about themselves.

Most things are "allowed to be forgotten" in most circumstances. So, for example, most employers aren't allowed to ask "have you ever been made bankrupt?" although I think they can ask "are you an undischarged bankrupt". Google is allowing employers to sidestep the protective regulations that were built into bankruptcy law before the internet existed. The EU is now merely trying to reinstate them.

The argument that black cabs are making is that Uber is using a taxi-meter for their fares and its illegal to have a taxi-meter installed (in London) unless you are a black cab.

(I'm making no comment about whether that rule is reasonable, I don't know why it exists other than, presumably, to deter non-black cabs from answering hails - the price needs to be agreed which should be done at booking time)

Black cab drivers are complaining that that law isn't being enforced for Uber, hence their protest. TfL have said that they don't consider using an app, having a meter installed.

At the end of the day this can only be decided by:

a) repealing the law - Uber is welcome to lobby to get that done - but they haven't.
b) bringing a test case - this is where I suspect the black cab drivers problem is. It's probably TfL who has to bring the test case. The courts will then have to decide whether an app is an "installed taxi-meter"

After (or possibly before) b, parliament can decide to clarify the law. Generally parliament doesn't act unless there's a perceived problem though - so it won't be until: 1) The courts rule that an app isn't an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that they intended to catch the Uber case - the law will be modified to make it explicit that an app counts as a taxi-meter.
2) The courts rule that an app is an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that that wasn't intended to be caught and clarify the law (probably after lobbying)
3) There are a series of high profile assaults/robberies/etc by Uber drivers so parliament clarifies the law so then TfL prosecutes Uber drivers.

Black-cab and mini-cab services coexist in London. I've used both and no doubt will again in the future.

Uber appears to be treading the line between a mini-cab service (which would be legal) and a black-cab service (which would be illegal). One of the great things about London is that, late at night, when you're the worse for drink, you can get into some random strangers car and be as confident as it's possible to be that that person will deliver the promised service.

There's quite a lot of (TfL) advertising warning people that "unless it's pre-booked it's a stranger's car".

So in this particular case it will be interesting to watch the fairly well monied Uber fighting with the zillion somewhat less monied cab companies.

They're not fighting the cab companies. They're fighting the black cab drivers.

London has a peculiar system. There are black cabs - which can be hailed on the street, within certain limits they are obliged to take you to your destination (so if they're waiting at a major station hoping for a lucrative fare and you want to go around the corner, they have to take you and lose their place in the queue at the station), and the fare is calculated by an installed meter and is relative to time and distance travelled. (There is a minimum fare)

Private hire cars must be pre-booked (the booking only has to be a few minutes in advance - typically you ring up the office and then they send the nearest car to pick you up), and they're under no obligation at all to take you when you call when they hear where you want to go.

Uber uses a metering system linked to an app. Black cabs are the only taxis allowed to have a meter fitted. TfL (Transport for London) have said they don't consider the app to be "fitted" and therefore the law banning other cars from having a meter fitted doesn't apply.

Black cabs also have to pass a rather impressive test. Within the area they're obliged to carry passengers, they're required to show they know every street, landmark etc. (Apparently, when they're examined, a favourite trick of the examiners is to ask them to do a journey where roadworks have temporarily closed the "usual" way and the drivers are expected to know about it and not just "follow the diversion" but take the best route knowing in advance that there are roadworks.)

We learned in grade school that it works because a lot of liquids, especially water, stick together. The water going downward pulls the water upwards because the whole amount in the hose is bonded together. THAT is how it works.

But if you fill a large diameter pipe with water then the water falls out of the pipe even if you keep the top end closed. Put a piece of card across the low end though and air pressure will hold the water in.

Based on looking at a drip, I'd guess that water doesn't have enough tensile strength to support anything more than a couple of mm of itself.

The claim in the paper (linked from one of the first comments) is that it's the tensile strength of water that allows the siphon to work.

For the case of water I think that's garbage. Water doesn't have enough tensile strength to support more than a very low siphon. It's air pressure that allows siphons of usable height. Because of it's relatively high vapour pressure while a liquid it's going to be hard to prove anything either way using water though.

Mercury would be a better bet. It has a very low vapour pressure.

If you set up a siphon so that no mercury is flowing (source and destination reservoirs are at the same pressure) then you can make it flow either way by lifting or lowering the reservoirs relative to one another. (You can do this with water too)

I predict that if you were to then move the apparatus to a vacuum chamber, the mercury in the siphon tube would come out due to gravity and there would be a vacuum in the tube too. Raising and lowering the reservoirs would then not cause any mercury to flow either way.

The energy captured in coal, gas, and oil is the result of many millions of years of sunshine. How, exactly, does one reasonably maintain an expectation that our releasing that in a matter of a couple decades should have no significant effects?

Except that the energy being released by burning all that fossil fuel is trivial.

Google gives me 144000TWh in 2008 world energy consumption. Call it 2x10^17Wh

Solar flux at Earths surface is around 2x10^17W. Geothermal is around 5x10^13W.
Almost 10^5 hours in a year, so Geothermal heating is about 4x10^18Wh/year

The heating from burning all that fossil fuel is small in comparison to the heating due to natural radioactivity in the Earth's crust which, in turn, is negligible in comparison to the energy from the Sun.

It's the CO2 that is the problem. Even though it traps a tiny extra fraction of that incoming solar radiation, a tiny fraction adds up to a lot of energy and it's year in, year out.

In order to test among our theoretical traditions, ... the policy preferences of economic elites (measured by policy preferences at the 90th income percentile); ...

That says that "economic elites" in their study are the top 10% not the top 0.1% or so.

They later say (page 18)

What we cannot do with these data is distinguish definitively among different versions of elite theories. We cannot be sure whether we are capturing the political influence of the wealthiest Americans (the top 1% of wealth-holders? the top 1/10th of 1%?), or, conceivably, the less affluent but more numerous citizens around the 90th income percentile whose preferences are directly gauged by our measure.

I'm not sure why you think the study talks about the 0.1% when they explicitly state that they're capturing the preferences of the 90th income percentile and they cannot distinguish the different versions of "elite theories".

Presumably to limit the opportunity for known plaintext attacks.

I don't know when this is used but I guess it's the only traffic on an otherwise quiescent connection.

But the question is, given that any musician's ultimate target is to eventually have an audience, shouldn't how an instrument sounds to them be the quintessential point of evaluating the quality of an instrument?

Not just that. Performing is totally intertwined with feeling and mood. It's quite possible that someone can play better on a $1M violin than on a $30K violin even when objectively, they're equivalent.

ISTR a study that found that watching the performances was more important than hearing them when picking out the eventual competition winners.

Found a reference:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

Also, these ancient strads have stood the test of time. Even if a modern violin is as great now - will it still be as great at the end of a virtuoso's career? Or perhaps it will improve with age. I would guess that the ancient violins are probably more stable (assuming equivalent care regime)

I'm not sure you really need 1-2 minute charging.

Assuming an all electric infrastructure.

Cars would start the day fully charged - no need to "fill up" on the way to work - because of an overnight charge and it's reasonable to assume that will be sufficient for a typical day for most people.

The remaining obstacle is long distance driving. A 30 minute charge time every 4-6 hours wouldn't be unreasonable but that would only work if there wasn't a queue before you got to start charging. That's going to mean a lot of charging points - and probably there would have to be batteries at each charging point so that the load on the grid can be smoothed.

And why is this a problem?

I'm looking to sell say 50K on two exchanges - and I need to sell so I'm going to accept the best bid.

markets A and B are both offering 1.00 bid with a 1.02 ask. 20K on market A and 30K on market B are available.

I put in my 20K to market A. and I get my $20K. HFT trader with wow whiz algorithm spots my 20K order on A and races ahead to get a 30K 1.01 ask on B before I get there.

I get $30.3K on market B. Your greedy evil HFT has just made me keep more of my money and give less of it to those greedy bank market makers with their excessively wide spreads.

Not really. That used to be possible but there are now so many people doing it that there aren't sufficient arbitrage opportunities to make enough money to cover your costs.

Instead it's more like this:

Consider a hypothetical stock that is worth exactly $1.

What used to happen was that the market makers would have a bid/ask of 0.95/1.05. (For a modern market that still trades with those sorts of spreads, look at gold metal. For small investors, a 5-10% bid/ask spread is fairly typical)

Someone came along and said, hey, I can make money even if I under cut the banks on both sides. So they started offering 0.96/1.04, another competitor, 0.97/1.03 until eventually you end up at 1.00/1.01.

Of course, in real life it's not quite that simple, the price actually moves. While the banks were offering 0.95/1.05, excepting exceptional circumstances, they don't need to update their prices all that often in order to avoid losing money. Of course, they do want to update their prices but it's a fairly leisurely process.

HFT traders can keep their spreads so low because they update their bid/ask prices constantly.

They make money, not by having a big margin, but by having tiny margins but capturing a lot of trade by having the best price. HFT has taken money from the banks and given it back to the investor.. The banks hate it and would love to see it stopped.

That said, there are things that (some) HFT firms are allegedly doing that aren't ideal. One of the things is to enter a new bid/ask into the order book and then cancel it again so quickly that nobody else can take advantage of it.

For example, current market 0.99/1.01. HFT puts in a 1.00 bid and then instantly cancels it again. People see that 1.00 order and try to move towards it - for example the person with the 1.01 ask might cancel it and enter a 1.00 ask instead to try and match the 1.00 only to find it's been cancelled in the 50us it took to react to it. The 1.00 ask now gets cancelled again but the HFT has now entered a 1.01 ask and is now front of the order book.

I have no idea how prevalent this is but if it is, it's easily preventable (orders have to be good in the market for a minimum (short) length of time before they can be cancelled) without having to lose all that is good in HFT.

The religious right are NEVER going to accept science

I'm in the UK and we don't really have a "religious right" here. I don't think we have as bad a problem as the US but the impression I get is that scientific illiteracy is something that people in the UK are less ashamed of than say people in Germany.

But the fundamental problem isn't the "religious right" it's that people are very emotionally tied to opinions they hold and it's very hard to accept that you are wrong.

(Good) scientists fight this natural human tendency all the time. I'm sure everyone who has ever done any sort of statistical analysis has got a result they didn't like (expect) and then pored over the calculations for hours looking for the mistake. Ditto, they've got the result they expected and then had to eat humble pie when someone else points out that they've slipped a decimal point somewhere.

Scientists, with all their training to look at things objectively and derive conclusions from the data, find this hard to do. How much harder must it be for people who can't repeat the calculations and just have to accept it when a scientist says "you're wrong".

Because science (nature) is brutal. It doesn't care what your opinions, hopes, beliefs are. It will trample over them as effortlessly as it will support them and with as little feeling.