I was in the same situation up here in Canada when we switched over 6+ years ago. All the bank did was tell me that the new credit card with the chip used the same pin as my existing ATM card. It might be an issue if your credit card is from a different bank than the one with your account but if not it was a pretty painless process.

The bit I don't like is the new "contactless" payment system. I want any payment system to require purposeful contact on my part and not just require that my card was somewhere nearby since standing in a checkout queue I may well be near someone else making a payment. This has apparently already happened already in the UK where the system has be rolled out for longer. It may be a rare occurence but the amount of time spent getting one incorrect charge fixed will outweigh the time saved per transaction by many orders of magnitude.

Actually what the states refer to is something called helicity, not spin. However the two are closely related: helicity is the component of the spin in the particle's direction of motion. Since this is quantized electrons and quarks have only two possible states: either the spin is in the same direction as the direction of motion (right-handed) or it is opposite (left-handed).

The names come from the curl of your fingers in your left and right hands. If you pretend that the electron is a physically spinning object then for a right-handed particle if you curl your fingers in the direction of rotation your thumb points in the direction of motion. For a left handed particle you need to used your left hand.

Take a look outside the UK. I'm a physicist, not an engineer, so with engineering or in industry it might be different. However as a scientist and an academic I had a look at UK based academic jobs after my postdoc and the picture was bleak to say the least. Apart from not being able to afford any sort of decent house (and this was up north just over a decade ago before the bubble) my sister who is 5 years my junior and has no advanced degrees would have been earning practically the same amount as a primary school teacher as I would have as a junior faculty member plus it would have been a slight step down from my US RA salary!

Now compare that to the offer I had from Canada where the salary was about 75% higher (and on a rapidly rising scale), the job had the possibility of tenure (no 5 year renewable contract) and the cost of a house was less than half what it was in the UK. Since I had a wife and kids to support guess which job I took? If the salary situation for scientists is so poor that even a british academic who is not really motivated by money beyond enough for a comfortable life and would have likes to have stayed in the UK is highly motivated to leave what on earth is the point of providing scholarships? It's already cheaper to go to university in Canada from the UK than it is to go to a UK university so why not save the UK some money and let british students come over here earlier because, unless the UK fixes the salary issue, the sad truth is that many of those with families who are willing to look abroad will be leaving in order to be able to support those families - either that or giving up science for management.

Perhaps a better solution would be for companies to stop paying all the money to the managers and pay more of it to the people who actually make the company work. That way more people will want to get science and engineering because they lead to a valued and well paid job. Why would someone motivated by money take a few thousand pounds from the government now when they can get hundreds of thousands of pounds more over their career doing a far less challenging degree and setting themselves up to become a manager?

No, not all waves. Kaon and B-meson waves violate time reversal symmetry. We have known about this for almost 20 years since the first CPLEAR paper on the evidence of this and the more recent papers from Babar have confirmed it beyond any reasonable doubt. I'm always amazed how such a fundamental result as the laws of physics defining a direction of time (even when you take account of phase space/entropy effects) seems to be forgotten by many physicists.

I'd certainly agree that is my impression of a lot of issues in the US - you seem to have two extremes with no middle ground and while I no longer live there it does seem from the outside that the problem is getting worse and not better. It exists elsewhere too but nowhere near to the same extent as the US. However with Snowden I think you have an issue that is very likely to force people to one side or the other.

Snowden broke extremely serious laws and severely embarrassed the US government and damaged US reputation worldwide. He comes across as an intelligent person knowing full well exactly what he was doing and why so there is no possibility to claim that it was somehow inadvertent or he could not foresee the consequences. So either you have to really choose between whether or not he was justified in breaking the law and that pretty much forces you into one camp or the other....but that does not have to mean that your opinion is a "fixed belief" it just means there are few tenable middle positions for this topic.

You can also add to this the fact that with so many media sources to choose from you can select only the news and opinions that you want to hear so your opinion is never, or rarely challenged.

True, but it typically only fails as an excuse when the people who gave the orders have been removed from power. The problem with illegal orders is that while those giving them are in power not following them is illegal but once they are out of power having followed them is illegal. It's a no-win situation for those involved.

That might be true but learning about our current global internet directly is a more efficient way to understand it. If you don't already understand modern internet technology then surely it is a higher priority to learn about this directly rather than teach them the full history of how it was developed? We don't teach physics students the details of epicycles before covering Newtonian gravity nor do we teach students latin (any more) before learning modern languages like French. If my kids are interested in those topics then I'd certainly help them learn them but in terms of encouraging them to learn it I'd leave that up to their own personal interest - it's not something I think they need to know.

No, what's impressive is that they managed to get people to hang around that long to watch it it all.

That is clearly not true since they already differentiate as to whether or not you have a Y chromosome.

Do you arrest people who deny evolution or climate change? These are clearly and irrefutably documented facts. The reason that denying the holocaust is illegal is entirely because of public opinion - or rather public fear as to what it might lead to. It happens to be a false statement too but that is justification after the fact otherwise why single out just the one false statement from all the other false things idiots say?

The danger with laws like this is that they try to force individuals into thinking or believing a particular thing. No matter how well intentioned it is this simply does not work. The only way to fight ignorance, even willful ignorance, is with education not laws. Think of it like a vaccination: education does not seem to take hold in everyone exposed to it but so long as it reaches enough of the population there is sufficient immunity that stupidity and ignorance can't become dangerous and spread.

True, but the proposal is not just economics but economics with a political bias thrown in. For example you could allow selling of human organs to encourage supply while requiring that they are sold to a central agency that then distributes them to hospitals based on where they will be most effective. This would be using economics to encourage supply while still maximizing the life saving potential of those organs by directing them based on medical need and prognosis rather than bank balance. It would probably also work well in the majority of countries which have a national health care system.

While I'm still not sure I really agree with even this it would be one way to use economics to address the stated problem of a lack of supply. Of course it would not let rich people use their money to get preferential access to organs but surely this was an unimportant, unintended side-effect of the original proposal, right?

The Daleks dropped that when they found that DR-DOS made them run a lot faster.

Really? All of my Russian colleagues in physics are incredibly talented and well trained and have great senses of humor too! Based on this experience I'd have zero hesitation in accepting a suitably skilled Russian grad student and I hope this programme causes more of them to apply to my institute. If they have to go back to work in Russia afterwards then that's not a bad thing - science it a global enterprise and it will undoubtedly help Russia build ties with the global community is is good for everyone.

Well that would be the case for EA. I imagine most development studios "know it is shit" by now. You did mean to include that apostrophe right?