Several professors told me girls tend to lose interest in STEM in the 6th grade. I conjecture that the 6th grade is the level at which their parents cannot help them understand the math as their parents don't remember it. I suspect parents often tell their kids that they never needed math so it is by implication not important. Since tech jobs are fairly high paying jobs, this would also explain why math skill might be correllated with poverty.

Per the referenced article at http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2003-1/ the GPS handles the relativistic effects but the European Space agency alternative to GPS "GALILEO project [25] states that relativistic corrections will be the responsibility of the users (that is, the receivers)" so some GPS analogs don't take into account the relativistic effects. Assuming they used GPS and not GALILEO, the relativistic effect seems not to be the problem. The documentation for my car/marine GPS unit says that it does not work well around tall trees or tall buildings. I would assume mountains might cause problems too. I also understand that humidity or air pressure changes can have an effect.

What are they using to record the start/stop times of the neutrinos? If they are using the GPS signals, did they take into account General Relativiity affecting the clock rate in orbit? If they are using synchronized atomic clocks, did they take into account accellerating them to move them changes the clock rate possibly desynchronizing the clocks?

I think you are on point and the article has huge logical flaws. Fundamentally, the only part faith plays in science is that you must have enough faith that reality can be described logically in a simple enough form that you can comprehend it in order to justify the time spent developing science. Science encourages everyone to submit arguements and the arguements will be judged on their own merits. Occasionally, some component of the society tries to change this aspect of science but the vast bulk of the scientists ignore the sub-component of the society and continue on. Eventually, the attempt to control the scientific culture dies out or just becomes a tedious distraction from science. The scientists and engineers create ways of describing reality that have the potential to be useful. They then proceed to implement useful devices which they connect to non-scientific users via a nice simple user interface. To say that the non-scientific users believe in every detail of the science is incorrect. They believe the product is useful and, since they are told it was created by scientists and engineers using science, they believe that science is useful. If they ask for a dumbed down explanation from a scientist, it is usually to dispell the feeling that science is magic. The scientist explains enough of the mundane details behind the science using a simplified story approach to dispell the feeling that there is any magic involved. Also, the scientist typically states the set of premises/assumptions/observations (They are not facts although they are sometimes mislabeled as such. Facts are immutable. Premises/assumptions/observations are mutable.) and derives a theory from the premises/assumptions/observations. The scientist also usually explains how they arrived at their observations. The theories often only describe relationships between the premises/assumptions/observations. They do not describe why the premises/assumptions/observations are the way they are. A change in the set of premises/assumptions/observations often cause huge problems with the derived theories and new theories are developed. In general, theories die out from neglect if they are not useful in some way.

Landsat (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/), I think is maintained by EROS (http://eros.usgs.gov/) in South Dakota, is used for mapping minerals deposits. Meteorites may be too diluted to show much of a signature.

My mini-van has a 200 horsepower moter. I believe it gets that at 5000rpm (might be 4000 or 6000). Normal driving is at 2500rpm. This is about 50 percent of 200 hp which is 100hp. The conversion to watts is 746 watts/hp * 100hp = 75kw. So if I drive on the freeway for 1 hour, I expend 75kwh to go 70 miles. At 240V * 200Amps = 48kw. So it will take 75kwh / 48kw = 1.56 hours to recharge using the full capacity of the supply lines to the house. Trickle charging a extra battery to dump a surge into the car or overnight charging seem to be the only ways to reduce the time.

In a dictatorship, the power is concentrated in the dictator and support structure. In a democracy, the power is distributed throughout the system. The support structure is tasked to maintain this distribution of power. For instance, there exists a mechanism for removing elected officials. If the dictator becomes a greedy monster, the dictator system works horribly. In a democracy, if the leader becomes a greedy monster there are other people representing other interests in the society to hold the monster in check. Of course, if all of the people in power become greedy monsters the democracy will work moderately well if the greedy monsters are at odds. If they are not at odds, then the democracy will work horrilbly as well. So the democracy has the advantage of a distributed power structure. The market ecomomy is another example of a distributed power structure while every company in the market ecomomy is modeled after a dictatorship. Normally, The market economy weeds out the greedy-monster dictatorship companies by letting them fail.

False! At my high school, they had electronics, metal shop, wood shop, plastics shop, typing, and drafting. I took electronics shop for 2 years, metals shop for 1 year, welding for 1 quarter while taking all of the college prep courses. The metals shop had "WWII surplus" 7 manual lathes, 2 manual mills, sheet metal bending equipment, 1 mig welder station, 6 stick welder stations, 6 gas welder stations, 1 metal forge, 2 metal foundry stations (metal pouring into a sand mold). I took both college prep and vocational courses. In metals shop, I built a small remote controlled style aircraft engine. I took wood shop, and drafting in 9th grade. After I left I stayed in contact with the metals teacher. After they had just purchased 6 new lathes, he said the new principle was shutting down the vocational program since they were "dirty" jobs and not part of the new economy which was information based. (In one of my later "information" jobs, I programmed a user interface for robotic welding equipment.) My main regret was that I could not take more metals shop and some plastics shop as it was by far the best part of high school. After I graduated they started mandating 1 year of foreign language for college prep which shut a lot of college prep kids out of taking the vocational courses. So the teachers allowed students to take some core courses like English and Physics 1 hour before school officially started. Since then, I have talked to professors in electrical engineering. They say they have to give a course in how to use basic tools such as screw drivers since kids don't grow up on the farm or with parents who repair things themselves anymore. Often, they don't grow up with much contact with their father. Also, they state that if they don't get girls interested in science, math, and engineering by they 6th grade the girls rule it out as a career. Females comprise more than 50% of the college population. Like it or not, building things interests people in learning about things. It also develops confidence and "leadership skills" (a much abused term). IMO, with the exception of mathematics (which build proofs) and programming (which build code), academics have gotten too far away from building things. Being a dynamic, funny instructor/ entertainer is not as great of a motivator as letting the students learn by building. I also think students should be taught how to start their own small business and grow it. No one can outsource your job if you own your job. When did we get the mentality that all we can aspire to is a job? ("Junior Achievement" was an extra curricular activity about starting a small business.) Too much of high school and college education is about how to be a good follower and not about charting your own course. Always look for unconventional education opportunities such as volunteering for Habitat for Humanity if you want to learn to build houses. Good Luck!

Why? One method of making money is to develop closed source software then open source an older version of the software (F/OSS) to gain market acceptance/share. The open source company then charges for either commercial-use or latest-version-use. I believe ghostscript follows one of these models. The open source company could sell the copyright in the non-open source code base. I believe the Tripwire (intrusion detection) developers did this recently. Technically, people releasing code under the GPL or at a later contributer's option any later version of the GPL could find a later version of the GPL allows the close sourcing of the code by company X only. This seems to be a dangerous clause if your goal is to keep it in the same state as the GPL license you released the code under. That said. Hiring professional help is not a substitute for educating yourself on possible problems in a sale of this nature. The variation in knowledge in the other professions is equal to the variation in knowledge in the programming profession. I would recommend the "Science Fiction Handbook" by L. Sprague De Camp http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Handbook-Sprague-Camp/dp/0070161984 for an insightful description of contract issues and desired clauses with selling book rights which might be applicable to the current situation from someone who did it for a living. Another book which might apply is: Inventions, patents, and their management / by Alf K. Berle and L. Sprague de Camp

The wave function of all quantum physicists says the probability some physicist will have the energy to change the light bulb is spread across all physicists. It does not imply any physicist has sufficient energy to change the light bulb. So changing the light bulb may be impossible.

Wouldn't it be better to TARPIT them rather than --reject-with tcp-reset? That said, if they are generating one query from each IP address and trying to log in more than 300 seconds apart this may have no effect. Perhaps all firewalls without ssh enabled should TARPIT attempts to connect to slow this down. Perhaps one could create a script on all computers to change the ssh port, assumes you are using a nonstandard high port, as a function of time and to tarpit all other ports.