Agreed but they had better not make any mistakes and accuse someone who does not subsequently get convicted. While it is hard to see how someone arrested for drunk driving would be not convicted they do have a history of mistakes like this. A few years ago they busted an online child pornography ring and then went around and named people whose credit cards were used without stopping to think that some of those cards were stolen and used fraudulently.

I'm all in favour of doing what we can to stop drunk driving but deliberately naming and shaming people before they have a conviction is dangerous at best and just plain wrong if those people are not found guilty.

Clearly you have never done experimental physics. Not only are there plenty of 'back of the envelope' calculations that would take far longer to input into a CAS system than to solve but we also use notation that I've no clue how to put into a CAS system. For example in the Standard Model Lagrangian I have 'vectors' to represent spin and colour. These are written into the same term as a multiplication and yet each colour vector must only multiply with colour matrices and other colour vectors. This is achieved by the summation convention but I've never seen a CAS system that supports this properly in a way that is simple enough for 'everyday' calculations.

We've already had to have that conversation with our 10 year old son. The Engineering faculty of our local university runs a Raspberry Pi programming course...but only for girls. My wife contacted them to ask about programs for our son. The super enthusiastic airhead who responded suggested that they had lots of programs for boys but really it boils down to a few places in a summer program and even then much of that program is for girls only. My wife got as far as asking them how their blatant sexism was consistent with the Alberta Human Rights act but got a typical email full of PR but empty of content. In the EU such practice would actually be illegal under gender discrimination laws in Alberta it is less clear since they have this get-out clause 'unless there is a justifiable reason'.

So we had to explain that there were no programs for him because he is a boy which he had a really hard time understanding because he has always been taught that sexism is wrong. Since actions speak louder than words this has undermined the lesson that he had learnt and I've already heard him once tease his older sister that she shouldn't use computers until she has had the 'special lessons for girls'! So as a scheme to eradicate sexism this is an epic way to shoot yourself in the foot. Even simple logic tells you that you cannot eradicate sexism while actually practicing it!

Really? Wow. You do all your exams on computer? None of them are handwritten, not even the maths and physics exams?

Fair point but there is one type of writing where typing is really terrible: mathematical notation. It is far, far faster for me to do calculations on paper with a pen than it is to use a computer. If I want it to look neat then writing LaTeX is a clear winner but typing expressions into LaTeX is a lot slower than just jotting them down. So for working things out paper and pen is so far the best there is even in the 21st century.

I agree that fresh is better than frozen but, most importantly, not being American, the option I wanted was: I prefer my turkey....at Christmas.

Not entirely - it tells you the number of write cycles each cell has: 5*365=1,825 cycles. You then just have to hope that the load leveller knows what it is doing because a single file like a mailbox could easily exceed that in a day if the writes were always to the same location on the disk.

Well a C90 tape had a 90 minute length and, depending on you computer the data was written at 1200 baud (BBC Model B) to ~1500 baud for a ZX spectrum. Unfortunately there was some overhead so lets say this was 20% (guesstimate). This would give a tape capacity of 90x60x(1200/8)x0.8=648000 bytes or ~633 kB. Some people used to use C120s which would get you an extra 33% but those tapes were thinner and more likely to break or suffer degradation in sound quality which meant you lost your program. With a Spectrum and a C120 you'd might be pushing the dizzying heights of a whole MB on tape.

The premise that this is the only rational approach is wrong though. Suppose you lived in a town where the only way to keep armed militants off the streets was to have those streets patrolled by robots programmed to shoot anyone carrying a gun? If you stay away from the robots you will be going into areas far more dangerous where the likelihood of getting short by some extremist is higher than the likelihood of getting shot by a malfunctioning robot.

If the alternative to the robot is something even more likely to result in serious harm or death then it is entirely rational not to run away from them.

Alpha particles are actually the most dangerous form of radiation because they are the most highly ionizing and so they cause the most damage to cells. While this also makes them the easiest to shield (even a fair amount of air will stop them) their danger lies from either direct skin contact or from consuming something contaminated by them.

You do realize that there is a decay chain right? The next one in the sequence has a half life of 246,000 years and it carries on after that ending at some stable isotope of lead.

Correct. However there is a difference between deliberately trying to destroy something and accidentally doing so. No military has ever used a nuclear power station as a weapon. Are we therefore to conclude that they are completely safe and pose zero risk of contaminating the environment? The question is not whether these things are a deadly weapon the question is whether they are dangerous. Plutonium is also extremely toxic chemically.

Even if these batteries can be made safe enough to launch, and I don't doubt that they could, you have to prove that which will require a considerable engineering effort potentially making them more expensive than the budget will allow. In addition Pu-238 has a very limited supply.

...and did they heat it up to however many thousands of degrees it would reach during re-entry first? That's assuming it simply didn't burn up in the atmosphere first like many meteorites, some of which have very high metal content.

What you are getting is the reconstructed data. To be able to do anything scientifically valuable with it you have to understand the intricate details of the reconstruction software, the trigger, the calibration etc. etc. To be honest I would be amazed if anyone outside CMS will be able to do much with it at all. I'd also expect that there will be bandwidth restrictions on accessing the data since the dataset is multi-PB (if it is the full set of run I data).

We did a similar exercise with the D0 experiment at Fermilab several years ago and it was of interest to practically nobody. I expect there may be somewhat more interest with this being the LHC data but I'd be surprised if anything useful comes of it given the massive amount of work required to be able to do a useful analysis. The best I can think of is that this might make a really nice undergraduate course project or, with some pre-written, high level analysis code, perhaps even as outreach for high school students.

You are talking rubbish. Organizations issue fines all the time in the UK e.g. libraries can fine you if you are late returning a book etc. I doubt every library has a sworn judge and a panel of jurors on hand to adjudicate your fine.

Any organization can levy a fine through an agreement. Students typically sign that they agree to be bound by the terms of the university's code of student conduct in before they are allowed to enrol. That code will undoubtedly contain the relevant clauses allowing a discipline procedure to levy a fine on the student. Even without such a signed agreement the fine can still be enforced with the threat of losing you membership of the organization should you fail to pay.

I can't see any way that any of the above constitutes false representation or abuse of position and section 6 and 7 have to do with possession, making and supplying articles for use in fraud (did you even read the act before citing it?).

This is certainly not the behaviour you would expect from a university and I am frankly amazed that they are doing this to their own students. However if it is done within the discipline framework of the university and the students have signed on to follow that code then I would expect that their choices are limited to either paying it or dropping out and finding a better university to attend.

Correct but it does not stop there. It decays into an isotope with a 246k year half life and so on down a decay chain which eventually ends at lead.