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Comment Speed of Evolution (Score 1) 564

And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us.

Not unless something radical happens with evolution. It would be more like a viking, anglo-saxon or celt from the year 1028 hanging around us. They may have different standards of acceptable behaviour but they would likely quickly learn how to fit into modern society because they are no less intelligent than we are. In fact they might quite possibly more intelligent on average given that they had no safety labels or health and safety inspectors to reduce attrition at the bottom end of the spectrum.

Comment Re:Email Insecure (Score 1) 346

You are wrong. email can be any level of security you want.

Only if you control the entire network and all the servers used. This is not really practical in 99.9% of the use cases of email since it means you need to form a separate email network, isolated from the outside world to prevent any forwarding over insecure networks or to insecure servers.

Comment Re:Different from other revolution celebrations (Score 4, Informative) 340

Given the significant French involvement it was hardly a civil war but rather a rebellion aided by a foreign power which, being successful, gets called a revolution. In fact the French accumulated such a large debt helping you that it is considered as a cause of the French Revolution (another successful rebellion) so it might be considered polite to remember that they were at least there. After all if it weren't for their help, instead of "freedom fries" you'd probably be eating chips.

Comment Email Insecure (Score 5, Insightful) 346

Through a combination of carelessness and cluelessness, this employee managed to put hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of customer funds at risk.

Sending information like this via email is where the mistake happened, not mistyping the address. Email is not secure even if it is sent to the right address you have no control over how it gets there and it could be easily intercepted and read enroute. Their reputation loss has already occurred by admitting that they use email for highly sensitive information like this.

Comment Re:Relativistic Mass is fundamentally wrong (Score 1) 347

Even professors that don't like using that concept warn their grad students about it because it comes up in papers still

Not in particle physics - I've never seen that notation used: 'm' always means the invariant mass. Perhaps if you go back to the 1950's but then you are really using textbooks and not papers and again they use invariant mass. If you write momentum as 'mv' I bet you would not find a single physicist in any reputable particle physics group that would think you meant it as a relativistic expression.

Other text books ranging from Coh-Tannoudjio to multiple modern physics and university level intro physics textbooks still stick with the relativistic mass system when glossing over stuff.

Rubbish. The intro texts typically introduce relativistic mass and then describe it as an incorrect and flawed concept (often citing Einstein) and then never, or rarely, mention it again. Senior undergrad particle texts never even mention the concept nor do the grad level texts or modern papers.

And the Lagrangian for that is Lorentz invariant, but that doesn't mean energy is invariant under Lorentz transformations...

Correct but a particle's mass comes from the energy it has in its rest frame which IS an invariant quantity and which is determined by the Higgs coupling for fundamental particles.

Comment Moral Solution (Score 2) 305

Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?

Even in this situation it still does not make it ethical to fudge the data and lie: you simply shut up and say nothing. To know whether it would be ethical to reveal the truth you need to know the consequence of keeping quiet. For example if you found that a certain company was in financial trouble but still had a chance to pull through (and were acting to maximize that chance without dragging in new investors) you might keep quiet to help avoid financial disaster for those affected. However it would still be wrong to fudge the data and publish a report claiming that they were financially sound.

Comment LHC Magnets (Score 1) 73

Better magnetic "mirrors" and/or "lenses" for focusing beams in things like the LHC or even just an electron microscope?

Actually it is not the focussing magnets for the LHC but more the bending magnets. Doubling the field strength will roughly double the energy we could reach. However you have to be able to make several tens of kilometres of these magnets for that which means they have to be incredibly stable otherwise the machine will not work. Currently we use 9.6T bending magnets - this is no where near a world record but stability is very important.

Comment Re:Relativistic Mass is fundamentally wrong (Score 1) 347

Try using F=d/dt mv ...

Yes...and that does not work at all for relativity since you are missing the gamma factor.

F=ma doesn't work naively in any case where the mass is not constant, relativistic or not.

True but it doesn't work even when mass is constant e.g. for an instant of time under relativity because the 'gamma' factor is a correction to the velocity, and here you have acceleration so there is no simple gamma factor. You are also wrong that it is purely pedagogical because at a fundamental level we know that e.g. the mass of an electron is due to its coupling to the Higgs field. This coupling does not become larger with an increase in energy hence the electron mass remains constant. Still not convinced? Einstein himself argued against the concept.

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