That was religious disparaging, not racial.

Studies don't prove things. Studies fail to disprove things. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it certainly is consistent with a theory of causation. It's also consistent with the theory that the purported effect is actually the cause, and the cause is the effect.

Oh, wait. The article specifically said, " those who could no longer legally buy cannabis did better in their studies" (emphasis mine), so cancel my parent post..

I don't think the purpose of this article is to convince lawmakers to make marijuana illegal, but rather to convince university students to not smoke pot.

Not everyone on /. is in the USA, you know.

Why don't you hire women?

So, was there a non-disclosure agreement? You don't have a statutory right to not have your ideas stolen.

Because history shows us that it turns out bad. When bigots are a small minority, it's ok to let the free market deal with the problem. When they are in the majority, or when they wield a majority of the power, the free market gets ugly. Just look at pre-civil rights era segregation.

Surely, this situation has come up thousands of times already. I thought the precedent was that it is basically legal.

This experiment measures the power level where spontaneous emission becomes comparable to stimulated emission.

You have a similar situation in a laser. A laser works on the principle of stimulated emission. When you pass laser light of an appropriate frequency through an excited laser cavity, the light is amplified, since the light stimulates nearby particles to emit more light. So the light grows exponentially with the length of some cavity until saturating (by fully de-exciting the cavity). But, where does the initial "seed" light come from in a laser? The laser cavity also emits light via spontaneous emission. So what you have is some combination of spontaneous and stimulated emission. The stimulated emission ramps up exponentially and dwarfs the spontaneous emission, which is always present.

Stimulated emission can be treated using classical mechanics by treating the medium as an amplifier. But spontaneous emission must be treated quantum mechanically. Of course, stimulated emission can also be treated with quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics is valid all the time, but classical mechanics is only valid above a certain point.

That is a totally different phenomenon.

I don't think this work directly puts any limit on the size of a quantum computer. But the larger the computer, the harder it will be to keep the computer from coupling to environmental vacuum modes, which destroy the interference pattern.

80 mW of pump laser intensity. I don't know how many photon pairs that generates in the photonic crystal.

Robots do what humans ask them to do. Robots don't need laws. Humans have laws for dealing with other people, and this includes treatment of their property.

You are still free to sign the contract. The state just makes it so that you are free to ignore the contract you have signed. Bam. Even more freedom.