Ah but it is broken. For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit which is then further compounded by the fact that there are 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint and only 16 in a US pint. As such it is a completely broken unit system you not only have to memorize an insane number of relationships between units you even have to remember whose imperial-based unit scheme you are using.

However, what makes it s truly broken unit system is that it uses the unit pound for both mass and weight. Yes there have been "hacks" of the system to bring them inline with physical reality so you have the "avoirdupois pound" meaning a mass and the "pound" meaning force. However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass? If you need to tweak your unit system to make it consistent with physics that's not really a good sign is it?

If that's still not enough to convince you that there is a problem then consider that there are only three countries in the world still using the old imperial-based system: Liberia, Burma and the USA. There are not many things that practically the entire planet agree upon but apparent metric units is one of them and it is not without good reason!

Yes...and no. They can be indirectly detected by requiring conservation of momentum in a plane transverse to the beam. This is not as good as actually seeing them but we can easily reconstruct W boson decays which involve neutrinos and we can even measure the W boson mass although it is an incredibly complex analysis.

That's easy to fix - boost them to ~260 GeV and they will last long enough to make a 1,600 km journey. It's the 1,600 km of vacuum pipe and focussing magnets that is the real problem.

Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.

I'd be careful about complaining about the food it prints to the cook. It probably will not be long before someone figures out how to make it print an edible gun.

Thanks for the link - no surprise there. This is what I find maddening about the climate debate: it is full of people who are willing misrepresent or omit data to support their preconceived bias. As an outsider to the field this makes it impossible to tell which articles contain real science and which contained the cherry-picked data to support the author's viewpoint.

Not always. Look at Google's tax avoidance in the UK. To skip paying UK tax all the deals are negotiated by people in the UK but the final act of agreeing to the the sale is done by someone in Ireland. So now your simple law which is "you get taxed where the sale takes place" suddenly has to sprout a whole ton of rules about how it defines where the deal takes place to avoid Google's tactic of doing everything in the UK except the last part.

The problem is not always that governments have written laws with loopholes in them it is that corporations will twist even the simplest things, like where a deal takes place, and use it to avoid paying tax. They would run rings around any simply stated tax code. Part (but not all ) of the reason most country's tax laws are a nightmare is to stamp out the most egregious abuses.

Yes but in these cases we have the 4-momenta measured of most, if not all, the particle in the decay and so can reconstruct the invariant mass of the decaying particle along with other properties like charge and spin. Saying that a massively complex and not fully understood system like the galaxy is producing more positrons than we think it should is a very, very different from saying that we see a mass resonance at a particular value.

For example if instead of showing a mass peak when looking at Higgs to Z boson to muon decays ATLAS has just claimed that there was an 5 sigma excess of high energy muons over what was expected nobody would believe that we had found the Higgs: it might be the Higgs or it might be some background feature that we did not understand. Once you can show that you have 2 muons and 2 anti-muons with one pair give a Z boson mass and the total mass of all 4 producing a peak at 125 GeV/c2 over 5 sigma above the background you then have enough evidence to claim discovery of a new, electrically neutral particle. That is the level of detail which is going to be needed before anyone believes that you have found Dark Matter.

What makes this funnier is that it is true! Nobody will really believe that the AMS positron signal is from Dark Matter until we have discovered the Dark Matter itself. It may useful in giving us an idea of where to search. Indeed the earlier discovery by PAMELA of the signal AMS is studying already lead to new models for DM which can explain the lack of anti-protons.

Any ideas how you can do that without coming up with a legal code so hopelessly complex that nobody can possibly follow it? Your position also implies that you have no real objections to highly immoral, but technically legal, activities that international companies get up to e.g. running slave-wage sweat shops in third world countries, unsafe factories etc. Should we really not expect companies to behave in a moral and ethical fashion even if not compelled to do so by law? They get up to worse legal allowed things than tax evasion!

Completely true and the government certainly shoulders some of the blame but they are also stuck in a very hard place. They could certainly change the tax law but the problem is how? They are up against multi-national corporations who will do anything they can to avoid paying tax and have armies of lawyers and a global reach to do just that. It is hard to see how any tax law can actually stop these companies and billionaires without being so strict, severe or complex that it will hurt smaller companies.

I agree nobody should be expected to pay more tax voluntarily than the law allows but, at the same time, calling an individual or a house a company simply to avoid income tax or stamp duty is going completely against the spirit of the law. Yes government can pass laws to block each new loop hole but you'll end up with tax laws that fill a library and the cost of filing your taxes will soar. This, ultimately, is the problem with laws: there is always some way to circumvent them if you try hard enough. Fixing the law is not the issue here we need to fix the attitude of the companies and billionaires who have benefitted greatly from society and now need to contribute to it at at least the same rate as the rest of us.

It is not a mistaken impression. I regularly teach such courses and I (and the TAs) card each and every student in both the midterm and final exams. If other institutes don't more fool them.

They claim that global warming is man-made. This is a falsifiable claim: with enough understanding of the climate you can either find an alternative mechanism which is the cause of the heating or you can understand the man-made mechanism in enough detail that there is no room for doubt. This is not at all easy but there is no requirement that things be easily falsifiable.

The climate is a complex beast and disturbing it can easily cause local cooling even if the overall global trend is to warm up. For example if the melting Greenland ice cap dumps enough fresh water into the Atlantic to disrupt the Gulf Stream then northern Europe will get a LOT colder. If there are reasonable, verifiable mechanisms for local then it is not unreasonable to have local cooling caused by global heating.

If you want to attack this survey then there are far better way to do it: which journals did they use and are they reputable? were the search criteria biased in any way and were control samples using a random selection of articles without the initial selection bias checked for a consistent result? Even if the survey was completely unbiased in every way can you really draw any sensible conclusions from numbers of papers?

As a scientist what I truly find really objectionable though is that this is science! You should make up your mind based on evidence not on what other people's opinions are: this is not some popularity contest! Personally I think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and it is highly likely that humans are some or all of the reason behind it but don't believe me: I could easily be wrong! Listen to what the evidence is and make up your own mind.

The issue with "free" is not about how serious the students are it is about how serious the accreditation of those students is. Frankly I would not give any worth to a degree based only on online tests and assignments taken remotely. There is no way to guarantee that the person taking the tests is the person that they say they are. To do this you need some physical verification i.e. the exam has to be held where someone can physically verify who is taking the exam and that they are following the exam rules. You also need someone to setup a new exam each time and grade the responses: this is not "free" someone has to be paid to do this as well as develop and maintain the software to run the course, regularly update the course materials to e.g. make examples more relevant etc. etc.

In essence the old adage "you get what you pay for" applies. Online degrees may be a lot cheaper and, with physical verification of students for exams and important tests, they may gain value but those that remain free will likely have very little value attached to their accreditation. That does not mean that you cannot still learn a lot from such free courses but it will mean that you will have no paper to prove that you know the material. So, in essence, they would be the high tech equivalent of reading a book.

Well clearly Monsanto need to add DRM to their seeds because we can't have people buying seeds and then using them in an unlicensed fashion. I suppose the method that would work best in this case is to install a root kit.