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Comment Responsibility? (Score 2) 39

There once was a concept of taking responsibility for mistakes.

Right, so exactly which government ministers and civil servants responsible for the leak took responsibility and resigned? Staying in office until voted out while having the taxpayers pay to fund the clean up is not, in any way, shape or form taking responsibility.

Comment Depends on Laws (Score 2) 49

Why do your confidentiality agreements override your other agreements to the license holder of the software?

My understanding is that in many (most?) countries outside the US EULA's have no legal authority unless you agree to them before purchase. If you buy some software and then, after the fact, you then have to agree to some random crap in order to be able to run it that's not a legal contract so you have no agreement.

Comment BIPM (Score 1) 18

OK it it's something like 1/9,192,631,770 of a vibration of a cesium atom

This was decided by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures which manages SI units. However, this definition is no longer sufficient since Caesium clocks are much less accurate than the current generation of ion clocks like the one in the paper. I believe there is a process underway to redefine the second more precisely presumably using this new technology since the Caesium-based definition is no longer sufficiently accurate, so in this case you are more worried about precision since your accuracy is limited by the definition.

In terms of measuring the precision I suspect they do this by measuring the stability of the frequency produced. Naively I'd do this by having two clocks produce signals and then have them interfere and look for changes in the itnerference pattern since if one frequency changes relative to the other it should produce easily observed changes. However, I do not work in this area and at this level of precision they may have much better ways to do things but I suspect, whatever the actual method, it will be comparing two of the same clock against each other and looking for frequency drifts between them since if the frequency changes it will affect the precision.

Comment Fairness is hard to agree on (Score 1) 62

Also...why in fuck's sake is there an ACM conference about "fairness"?

Probably because while we all agree that society should be "fair" we all have very different ideas of what "fair" means hence there is a need to discuss it. For example, if we take the extremes, the "equity-based" worldview defines fairness as equal outcomes regardless of situation or choices while the "equality-based" worldview takes fairness as treating everyone the same and leaves the outcomes entirely up to chance and the individual. I suspect/hope that despite the recent polarization of politics most of us are still on a spectrum between those two extremes hence the need to discuss what we collectively view as "fair".

Comment Re:Just below 0K (Score 1) 43

Given that perspective, the hottest possible temperature is when the air molecules are moving at about the speed of light.

No, that would be using the kinetic energy perspective to temperature not the more usual statitical mechanics mechanics approach. However, even then there is no upper bound on kinetic energy since, in the relativistic regime it becomes (gamma*mc^2 - mc^2) where gamma = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/v^2) so as v tends to c (the speed of light in vacuo) gamma become infinite so there is no known upper bound.

Comment Relativistic Kinetic Energy (Score 3, Informative) 43

The formula for KE you give only applies to Newtonian mechanics. As you aproach the speed of light you find that space and time do not behanve the same and so you definition of velocity has to change to make any sense. The result is that relativistic kinetic energy has the formulaL
KE = gamma*mc^2 - mc^2
where m is the mass, c the speed of light and gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where v is your classical newtonian velocity. Hence as v tends towards c, gamma tends to infiinity and so there is no known upper bound on kinetic energy.

If you have any doubts about this then just remember that the LHC accelerates protons to 7 TeV. If your classical formula held it would be impossible to accelerate them to an energy greater than about 500 MeV, i.e. we have exceeded that limit by a factor of 14,000.

Comment Science a Global Endeavour (Score 1) 60

The US had little to no competition long before WW2.

Hardly. The US was definitely gaining rapidly before WW2 but Europe, and particularly the British Empire, was still very much the world's superpower. WW2 ended the empire and caused massive damage throughout Europe allowing the US to take the lead.

Regardless of that though science is a global endeavour and the knowledge gained benefits all of humanity. None of us will be better off if the US science program is diminished because it will mean less science is being done.

Comment Re:Existing instruments give us a data firehose (Score 1) 60

It's not as if the CMB is going to evaporate or something.

No it isn't but there are countries other than the US doing research and they are not going to wait around for you to get your act together. Those funding such research will attract the brightest minds from around the globe and it will be there that the discoveries are made, including the spin-off breakthroughs that come from pushing technology to its limit in the name of research.

Once the US drops the ball and gets behind on the science and technology curve it is going to find it extremely hard to take the lead again.

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