Uranium isn't particularly radioactive and what it emits from radioactive decay isn't particularly dangerous (mostly alphas, which are blocked by everything, including your skin and a couple inches of air) - it has a long half life, but there's millions of tons of the stuff all over the planet and you aren't dead yet. Most Geiger counters will go 'nuts' at almost anything that's big enough to handle, since they're usually designed to find trace amounts of radioactive material; a large lump of anything will test them effectively, but uraninite is fairly safe to handle so it's a good choice.
Uranium *fission* is dangerous but that doesn't happen unless somebody wants it to. Nuclear reactor waste fuel is dangerously radioactive primarily due to the assorted byproducts of fission that are still stuck in it (and most of those will decay in a few months or years - highly radioactive things have short half lives, by definition).
Uranium is a dangerous element to deal with because most of the forms it's used in happen to be extremely poisonous without needing to decay. Getting it into a non-toxic form is a good idea. (Shoving it back into a reactor is a better idea, but it's cheaper to bury it than to reprocess it)
Actually productivity per worker per hour is lower in communist countries then in capitalist countries. Closest data I could find real fast was GDP per capita per annum
Even that doesn't particularly prove anything, since GDP is only a summary estimate of financial value, based on a whole raft of assumptions (some of which don't hold, like the assumption that a given item has the same value to all people at a given point in time, which is why it's only an estimate). It's useful for getting an idea about what's going on but you can rarely prove anything with it. This is basically more circumstancial evidence that says 'communism is unlikely to work better than capitalism'.
The man may be too incompetent to find me and get me, but I'm pretty sure that the corporations are out to get... my money. This whole "banning food and liquids" thing is waaay too convinient since that means you're now forced to buy the insanely overpriced stuff that is sold by the airline on board the plane. It's almost certain that the airlines jumped on the opportunity to eliminate one of their major sources of lost revenue. This clearly doesn't make you safer ["oh no! he's got an exploding sandwich! quick, hand me a butter knife"] but it definitely does make them richer.
There is no reasonable defense that will work against an unreasonable enemy. The sooner that is acknowleged the sooner many will realize just what a major problem it truly is.
Indeed. The major problem being that the government is reacting to this by using unreasonable defences that still don't work against the unreasonable enemies.
It's unclear how anyone is "dragged into it". It's more that other countries, especially the UK and US have chosen to get involved.
I never chose to get involved. Throughout history, the western countries have mostly been dragged into these things by small groups of so-called 'leaders' - they might be elected representatives, aristocracy, the Vatican, or whatever, but I can't think of any occasions where the country as a whole particularly wanted to get involved in one of those messes.
The top500 list is nonsense. It is based off of 1 benchmark (linpack.)
The other problem with it is that it only counts systems that people want you to know exist. For example, it's a safe bet that the NSA has multiple systems that would qualify but are not listed. There are probably a significant number of systems like that in the world - so calling it the 'top 500' is just silly.
Certainly, there needs to be a better economic balance, but how do you go about creating such a thing?
A good start would be to stop our corporations from going over there and enthusiastically screwing over the local people in order to get their stock to go up a quarter of a point. The big multinationals are busy making money by squeezing those people, because local laws don't stop them and our laws don't apply to their actions over there.
The best answer I can come up with is simple desperation.
Another answer, which is true for some terrorists (although not many), is sheer religious loathing. They hate the existence of people who don't follow the rules of their religion and strike out against them. The objective of such people is essentially to wreck the way of life of their targets.
In the middle east, they've been fighting wars over this on a regular basis for as far back as recorded history goes. The rest of the world occasionally gets dragged into it. We don't see much of them because mostly they hate the people near them far more than the ones in remote western countries... but sometimes a group of them comes over here to cause trouble.
There isn't much you can do about these people, although it should be noted that restricting freedom in the western countries is their objective, so creating such restrictions ourselves is in fact a form of surrendering.
We know that communism doesn't really work to well
Actually, we don't. You have to realise that the Soviet experiment didn't show very much - those countries were poor before they tried communism, they were poor while they were trying it, they were poor when they scrapped it and they're still poor now. About all this shows is that communism doesn't solve the problem of being poor. Any system of government would have a hard time surviving in those economic conditions. Certainly their attempts were fairly corrupt, but so are most governments.
We suspect that capitalism is more effective than communism largely because capitalism is based on greed, while communism is based on altriusm, and there are more greedy people in the world than altruistic ones. But that's just a theory.
Personally I don't think it makes a great deal of difference. The problem is rarely that you've got the wrong sort of government. The problem is usually that you've got the wrong sort of people.
I don't know whether it's true about this particular attack or not, but it seems highly likely that smart terrorists will now be attacking indirectly through security hysteria. If you blow up a few planes, a few people get killed or scared, but life goes on as normal. If you set up an elaborate plot to blow up stuff that almost works but is stopped at the last minute through a combination of tip-offs and heightened security... then you massively degrade the quality of life for citizens of your target country for years to come, due to the new restrictions. Travelling on an airplane just got even more hellish than it already was, which will frustrate and inconvinience people for years to come - and that's just the start of it. There will be more laws passed as a result of this, 'cracking down' on terrorists and innocents alike.
The terrorists are being successful in setting the government and security staff against the citizens of their target countries. Corruption inevitably increases as the government gains power, morale is low, and our way of life is generally disrupted. If the terrorists want to make us stop starting wars in their country then this will eventually erode our ability or interest in doing so (as we'll be too concerned with fighting our own government); if they just hate us for religious reasons then they're making good progress at making us suffer.
If I were a terrorist, I would keep doing this - and also branch out into randomly attempting to hit rail, road, and sea links.
Reliability is. Most of the wireless networks and peripherals I've seen have been randomly unreliable at some point or at least more difficult to configure such that they work reliably.
This is the same problem as speed (contention for limited bandwidth in a given region of space), and ultimately it all comes down to the one big reason why wires are better when practical:
You can always lay another wire. You can't create more bandwidth in the air.
About a month ago, I saw in a shop a device even more blatantly pointless than this NIC. It was an "A/V USB cable". Gold-plated.
As I understand it, the primary reason for this is because a tiny layer of gold plating is cheaper than making the connector out of stainless steel (and you don't want to have any contact surface - analog or digital - made out of a metal that corrodes just from humidity, since that causes ignorant people to return the product to the store).
ping doesn't put much load on your networking stack. Try that with large UDP (or better yet, TCP) frames, at a rate which actually saturates your network, on a gigabit network - and you'll start to see what network card latency is all about (hint: you'll never get the last 300Mbit out of that gigabit network without doing something about the latency of your network card and kernel's networking stack).
Not sure why it's relevant to games, but low-latency high-intelligence network cards are very important for heavy duty servers.
one might have 'the next terror act (tm)' sitting somewhere on a collection system
One almost certainly does, given that pretty much all the 'terror acts' (including the whole 9/11 thing) were sitting somewhere on a collection system for considerable time before they happened. The intelligence agencies don't have a problem with data collection and haven't for years. Their problem has for a long time been that they don't know how to handle the data they have already collected.
(From this we can conclude that all these new, intrusive, expensive data collection programs are boondoggles, doing nothing more than shuffling funding around and increasing government power)
On the other hand, we have considerable evidence that we're alone in the galaxy (other galaxies are too far away to know anything about).
Wikipedia misses the most obvious answer to the Fermi paradox - that aliens are out there, know we exist, and are frankly too disgusted by a race that would invent slashdot to have any desire to communicate with us. In fact, they're purposefully avoiding us because they hate the idea of getting embroiled in long purposeless debates about subjects that don't matter with people who don't know anything about them.
They have a good point. If I were an alien, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with humanity either.
My concern with complex mathematical models has always been that nearly any phenomena can be perfectly described given enough variables -- pretty much any curve, any pattern, any shape. In biology, when we try to fit models to data, we have to be very careful not to just keep trying to curve fit with more and more complex equations, because in the end we will be left with something that is not biologically very descriptive -- it leaves us with little understanding of the underlying biology.
The objective of scientific research is to find ways to make useful predictions (almost by definition; if a field of study cannot make predictions or is not useful, it's not science - it's philosophy or art something like that). If you can generate a sufficiently accurate prediction, then the method by which you attain it is immaterial. 'Understanding' the processes is one highly effective way to discover such things, but it's not the only way. These modelling techniques are a good way to bridge gaps in understanding and make accurate predictions. Understanding things is more important for 'pure research' goals - extending the foundations on which you can construct new predictions. There's no reason for concern so long as you keep these things clear and don't confuse them; they have nothing in common except that they're both ways of constructing a prediction.
However, I am unable to think of a reason why predicting the patterns of leopard spots could be useful, unless you're trying to engage in some form of leopard topiary or need to compress a large number of images of leopards.
So when I hear these guys had to tweak parameters to make the reaction-diffusion equation fit the data, I am left wondering what biological factors those extra parameters are supposed to define?
They aren't supposed to define anything. Attempting to do so would be confusing 'modelling' with 'understanding'. For an analogy: you can get mince out of a mincing machine, but no matter how hard you look, you are not going to get any mincing machines out of the mince.
Those parameters are almost certainly related to some real-world process, but the relationship is very unlikely to be a direct mapping of parameters to factors - and no amount of staring at the equations will result in understanding the unknown expression that defines this relationship. Most likely they are an approximation of the result of the true expression, sufficiently accurate to describe all the real-world cases but otherwise uninformative.
The SEC operates extremely slowly. It could be years before they get around to doing anything.
Also, they're quite busy and tend to ignore companies that are either small or dying, on the basis that a dying company is a problem which will resolve itself if ignored, and they have more important things to do.
The SEC and the courts. It's what they're for. They don't need to remove the CEOs of unsuccessful companies - those are self-resolving problems. It's the criminal management of successful companies that needs forcibly eliminating.
Remember, Enron was a sucessful company with a share price that was rising.
(This comment has nothing in particular to do with Apple, it's just an answer to the question asked)
Their research seems to deal mostly with the third problem, which is one of the biggest barriers to use in real life. Many of the algorithms used on these types of problems are NP, or require ridiculous amounts of (expensive) labeled data to train from. Also there are problems with generalization and overfitting.
They're often convergence algorithms - you run them until the answer is sufficiently accurate for your purposes. The problem is therefore a combination of 'more speed' and 'more accuracy', combined with the need to construct a topic model (a conceptual description of what a 'topic' actually is) that reflects the structure of the text closely enough to say something useful.
There is no freeware software that can compete with this type of algorithm under these conditions - over 300,000 articles in just a few hours.
Most research software is available under free licenses. This paper is using a method based on Blei's LDA model, which is available under the GPL, combined with some existing code for name recognition to do some preprocessing (Lingua::EN::Tagger, GPL), and the Griffiths/Steyvers method for using Gibbs sampling to model LDA (I think it's this stuff, free for non-commercial use only). The actual topic modelling in this paper is nothing new (it's a couple years old now and widely known); the paper is about preprocessing for better accuracy. Actually it's not a bad idea, but it's not a particularly interesting one and doesn't have much to do with the subject of topic modelling.
All that being said, I'm waiting for the paper, along with more technical specifics, to be released so I can really see what this is about
RTFA. There's a link to the paper in it. If you want the executive summary:
Use Lingua::EN::Tagger to preprocess proper nouns into single tokens.
Use LDA with Gibbs sampling to identify topics and classify documents into them.
As far as I can tell, this is about publicity, and 'proving' to non-researchers that it can be done (which just means doing what researchers do all the time, and showing it to the press). Presumably they want more funding.
Whenever they did that, members of the other party were watching. That's the whole point of a paper system really - any idiot who can read (so that's about 50% of the US population) can verify an individual step, and nobody can do anything without a bunch of them seeing. The Diebold system discards all this verification in the name of 'efficiency'.
Depends how it's run. The good non-profits run everything as an open book - all accounts published, all decisions made in public view, the only things kept secret are the identities of donors who don't want to be named. It's impossible to corrupt one of those and hide it.
Government-driven non-profits that keep everything secret, like a typical corporation, are easily manipulated but then they're often pork-barrel affairs from the outset - a way of shifting money to people for political reasons.
(Non-government non-profits, like conventional charities, are not considered here - only those which are based around government contracts and/or instructions)
I feel like I probably haven't listed all the points where this voting machine chain of trust can break down.
Have the machine generate a paper ballot. Have the voter examine the paper ballot and verify its correctness, then place it in the ballot box. The ballot is watched at all times by members of all interested parties, from deposit to recount (standard procedure for elections in most of the world).
Where's the trust here? You couldn't fake this without the complicity of the losing parties. The very notion that an election requires you trust the system is a lie, designed to consolidate control in the hands of the 'trusted'.
Apple don't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems (as defined in antitrust law), so they can bundle whatever they like with theirs. Microsoft do have a monopoly so they are restricted. That's what antitrust law is all about.
Apple might qualify as a monopoly for the iPod, which would mean they are restricted in what they can bundle with iPods. But they can do what they like with OSX.
Slashdot Mirror
Uranium isn't particularly radioactive and what it emits from radioactive decay isn't particularly dangerous (mostly alphas, which are blocked by everything, including your skin and a couple inches of air) - it has a long half life, but there's millions of tons of the stuff all over the planet and you aren't dead yet. Most Geiger counters will go 'nuts' at almost anything that's big enough to handle, since they're usually designed to find trace amounts of radioactive material; a large lump of anything will test them effectively, but uraninite is fairly safe to handle so it's a good choice.
Uranium *fission* is dangerous but that doesn't happen unless somebody wants it to. Nuclear reactor waste fuel is dangerously radioactive primarily due to the assorted byproducts of fission that are still stuck in it (and most of those will decay in a few months or years - highly radioactive things have short half lives, by definition).
Uranium is a dangerous element to deal with because most of the forms it's used in happen to be extremely poisonous without needing to decay. Getting it into a non-toxic form is a good idea. (Shoving it back into a reactor is a better idea, but it's cheaper to bury it than to reprocess it)
Even that doesn't particularly prove anything, since GDP is only a summary estimate of financial value, based on a whole raft of assumptions (some of which don't hold, like the assumption that a given item has the same value to all people at a given point in time, which is why it's only an estimate). It's useful for getting an idea about what's going on but you can rarely prove anything with it. This is basically more circumstancial evidence that says 'communism is unlikely to work better than capitalism'.
The relevant issues with GDP and similar measures of income are discussed in more detail over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNP#National_income_
The man may be too incompetent to find me and get me, but I'm pretty sure that the corporations are out to get... my money. This whole "banning food and liquids" thing is waaay too convinient since that means you're now forced to buy the insanely overpriced stuff that is sold by the airline on board the plane. It's almost certain that the airlines jumped on the opportunity to eliminate one of their major sources of lost revenue. This clearly doesn't make you safer ["oh no! he's got an exploding sandwich! quick, hand me a butter knife"] but it definitely does make them richer.
Indeed. The major problem being that the government is reacting to this by using unreasonable defences that still don't work against the unreasonable enemies.
I never chose to get involved. Throughout history, the western countries have mostly been dragged into these things by small groups of so-called 'leaders' - they might be elected representatives, aristocracy, the Vatican, or whatever, but I can't think of any occasions where the country as a whole particularly wanted to get involved in one of those messes.
The other problem with it is that it only counts systems that people want you to know exist. For example, it's a safe bet that the NSA has multiple systems that would qualify but are not listed. There are probably a significant number of systems like that in the world - so calling it the 'top 500' is just silly.
A good start would be to stop our corporations from going over there and enthusiastically screwing over the local people in order to get their stock to go up a quarter of a point. The big multinationals are busy making money by squeezing those people, because local laws don't stop them and our laws don't apply to their actions over there.
Another answer, which is true for some terrorists (although not many), is sheer religious loathing. They hate the existence of people who don't follow the rules of their religion and strike out against them. The objective of such people is essentially to wreck the way of life of their targets.
In the middle east, they've been fighting wars over this on a regular basis for as far back as recorded history goes. The rest of the world occasionally gets dragged into it. We don't see much of them because mostly they hate the people near them far more than the ones in remote western countries... but sometimes a group of them comes over here to cause trouble.
There isn't much you can do about these people, although it should be noted that restricting freedom in the western countries is their objective, so creating such restrictions ourselves is in fact a form of surrendering.
Actually, we don't. You have to realise that the Soviet experiment didn't show very much - those countries were poor before they tried communism, they were poor while they were trying it, they were poor when they scrapped it and they're still poor now. About all this shows is that communism doesn't solve the problem of being poor. Any system of government would have a hard time surviving in those economic conditions. Certainly their attempts were fairly corrupt, but so are most governments.
We suspect that capitalism is more effective than communism largely because capitalism is based on greed, while communism is based on altriusm, and there are more greedy people in the world than altruistic ones. But that's just a theory.
Personally I don't think it makes a great deal of difference. The problem is rarely that you've got the wrong sort of government. The problem is usually that you've got the wrong sort of people.
I don't know whether it's true about this particular attack or not, but it seems highly likely that smart terrorists will now be attacking indirectly through security hysteria. If you blow up a few planes, a few people get killed or scared, but life goes on as normal. If you set up an elaborate plot to blow up stuff that almost works but is stopped at the last minute through a combination of tip-offs and heightened security... then you massively degrade the quality of life for citizens of your target country for years to come, due to the new restrictions. Travelling on an airplane just got even more hellish than it already was, which will frustrate and inconvinience people for years to come - and that's just the start of it. There will be more laws passed as a result of this, 'cracking down' on terrorists and innocents alike. The terrorists are being successful in setting the government and security staff against the citizens of their target countries. Corruption inevitably increases as the government gains power, morale is low, and our way of life is generally disrupted. If the terrorists want to make us stop starting wars in their country then this will eventually erode our ability or interest in doing so (as we'll be too concerned with fighting our own government); if they just hate us for religious reasons then they're making good progress at making us suffer. If I were a terrorist, I would keep doing this - and also branch out into randomly attempting to hit rail, road, and sea links.
This is the same problem as speed (contention for limited bandwidth in a given region of space), and ultimately it all comes down to the one big reason why wires are better when practical:
You can always lay another wire. You can't create more bandwidth in the air.
ping doesn't put much load on your networking stack. Try that with large UDP (or better yet, TCP) frames, at a rate which actually saturates your network, on a gigabit network - and you'll start to see what network card latency is all about (hint: you'll never get the last 300Mbit out of that gigabit network without doing something about the latency of your network card and kernel's networking stack).
Not sure why it's relevant to games, but low-latency high-intelligence network cards are very important for heavy duty servers.
One almost certainly does, given that pretty much all the 'terror acts' (including the whole 9/11 thing) were sitting somewhere on a collection system for considerable time before they happened. The intelligence agencies don't have a problem with data collection and haven't for years. Their problem has for a long time been that they don't know how to handle the data they have already collected.
(From this we can conclude that all these new, intrusive, expensive data collection programs are boondoggles, doing nothing more than shuffling funding around and increasing government power)
Wikipedia misses the most obvious answer to the Fermi paradox - that aliens are out there, know we exist, and are frankly too disgusted by a race that would invent slashdot to have any desire to communicate with us. In fact, they're purposefully avoiding us because they hate the idea of getting embroiled in long purposeless debates about subjects that don't matter with people who don't know anything about them.
They have a good point. If I were an alien, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with humanity either.
The objective of scientific research is to find ways to make useful predictions (almost by definition; if a field of study cannot make predictions or is not useful, it's not science - it's philosophy or art something like that). If you can generate a sufficiently accurate prediction, then the method by which you attain it is immaterial. 'Understanding' the processes is one highly effective way to discover such things, but it's not the only way. These modelling techniques are a good way to bridge gaps in understanding and make accurate predictions. Understanding things is more important for 'pure research' goals - extending the foundations on which you can construct new predictions. There's no reason for concern so long as you keep these things clear and don't confuse them; they have nothing in common except that they're both ways of constructing a prediction.
However, I am unable to think of a reason why predicting the patterns of leopard spots could be useful, unless you're trying to engage in some form of leopard topiary or need to compress a large number of images of leopards.
They aren't supposed to define anything. Attempting to do so would be confusing 'modelling' with 'understanding'. For an analogy: you can get mince out of a mincing machine, but no matter how hard you look, you are not going to get any mincing machines out of the mince.
Those parameters are almost certainly related to some real-world process, but the relationship is very unlikely to be a direct mapping of parameters to factors - and no amount of staring at the equations will result in understanding the unknown expression that defines this relationship. Most likely they are an approximation of the result of the true expression, sufficiently accurate to describe all the real-world cases but otherwise uninformative.
The SEC operates extremely slowly. It could be years before they get around to doing anything.
Also, they're quite busy and tend to ignore companies that are either small or dying, on the basis that a dying company is a problem which will resolve itself if ignored, and they have more important things to do.
The SEC and the courts. It's what they're for. They don't need to remove the CEOs of unsuccessful companies - those are self-resolving problems. It's the criminal management of successful companies that needs forcibly eliminating.
Remember, Enron was a sucessful company with a share price that was rising.
(This comment has nothing in particular to do with Apple, it's just an answer to the question asked)
They're often convergence algorithms - you run them until the answer is sufficiently accurate for your purposes. The problem is therefore a combination of 'more speed' and 'more accuracy', combined with the need to construct a topic model (a conceptual description of what a 'topic' actually is) that reflects the structure of the text closely enough to say something useful.
Most research software is available under free licenses. This paper is using a method based on Blei's LDA model, which is available under the GPL, combined with some existing code for name recognition to do some preprocessing (Lingua::EN::Tagger, GPL), and the Griffiths/Steyvers method for using Gibbs sampling to model LDA (I think it's this stuff, free for non-commercial use only). The actual topic modelling in this paper is nothing new (it's a couple years old now and widely known); the paper is about preprocessing for better accuracy. Actually it's not a bad idea, but it's not a particularly interesting one and doesn't have much to do with the subject of topic modelling.
RTFA. There's a link to the paper in it. If you want the executive summary:
Use Lingua::EN::Tagger to preprocess proper nouns into single tokens.
Use LDA with Gibbs sampling to identify topics and classify documents into them.
As far as I can tell, this is about publicity, and 'proving' to non-researchers that it can be done (which just means doing what researchers do all the time, and showing it to the press). Presumably they want more funding.
The voter reads the paper before handing it in. One would expect them to know whether or not it says the right thing.
Whenever they did that, members of the other party were watching. That's the whole point of a paper system really - any idiot who can read (so that's about 50% of the US population) can verify an individual step, and nobody can do anything without a bunch of them seeing. The Diebold system discards all this verification in the name of 'efficiency'.
Depends how it's run. The good non-profits run everything as an open book - all accounts published, all decisions made in public view, the only things kept secret are the identities of donors who don't want to be named. It's impossible to corrupt one of those and hide it.
Government-driven non-profits that keep everything secret, like a typical corporation, are easily manipulated but then they're often pork-barrel affairs from the outset - a way of shifting money to people for political reasons.
(Non-government non-profits, like conventional charities, are not considered here - only those which are based around government contracts and/or instructions)
Have the machine generate a paper ballot. Have the voter examine the paper ballot and verify its correctness, then place it in the ballot box. The ballot is watched at all times by members of all interested parties, from deposit to recount (standard procedure for elections in most of the world).
Where's the trust here? You couldn't fake this without the complicity of the losing parties. The very notion that an election requires you trust the system is a lie, designed to consolidate control in the hands of the 'trusted'.
Apple don't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems (as defined in antitrust law), so they can bundle whatever they like with theirs. Microsoft do have a monopoly so they are restricted. That's what antitrust law is all about.
Apple might qualify as a monopoly for the iPod, which would mean they are restricted in what they can bundle with iPods. But they can do what they like with OSX.
Why? TeX is not GPLed. Neither is Acrobat.