Not if Apple hard-codes the firmware to boot on only a single device with a single set of hardware IDs.
Replying to myself because I just realized that such changes are probably unnecessary. As I understand it, IPSW firmware binaries are already signed by Apple for use on a specific device at installation time. As far as I know, it isn't possible to pre-sign an IPSW for use on arbitrary devices. If Apple tells their signing servers to sign the IPSW only for use on a specific device, it will do so. More importantly, if Apple tells their signing servers to stop signing that firmware binary, it won't be possible for anyone to install that firmware on any device in the future even if they already have a copy of that firmware, though if they already have a signed copy, they could reinstall it on that same device, I think.
Oops. Typo caused by over-editing. I meant to say "And thanks to the hardware requiring firmware signed by Apple's key, nobody but Apple has the ability to make such firmware work on other devices."
1) a program "for that specific phone" is what the judge ordered, however if that program works on one phone, it will work on others regardless of the desires of Apple
Not if Apple hard-codes the firmware to boot on only a single device with a single set of hardware IDs. And thanks to the hardware requiring firmware by Apple's key, nobody but Apple has the ability to make such firmware work on other devices.
On the iPhone 5c (basically an iPhone 5 in a plastic case), they probably can. That's probably the last model that you could attack in that way, though.
The FBI should be glad it isn't an iPhone 5s or later. If it were, the crypto keys wouldn't be in the external NAND flash, but rather in the secure enclave, which is a small bit of flash silicon that's inside the CPU itself, and it may not even be possible to expose the flash without destroying it.
You're right, that's an unpopular opinion among people who don't profess faith in a magic being. The reason is that it's nonsense. It's perfectly possible to seek knowledge, appreciate beauty and "search for the exceptional in the mundane" without attributing it all to a magic father figure.
Certainly. You're misunderstanding me subtly. I'm not saying that being religious is a requirement for doing those things, but rather that doing those things tends to be almost a requirement for being religious, which means that people who are religious are more likely than nonreligious to exhibit those traits.
The claim is as ridiculous as religious people's claim that without religious belief there is no morality.
Clearly, morality can exist without religious beliefs. It is another question altogether whether morality would have developed (historically) in the absence of religious beliefs, and what that moral code would look like if it had. There might be a good sci-fi story in there somewhere.
Read the bible sometime. Nobody who wouldn't be called a psychopath in today's world would hold up the bible as a moral source unless they a) hadn't read it or b) were blinded by faith.
The Bible basically hits a reset button right at the beginning of the New Testament. Jesus threw out the old holy laws, including the parts of the Bible that you would say require being a psychopath to consider moral. Essentially, the last half is a giant retcon, and you're complaining about the old canon being objectionable. This is not to say that some people don't try to pick and choose parts of the OT and use them as a cudgel against women, minorities, gays, etc., but that just proves that even people who read the Bible can be ignorant of it.:-)
You mistake an iPhone's unlock code with the iPhone's encryption key. the iPhones do typically use a 4-6 digit pin as an unlock code. The user also has the ability to create a full alphanumeric password for the unlock code as well. However, that is simply the code that's used to unlock the actual full encryption key that is stored within dedicated crypto hardware. Apple uses a dedicated chip to store and process the encryption. They call this the Secure Enclave. The secure enclave stores a full 256-bit AES encryption key.
That's true for a modern iPhone (5s and later). This is a 5c, which is basically just an iPhone 5 with a plastic case. It doesn't have a secure enclave, so the key is stored (encrypted with the passcode) in the external flash part along with all the other data.
I think there is a hardware key that is burned into the CPU during manufacturing. If so, you can probably read that by uncapping the CPU and using an electron microscope on it. Not easy, but not impossible.
Equally though, in that case, the FBI can get into a dead person's iPhone by using their dead finger.
Only if they unlock the device and remove the passcode within 48 hours after the owner last used the device. Otherwise, that fingerprint won't do them any good.
It's not anywhere as impressive as it used to be...
You're inclined to understatement. If it is the 4-processor Cray X-MP, then it is approximately the same speed as the cell phone whose crypto key they're trying to crack....
I didn't think anyone still built interference engines, either, but apparently at least as of two years ago, a lot of smaller engines used interference designs. With that said, AFAIK, there's no technical reason that government safety standards couldn't mandate that electronic valve timing be used exclusively with non-interference designs. That would probably go a long way towards ridding the world of interference engines, at least in the long run, which would be IMO a good thing.
For that matter, the main reason that valves are designed the way they are designed is that they have to be operated mechanically using simple levers. With an electronically controlled valve, at least in principle, there's no reason the valve couldn't be built in such a way that it either:
Opens outwards
Opens by sliding
Opens by iris action
Any of those would eliminate the risk of the head colliding with the valves, and that last one could potentially also allow the ECU to individually adjust how much the valves open based on temperature, throttle, etc. much more precisely than any purely mechanical design, which might be beneficial in terms of fuel efficiency, noise, etc., or at least might allow them to eliminate external hardware that regulates airflow, thus reducing the overall cost of the engine.
That said, I am not an engine designer, so this is mostly speculation.
The current-gen Apple TV (at least) can turn on or off your TV set using that protocol. I'm not sure if it can detect the TV being turned off externally, though.
Downs is a bad example, since it involves an entire chromosome (thus "trisomy 21").
It's a step up in complexity, but probably not impossible. If you can build a virus that replaces or injects DNA fragments, you can probably do so in a way that limits it to DNA that matches a pattern that exists only in one of the three chromosomes, and then inject enough stop codons to keep that strand of DNA from creating any mRNA chains that are long enough to cause problems. Then again, I am not a geneticist, so I could be missing something.
And what if we can slumber for millions of years, lying deactivated until we reach something of interest? Even if there turns out there is no way to reach places faster than light, if we have the possibility to adapt ourselves accordingly, why wouldn't we? Although instant communication across thousands of lightyears would be nice, it's by no means a requirement for further colonization.
This is an interesting possibility, but I think that "slumber" might be overkill. You don't need to send actual humans there, just the building blocks needed to create humans.
So you might start by building a copy of the human genome, wrapped up as "junk genes" in mold. The mold goes into spore form, and gets frozen by the cold of space, remaining dormant until it arrives. You then modify the genetic trigger that fires when there are favorable conditions for life. Instead of causing the mold to go from spore form into actual mold, the trigger would instead change the stop codons to construct appropriate organelles (e.g. human mitochondria) by using some previously "junk" DNA to construct the human mitochondrial DNA, and then would subsequently change the stop codons again to make the human DNA be the primary DNA, leaving the mold and mitochondrial DNA disabled. After a few cell divisions, you'd basically have human cells, and I think that would be close enough.
Of course, I shudder to think what sort of conditions would be necessary for a human embryo to grow without a human womb. In practice, such a design would probably have to use a multi-stage process with multiple generations of self-replication, each of which builds progressively more complex structures, until you eventually get to something that can process oxygen and pump blood well enough for a human fetus to grow inside it, at which point it would produce one or more actual, pre-fertilized human eggs.
I'm not sure how practical such a concept would be, and I'm not sure if the cell membrane of a mold cell would be serviceable as a temporary housing for the contents of a human cell, but it would be pretty cool if somebody managed to pull it off. Combine that with androids to teach them human culture, and you have yourself a lifeboat.
Science has aspects of almost religious faith, too. This makes some issues hard to research, such as anthropogenic global warming. If anybody actually tried to present evidence contradicting that theory, they'd be utterly destroyed with vicious attacks before anybody even read the data. This doesn't do science any good, because it suppresses the search for truth.
But religion has aspects of the other kind, too. Just as special relativity challenged Newtonian mechanics and caused it to be tweaked under certain circumstances, religious understanding has adapted as scientific revelations have proven some of the details wrong. Most Christians don't believe that Genesis is literal truth, because most of them acknowledge evolution. Most Christians understand that the Bible's description of the Earth as a firm foundation doesn't really mean that it is fixed in space, thanks in large part to Galileo. Faith was tested, and the interpretation evolved, even though the fundamental belief in a creator remained the same.
What is dangerous, in either case, is a dogmatic literalist interpretation of anything, whether it is the Bible or scientific theories. The desire to find ways to keep from throwing away the old model has to be balanced by acknowledgement of its failings, or else there is no progress. On the other hand, the opposite of that—throwing away the old model too quickly in favor of a new model that may or may not be better—can also be dangerous. Balance is the key.
Looking at Google Maps, that particular hotel is off to the side from the runway by just a bit. At the end of the runway, the height limits include only the width of the runway and a small margin on either side. The farther away you get, the farther out the height limits spread, and the taller the height limits are. So it probably avoids the height limits because it isn't actually in the flight path.
With that said, if the runway got extended later, it is also possible that it was simply grandfathered in.:-)
You're missing the difference between proof and evidence. The smoke you smell in a forest could be perceived as evidence of a possible forest fire, but certainly does not prove such a fire exists. In much the same way, those with religious faith see evidence of God in the world around them, but that evidence is a far cry from being proof of God's existence.
In fact, I know this won't be a popular opinion around here, but I would argue that those with religious beliefs are more likely to achieve scientific breakthroughs than those without. Spiritual belief systems generally encourage people to look for God—to search for the exceptional in the mundane. This is the very same spirit of discovery that drives scientific progress. Without that spirit, science is tedious and uninspired. Science teaches us how to answer the questions. Religion teaches us to ask them in the first place.
But that's just my personal perspective. Different people approach science and religion in different ways and come to different conclusions. That diversity makes us stronger as a species, and prevents science from becoming a monoculture, which IMO is one of the greatest threats to progress imaginable.
By law, there are no tall buildings overlooking the ends of runways. A four-story building would typically have to be almost a quarter mile from the edge of the airport property, by my math, to comply with height regulations.
Below 10,000 ft, airplanes are travelling at less than 250 mph. At takeoff, it's closer to 175 mph for a jet like a 737. At less than a perpendicular angle, the rate of travel across a field of view is less than that. If a person holds their arm out they can point with a lot of precision -- it's a lot easier than tracking an object at the same distance with binoculars.
Exactly. What matters when it comes to tracking something is the speed at which the angle changes, not the speed at which the object is moving. This is a mistake that a lot of sci-fi writers make, often with painful consequences. Even if the airplane were moving at.9c (nine tenths the speed of light), as long as it was moving straight towards you, you could paint it trivially with any sort of laser, because it would always be at the same angle relative to your position. Its motion towards you would merely cause it to look more blue, and would cause it to rapidly grow in apparent size.
Now to be able to hit the actual window might require a lot of precision, but the reality is that slight motions over such a distance will cause it to jump around anyway, and it only has to hit the window for a moment to cause problems.
If the airport is equipped for autoland, many modern jets will take you right down to the ground, and I think that autoland capabilities are actually required for CAT III. As I understand it, you're still required to have a certain amount of visibility for a Cat III approach to ensure that the pilot would be capable of completing the landing in the event of an autopilot failure or whatever. That doesn't mean the pilot actually has to take over at those altitudes, just that conditions must be good enough to allow the pilot to do so safely.
For that matter, in theory there's a CAT IIIc with no visibility limitations whatsoever, provided that the aircraft supports autoland and that the airport has sufficient navigation beacons or whatever to allow the aircraft to auto-taxi right into the gate. I don't think any airports are equipped for that, though.
The questions is whether this religious belief slows or prevents some scientific research that would have been successful if not for religion.
It almost certainly does. It also speeds other scientific research that would have been ignored or would have gotten less attention if not for religion.
Religious people are wary of doing research into bigger and bigger bombs, more powerful rifles, more deadly ammo, etc. They'll work on autonomous cars, but are horrified by autonomous war drones. They're far more likely than non-religious people to try to come up with solutions for world hunger, technology to create clean drinking water for impoverished people (which will eventually be crucial for our planet's survival), cures for diseases that mainly affect people in poor countries, etc.
The real question should not be whether religion affects what research gets done, but rather whether those biases have a net positive or negative impact on the future of the human race. Personally, I think that religion and ethics have a net positive impact on science, though I will acknowledge that occasionally it has negative side effects, either intentionally or accidentally.
Abrahamic religions generally preach faith, which is the opposite of skepticism and pretty much anathema to any kind of serious scientific thinking. Most religions seem to share a penchant for elaborate stories used as explanation. Stories are nice, but a tendency to believe them without testing is intellectually lazy.
Funny, then, that our modern understanding of genetics leans so heavily on the work of a Catholic friar.
Faith is not the opposite of skepticism. That's a fallacy pushed by people who have little to no faith. Faith is tested by skepticism, and when that faith survives the testing, it grows stronger. The strongest faith, then, is usually not held in the absence of skepticism, but rather is the direct result of it.
Put another way, this is approximately big enough to power the laundry room for a small apartment complex, or approximately the worst-case total power for 1-2 households.
Depends on what you mean by "typical salaries in... China". In some parts of China, minimum wage is only $1.23 per hour, which translates to $49.20 per week, or $2558.40 per year. There is nowhere in the U.S where you can live on $49.20 per week without being homeless. Even if you own your own house, if isn't possible. After all, it would take most of that $49 per week to pay for food alone. Add in insurance for your home (required by law, generally), and you're way, way over. And you'd still be doing without modern conveniences like water and electricity, which would result in the social services folks evicting you from your house pretty quickly.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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The Bay area is one of the most expensive places in the world though. There are plenty of areas in this country where $15/hour suddenly gives you close to a median income.
Ah, but the reason that the Bay Area is so expensive is that there's such a shortage of land to build housing. In places where the median income is much lower, yes you'll increase demand for housing, but the market will absorb it easily, because there's no shortage of land.
For example, Nashville has a median per-capita income of about $29k. That's just slightly under $15/hour, in theory, ignoring the impact of children on the per-capita numbers. Housing in Nashville is relatively cheap (compared to the Bay Area) at $1053/month.
What would happen if Nashville raised its minimum wage to $15/hr.? Well, a lot of people would have more money to spend. Some percentage of them would spend some percentage of that money on better housing.
Now most people in Nashville aren't having to do apartment sharing eight ways just to make ends meet. The exceptions are mostly college students and new renters, who are just a tiny percentage of the market (unlike in the Bay Area with its staggering rents). So the number of new housing units required would be a fairly small percentage of the market.
The bigger impact would be from people moving up to higher grades of housing or larger apartments with more rooms. In theory, this would drive the price of higher-end housing up. But what happens to all the low-rent housing? Suddenly, you have landlords who can't rent their rooms. So they will spend money to bring their apartments up to higher standards so that they can charge higher fees and bring in people who have more money. They break even, the price of the absolute cheapest housing goes up, and the quality of the housing goes up to match. More importantly, the number of housing units at that higher class goes up, balancing out the increase in demand, so the price for that class of housing actually remains about the same.
So it would have an impact, just not a very big one, and mostly at or near the very bottom of the housing market cost-wise.
Yeah but I don't think you can assume that if you're artificially raising salaries. With respect to education, this raise will affect many people who are already done with education, as well as people who simply aren't capable of finishing high school or going to college.
Yes, which means that there could be some short-term impact, but over the longer term, the trend should reverse, at least in theory.
But even if we assume artificially raising salaries will lead to the same results, it becomes question of whether more people will be bumped from the very poorest into a lower birthrate bucket, or from the $20k range into the $30k range which would result in an increase.
That's a very good question, and I suspect that the answer is "Nobody knows for sure.":-)
White text on a black background certainly looks thicker than black text on a white background to me on my MacBook Pro. That said, it may depend on the font rendering engine.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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If some segment of the population suddenly has twice as much income, and maybe 5x as much disposable income, that's going to put upward price pressure on lots of goods and services.
Not when you're talking about the bottom tier of wage earners. Their salary would have to increase by way more than a factor of 2 before they would even start to compete for non-low-end housing. Here are some examples of Bay Area jobs and what they pay:
CA Minimum wage: $10/hr
Legal secretary: $21.03/hr
Assistant Manager: $22.46/hr
Kindergarten teacher: $30.74/hr
Entry-level software engineer: $38.46/hr
General Manager: $38.89/hr
Santa Clara County median salary: $44.95/hr
Median software engineer salary: $52.10/hr
For instance, the people who are living with 3 roommates each making minimum wage now decide to get a bigger place, or just have 1 other roommate (maybe a GF/BF). Suddenly demand for housing goes up. The people who used to compete for low rent places in crappy neighborhoods are now competing for medium rent places in decent neighborhoods. Now the manager, who lives in a decent neighborhood, faces a rent increase and wants a higher salary. Did your 4.3% include that?
IMO, the 4.3% number cannot possibly be based in reality. About a quarter of the cost of even a fast food joint's income goes towards labor costs (and even more for other restaurants). If labor costs doubled, you'd expect a minimum of a 25% increase in the cost of the burgers, and that's before you factor in the cost of the labor throughout the rest of the supply chain (raising the cattle, etc.). Now I realize that not all of your labor costs will double, so that's an overestimate, but 4.3% is an absolutely laughable underestimate. I'd guess that 15% is probably closer to the mark, but it could be slightly higher.
I think people who think the minimum wage doesn't have a big impact are missing this key idea. It's all relative, and it's not just about direct costs. It's about, if I make 4x minimum wage right now, and suddenly I'm only making 2x minimum wage, that hurts me in many small ways that add up. Maybe these poor people start having more kids, and my kids' school gets crowded, and there's a bond referendum to build a bunch of new schools and hire teachers, and my property taxes go up. Maybe poor people stop taking the bus or walking to work and buy cars, and now there's more traffic, and the city/county/state need to add lanes to a bunch of roads, and there's a tax increase to pay for it. Now I'm being affected even if I don't eat fast food.
Statistically speaking, people who make more money tend to get better education, and this results in having fewer kids, not more. So at least over the long haul, that first "maybe" is pretty unlikely. The second issue (traffic) is a concern, but:
Jobs in poor neighborhoods will pay more, and there will be more of them, because the poor will have more money to spend.
Minimum wage workers who choose to keep working in the nicer neighborhoods will be able to afford to live closer to where they work.
So those folks will be traveling shorter distances to work, which should largely balance out the higher number of cars.
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Replying to myself because I just realized that such changes are probably unnecessary. As I understand it, IPSW firmware binaries are already signed by Apple for use on a specific device at installation time. As far as I know, it isn't possible to pre-sign an IPSW for use on arbitrary devices. If Apple tells their signing servers to sign the IPSW only for use on a specific device, it will do so. More importantly, if Apple tells their signing servers to stop signing that firmware binary, it won't be possible for anyone to install that firmware on any device in the future even if they already have a copy of that firmware, though if they already have a signed copy, they could reinstall it on that same device, I think.
Oops. Typo caused by over-editing. I meant to say "And thanks to the hardware requiring firmware signed by Apple's key, nobody but Apple has the ability to make such firmware work on other devices."
Not if Apple hard-codes the firmware to boot on only a single device with a single set of hardware IDs. And thanks to the hardware requiring firmware by Apple's key, nobody but Apple has the ability to make such firmware work on other devices.
On the iPhone 5c (basically an iPhone 5 in a plastic case), they probably can. That's probably the last model that you could attack in that way, though.
The FBI should be glad it isn't an iPhone 5s or later. If it were, the crypto keys wouldn't be in the external NAND flash, but rather in the secure enclave, which is a small bit of flash silicon that's inside the CPU itself, and it may not even be possible to expose the flash without destroying it.
Certainly. You're misunderstanding me subtly. I'm not saying that being religious is a requirement for doing those things, but rather that doing those things tends to be almost a requirement for being religious, which means that people who are religious are more likely than nonreligious to exhibit those traits.
Clearly, morality can exist without religious beliefs. It is another question altogether whether morality would have developed (historically) in the absence of religious beliefs, and what that moral code would look like if it had. There might be a good sci-fi story in there somewhere.
The Bible basically hits a reset button right at the beginning of the New Testament. Jesus threw out the old holy laws, including the parts of the Bible that you would say require being a psychopath to consider moral. Essentially, the last half is a giant retcon, and you're complaining about the old canon being objectionable. This is not to say that some people don't try to pick and choose parts of the OT and use them as a cudgel against women, minorities, gays, etc., but that just proves that even people who read the Bible can be ignorant of it. :-)
That's true for a modern iPhone (5s and later). This is a 5c, which is basically just an iPhone 5 with a plastic case. It doesn't have a secure enclave, so the key is stored (encrypted with the passcode) in the external flash part along with all the other data.
I think there is a hardware key that is burned into the CPU during manufacturing. If so, you can probably read that by uncapping the CPU and using an electron microscope on it. Not easy, but not impossible.
Only if they unlock the device and remove the passcode within 48 hours after the owner last used the device. Otherwise, that fingerprint won't do them any good.
You're inclined to understatement. If it is the 4-processor Cray X-MP, then it is approximately the same speed as the cell phone whose crypto key they're trying to crack....
I didn't think anyone still built interference engines, either, but apparently at least as of two years ago, a lot of smaller engines used interference designs. With that said, AFAIK, there's no technical reason that government safety standards couldn't mandate that electronic valve timing be used exclusively with non-interference designs. That would probably go a long way towards ridding the world of interference engines, at least in the long run, which would be IMO a good thing.
For that matter, the main reason that valves are designed the way they are designed is that they have to be operated mechanically using simple levers. With an electronically controlled valve, at least in principle, there's no reason the valve couldn't be built in such a way that it either:
Any of those would eliminate the risk of the head colliding with the valves, and that last one could potentially also allow the ECU to individually adjust how much the valves open based on temperature, throttle, etc. much more precisely than any purely mechanical design, which might be beneficial in terms of fuel efficiency, noise, etc., or at least might allow them to eliminate external hardware that regulates airflow, thus reducing the overall cost of the engine.
That said, I am not an engine designer, so this is mostly speculation.
The current-gen Apple TV (at least) can turn on or off your TV set using that protocol. I'm not sure if it can detect the TV being turned off externally, though.
It's a step up in complexity, but probably not impossible. If you can build a virus that replaces or injects DNA fragments, you can probably do so in a way that limits it to DNA that matches a pattern that exists only in one of the three chromosomes, and then inject enough stop codons to keep that strand of DNA from creating any mRNA chains that are long enough to cause problems. Then again, I am not a geneticist, so I could be missing something.
This is an interesting possibility, but I think that "slumber" might be overkill. You don't need to send actual humans there, just the building blocks needed to create humans.
So you might start by building a copy of the human genome, wrapped up as "junk genes" in mold. The mold goes into spore form, and gets frozen by the cold of space, remaining dormant until it arrives. You then modify the genetic trigger that fires when there are favorable conditions for life. Instead of causing the mold to go from spore form into actual mold, the trigger would instead change the stop codons to construct appropriate organelles (e.g. human mitochondria) by using some previously "junk" DNA to construct the human mitochondrial DNA, and then would subsequently change the stop codons again to make the human DNA be the primary DNA, leaving the mold and mitochondrial DNA disabled. After a few cell divisions, you'd basically have human cells, and I think that would be close enough.
Of course, I shudder to think what sort of conditions would be necessary for a human embryo to grow without a human womb. In practice, such a design would probably have to use a multi-stage process with multiple generations of self-replication, each of which builds progressively more complex structures, until you eventually get to something that can process oxygen and pump blood well enough for a human fetus to grow inside it, at which point it would produce one or more actual, pre-fertilized human eggs.
I'm not sure how practical such a concept would be, and I'm not sure if the cell membrane of a mold cell would be serviceable as a temporary housing for the contents of a human cell, but it would be pretty cool if somebody managed to pull it off. Combine that with androids to teach them human culture, and you have yourself a lifeboat.
Science has aspects of almost religious faith, too. This makes some issues hard to research, such as anthropogenic global warming. If anybody actually tried to present evidence contradicting that theory, they'd be utterly destroyed with vicious attacks before anybody even read the data. This doesn't do science any good, because it suppresses the search for truth.
But religion has aspects of the other kind, too. Just as special relativity challenged Newtonian mechanics and caused it to be tweaked under certain circumstances, religious understanding has adapted as scientific revelations have proven some of the details wrong. Most Christians don't believe that Genesis is literal truth, because most of them acknowledge evolution. Most Christians understand that the Bible's description of the Earth as a firm foundation doesn't really mean that it is fixed in space, thanks in large part to Galileo. Faith was tested, and the interpretation evolved, even though the fundamental belief in a creator remained the same.
What is dangerous, in either case, is a dogmatic literalist interpretation of anything, whether it is the Bible or scientific theories. The desire to find ways to keep from throwing away the old model has to be balanced by acknowledgement of its failings, or else there is no progress. On the other hand, the opposite of that—throwing away the old model too quickly in favor of a new model that may or may not be better—can also be dangerous. Balance is the key.
Looking at Google Maps, that particular hotel is off to the side from the runway by just a bit. At the end of the runway, the height limits include only the width of the runway and a small margin on either side. The farther away you get, the farther out the height limits spread, and the taller the height limits are. So it probably avoids the height limits because it isn't actually in the flight path.
With that said, if the runway got extended later, it is also possible that it was simply grandfathered in. :-)
You're missing the difference between proof and evidence. The smoke you smell in a forest could be perceived as evidence of a possible forest fire, but certainly does not prove such a fire exists. In much the same way, those with religious faith see evidence of God in the world around them, but that evidence is a far cry from being proof of God's existence.
In fact, I know this won't be a popular opinion around here, but I would argue that those with religious beliefs are more likely to achieve scientific breakthroughs than those without. Spiritual belief systems generally encourage people to look for God—to search for the exceptional in the mundane. This is the very same spirit of discovery that drives scientific progress. Without that spirit, science is tedious and uninspired. Science teaches us how to answer the questions. Religion teaches us to ask them in the first place.
But that's just my personal perspective. Different people approach science and religion in different ways and come to different conclusions. That diversity makes us stronger as a species, and prevents science from becoming a monoculture, which IMO is one of the greatest threats to progress imaginable.
By law, there are no tall buildings overlooking the ends of runways. A four-story building would typically have to be almost a quarter mile from the edge of the airport property, by my math, to comply with height regulations.
Exactly. What matters when it comes to tracking something is the speed at which the angle changes, not the speed at which the object is moving. This is a mistake that a lot of sci-fi writers make, often with painful consequences. Even if the airplane were moving at .9c (nine tenths the speed of light), as long as it was moving straight towards you, you could paint it trivially with any sort of laser, because it would always be at the same angle relative to your position. Its motion towards you would merely cause it to look more blue, and would cause it to rapidly grow in apparent size.
Now to be able to hit the actual window might require a lot of precision, but the reality is that slight motions over such a distance will cause it to jump around anyway, and it only has to hit the window for a moment to cause problems.
If the airport is equipped for autoland, many modern jets will take you right down to the ground, and I think that autoland capabilities are actually required for CAT III. As I understand it, you're still required to have a certain amount of visibility for a Cat III approach to ensure that the pilot would be capable of completing the landing in the event of an autopilot failure or whatever. That doesn't mean the pilot actually has to take over at those altitudes, just that conditions must be good enough to allow the pilot to do so safely.
For that matter, in theory there's a CAT IIIc with no visibility limitations whatsoever, provided that the aircraft supports autoland and that the airport has sufficient navigation beacons or whatever to allow the aircraft to auto-taxi right into the gate. I don't think any airports are equipped for that, though.
It almost certainly does. It also speeds other scientific research that would have been ignored or would have gotten less attention if not for religion.
Religious people are wary of doing research into bigger and bigger bombs, more powerful rifles, more deadly ammo, etc. They'll work on autonomous cars, but are horrified by autonomous war drones. They're far more likely than non-religious people to try to come up with solutions for world hunger, technology to create clean drinking water for impoverished people (which will eventually be crucial for our planet's survival), cures for diseases that mainly affect people in poor countries, etc.
The real question should not be whether religion affects what research gets done, but rather whether those biases have a net positive or negative impact on the future of the human race. Personally, I think that religion and ethics have a net positive impact on science, though I will acknowledge that occasionally it has negative side effects, either intentionally or accidentally.
Funny, then, that our modern understanding of genetics leans so heavily on the work of a Catholic friar.
Faith is not the opposite of skepticism. That's a fallacy pushed by people who have little to no faith. Faith is tested by skepticism, and when that faith survives the testing, it grows stronger. The strongest faith, then, is usually not held in the absence of skepticism, but rather is the direct result of it.
Put another way, this is approximately big enough to power the laundry room for a small apartment complex, or approximately the worst-case total power for 1-2 households.
Depends on what you mean by "typical salaries in ... China". In some parts of China, minimum wage is only $1.23 per hour, which translates to $49.20 per week, or $2558.40 per year. There is nowhere in the U.S where you can live on $49.20 per week without being homeless. Even if you own your own house, if isn't possible. After all, it would take most of that $49 per week to pay for food alone. Add in insurance for your home (required by law, generally), and you're way, way over. And you'd still be doing without modern conveniences like water and electricity, which would result in the social services folks evicting you from your house pretty quickly.
Ah, but the reason that the Bay Area is so expensive is that there's such a shortage of land to build housing. In places where the median income is much lower, yes you'll increase demand for housing, but the market will absorb it easily, because there's no shortage of land.
For example, Nashville has a median per-capita income of about $29k. That's just slightly under $15/hour, in theory, ignoring the impact of children on the per-capita numbers. Housing in Nashville is relatively cheap (compared to the Bay Area) at $1053/month.
What would happen if Nashville raised its minimum wage to $15/hr.? Well, a lot of people would have more money to spend. Some percentage of them would spend some percentage of that money on better housing.
Now most people in Nashville aren't having to do apartment sharing eight ways just to make ends meet. The exceptions are mostly college students and new renters, who are just a tiny percentage of the market (unlike in the Bay Area with its staggering rents). So the number of new housing units required would be a fairly small percentage of the market.
The bigger impact would be from people moving up to higher grades of housing or larger apartments with more rooms. In theory, this would drive the price of higher-end housing up. But what happens to all the low-rent housing? Suddenly, you have landlords who can't rent their rooms. So they will spend money to bring their apartments up to higher standards so that they can charge higher fees and bring in people who have more money. They break even, the price of the absolute cheapest housing goes up, and the quality of the housing goes up to match. More importantly, the number of housing units at that higher class goes up, balancing out the increase in demand, so the price for that class of housing actually remains about the same.
So it would have an impact, just not a very big one, and mostly at or near the very bottom of the housing market cost-wise.
Yes, which means that there could be some short-term impact, but over the longer term, the trend should reverse, at least in theory.
That's a very good question, and I suspect that the answer is "Nobody knows for sure." :-)
White text on a black background certainly looks thicker than black text on a white background to me on my MacBook Pro. That said, it may depend on the font rendering engine.
Not when you're talking about the bottom tier of wage earners. Their salary would have to increase by way more than a factor of 2 before they would even start to compete for non-low-end housing. Here are some examples of Bay Area jobs and what they pay:
IMO, the 4.3% number cannot possibly be based in reality. About a quarter of the cost of even a fast food joint's income goes towards labor costs (and even more for other restaurants). If labor costs doubled, you'd expect a minimum of a 25% increase in the cost of the burgers, and that's before you factor in the cost of the labor throughout the rest of the supply chain (raising the cattle, etc.). Now I realize that not all of your labor costs will double, so that's an overestimate, but 4.3% is an absolutely laughable underestimate. I'd guess that 15% is probably closer to the mark, but it could be slightly higher.
Statistically speaking, people who make more money tend to get better education, and this results in having fewer kids, not more. So at least over the long haul, that first "maybe" is pretty unlikely. The second issue (traffic) is a concern, but:
So those folks will be traveling shorter distances to work, which should largely balance out the higher number of cars.