Whether Iran considers assassination of their nuclear engineers to be an act of war by Israel isn't that relevant since Iran is in a state of war with Israel. In fact, they are at this point the only country in the region which has essentially refused to ever even remotely attempt to consider sitting down at a negotiating table with Israel. (Even Syria has done more). For all purposes that matter, Israel and Iran are at war. The only marginal way that they might not be from a legal perspective is that Iran doesn't recognize Israel's existence. So assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists just means that the state of war is heating up.
Almost every single sentence you've wrote is wrong as far as I can tell. See Zuckerman's paper I referenced earlier for a very long list of references showing that crime is not reduced by religiosity. There are complicating factors (for example, in a worse off society people may be more inclined to turn to religion) but your claim that there are "numerous studies" backing up this sort of position is simply false. Moreover, if this sort of claim were at all true then one would expect Sweden to be in absolutely awful shape since it is even less religious than Russia and China, yet Sweden is extremely well off.
As to your claim about philosophy, many prominent philosophers, such as Kant, Bentham, and Rahls would disagree. All three would see humans as having innate instincts for moral good. And in fact, studies have shown that many mammals will instinctively help other members of their species even when they have not encountered them before. For example, when another rat is hurt or trapped, nearby rats will help free them http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2011/12/08/helping-your-fellow-rat-rodents-show-empathy-driven-behavior. The instincts for basic moral behavior run deep.
At a temporal level, the claim is also questionable. It is pretty clear that over time, religiosity has gone down. But over the last few hundred years, the overall violence level when measured by the percentage of the population that dies violent deaths has gone down. There's an excellent book about the decline of violence among humans, The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker, which I strongly recommend.
By the way, the first major proponent for National atheism is Carl Marx. This is something to think very strongly about, though I very much doubt that people will do so even after reading that statement.
Ok. So first of all, his name was "Karl". Second, the that's just not true. Marx was born in 1818, when the French revolution was already over. During the French Revolution, major proponents of atheism included Jacques Hébert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_H%C3%A9bert and Chaumette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gaspard_Chaumette. Curiously, the bloody Robespierre strongly favored deism. But let's pretend that your claim was true for a moment and that Karl Marx really had been the first proponent of national atheism. Would this matter? Not really. This is in essence the genetic fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy- who comes up with an idea doesn't impact whether the idea is valid. For example, the mathematician John Nashh is schizophrenic- that doesn't make his math incorrect. And even if the genetic fallacy were valid, Marx's idea of national atheism, a forced destruction of religion, is extremely different than a secular society that simply doesn't care much about religion, (like say Sweden).
You may be operating with unconscious assumptions of a very traditionalist Christian nature. If for example one has a deity that is interested in rewarding the good but isn't that obsessed with punished wrongdoers, then not having hell makes sense. There are a lot of coherent theological positions including some in Christianity that allow for a heaven with no hell.
And somehow I wrote "social primes" when I meant to write social problems. Ugh. But the point should be clear. (Incidentally, there is such a thing as a sociable number, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociable_number but no prime is sociable.)
If there's good then there's evil. If there's a God then there's a Devil. If there's a Heaven then there's a Hell.
It might help if you took a comparative religion course. Many people believe in God without a belief in a Devil. This applies for example to many liberal Christians. In Judaism, the closest thing to the Devil is "Satan" who acts more as a prosecuting angel or a gadfly in the heavenly court. This interpretation is based on pretty old sources including the actual mentions of Satan in the Old Testament, especially the book of Job.
Similarly, many forms of Christianity have a notion heaven without any notion of hell. This is common among Christians who ascribe to universal reconciliation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_reconciliation and similar beliefs. Some other groups believe that there is either heaven or oblivion- this belief is common among Jehovah Witnesses for example. Similarly, many forms of Judaism have a notion of purgatory but no equivalent of hell. Indeed, there's a belief common among Orthodox Jews that no matter how bad you are you won't suffer for more than a year in the afterlife. This is related to the tradition of saying, Kaddish, the prayer for the dead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaddish for 11 months- one wants to ease their suffering but one does not want to imply that that someone was so bad that they were being punished for a full year.
In the other direction, you have some belief systems that have a notion similar to hell but no equivalent of heaven. For example, in some forms of Buddhism, there are very unpleasant things one can be reincarnated to to suffer for milllenia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism) but there's no real equivalent of heaven. So one can not only have a belief in heaven with no belief in hell, one can have a belief in hell with no belief in heaven.
I'm curious how this is consistent with http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf which makes a convincing case that religion in an area is correlated with more social primes, including more crime. Putting these together it looks like more religious countries generally have more crime and violence, but controlling for religiosity levels, belief in hell is correlated with a reduction in crime rates. But clearly more research needs to occur.
Are we really going down the personal anecdote road? Because if so we can. My mother is a cancer survivor. Both my grandmothers died of cancer. My aunt is as we speak recovering from a relapse of stomach cancer. My little brother's nanny has cancer and they just made the decision to only give palliative care because there's not much else they can do. So if we're going down that road, I think I'm allowed to say that just because some people feel good from Relay for Life doesn't mean tat Relay for Life is the best or most efficient way to do so. It is possible to do almost everything Relay for Life does and still actually raise money. In fact, many Relay participants don't realize how little money actually goes to anything other than Relay expenses. Whether that's because they haven't looked into it or have been actively misinformed seems to vary from person to person, but either way, lying by either omission or commission to cancer survivors isn't good behavior.
Some of their money does go to things that are arguably worthwhile. But a lot of it isn't even going to things like family support or end of life quality care either. The Relays for example often cost almost as much money to run as they get out of them, so the Relay for Life ends up having no substantial amount of money go anywhere useful http://www.jafsica.com/2010/04/26/life-death-cancer/. This is a big part of why the ACS only gets three stars on financials by Charity Navigator http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6495. Many other groups dedicated to fighting cancer get better numbers from Charity Navigator, either in the financial category or for overall, or both.
I'm not a fan of the American Cancer Society. They are a highly inefficient charity and very little of their money goes to things like research. But, really suing a charity that's at least trying to fight cancer? I thought FunnyJunk was engaging in really poor PR but that's even worse. I can't even begin to think of a legal argument for why they should sue the ACS in this context, and even if they had a marginally plausible argument that didn't immediately invite Rule 11 sanctions ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_11%23Chapter_III_-_Pleadings_and_Motionsrel=url2html-23882http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_11#Chapter_III_-_Pleadings_and_Motions>, any sane lawyer would say that this would just be a bad idea. The lack of awareness here was impressive before but has no crossed over into a whole other level of stupidity and douchebaggery.
Yes, that's true in a trivial sense. What that essentially amounts to is that one has unbreakable encryption if one has a shared source of randomness that the eavesdropper lacks. So if you can do things like have physical couriers carry bits back and forth between set locations you can do that sort of thing. The problem is that such situations aren't very common. Most encryption contexts that would be much too inefficient or outright impossible (you don't want to be in a situation where in order to securely give your credit card number to Amazon they have to send someone over with a flash drive full of random bits). The key is making practical and close to unbreakable or outright unbreakable crypto that doesn't rely on such ridiculously strong assumptions.
The basic idea of the key exchange is a variant of an older key exchange idea. The very basic idea involves Alice and Bob having a wire that goes between them. Each of the two has two resistors one with very low resistance and one with high resistance. To gain a series of random bits, Alice and Bob both randomly choose a resistor and connect it to the wire and then measure the resistance through the whole system. If they both used the high or both used the low resistance resistors they throw out those exchanges. Whenever they have one medium and one high, they will both know which one had a low and which one had a high because they'll know their own. But Eve the evil eavesdropper even if she has a connection into the line won't be able to get this just from knowing the total resistance. In some weak respects this resembles a physical analog of the Diffie-Hellman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange. The process being proposed here though, a Kish key exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_cypher does some clever stuff with the thermodynamics end to deal with man-in-the-middle and other related attacks.
That's unlikely. For most of the nasty stuff like Ebola, or Marburg or Lassa fever, most humans haven't been exposed at all. Similarly, pretty much no one today has immunity to yellow fever. To some extent, I'm more worried about malaria or yellow fever spreading a lot after a general societal breakdown for some other cause. Without regular drainage programs, diseases which use insects as vectors have a fun time. There's an excellent section in Charles Mann's 1493 covering the effects of those diseases- without any precautions they both got shockingly far north, to the point where you had malaria as a regular problem in some parts of the UK.
Um, you may want to look at what I was responding to. Soporific's question was about lab containment not about use for an attack. In the context of a lab where the concern is spreading from lab animals the hemorrhagic (spelling varies depending on which side of the pond you are on) is not that bad because the environment is well contained.
Ebola is deadly but it isn't that great at spreading. The vast majority of Ebola spread occurs through bodily fluids. This is a problem in less sanitary or hygenic environments- if you don't know the person who is vomiting has Ebola you aren't going to be as careful. Avoiding direct contact works for most purposes and so Ebola research generally occurs in a Biosafety-4 lab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level. This generally means that one has a pressure suit on at all times when working with the agent or infected lab animals. One goes through an ultraviolet scan and a shower system on exiting. But in the case of Ebola most of this is arguably overkill (in comparison most level 4 critters are ones that can spread through the air or through very small droplets). When doctors and nurses are working with Ebola they often just use full face masks without pressure suits (although that is to some extent for the practical reason that bringing pressure suits out to isolated areas would be very tough, and you certainly can't bring the whole lab environment out).
Actually the evidence at this point strongly suggests that the bubonic plague was so severe because there was poor sanitation and they didn't know how to do very basic care. http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/10/13/black-death-not-initiated-by-a/. Simillarly, the 1918 flu was so devastating in part because it occurred at the end of World War I so basic infrastructure was severely damaged, and you had massive numbers of returning troops as well as refugees moving all over thus making it spread easily.
You see this pretty often when someone is very smart and makes revolutionary discoveries in their own field. They essentially convince themselves that they are an expert on everything and have opinions worth having about everything. In the case of the Chomsky that's gotten also wound up in his politics and apparent desire for counter-narratives to standard histories especially when the standard versions are primarily about white Westerners. This isn't that dissimilar to how Linus Pauling developed weird ideas about vitamin C, or how Kary Mullis has decided that global warming is a hoax, that ozone depletion is a hoax, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that the Fed Reserve is part of a big conspiracy, and a few other strange ideas besides. None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.
Turing didn't just help with practical computers. A lot of his ideas mattered in many other fields. For example, his idea of the Turing machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine and related work was vital to a lot of other fields such as the rise of theoretical computer science, and even as far as the study of equations with integer solutions (called Diophantine equations) in the form of Hilbert's Tenth Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem.
Essentially, Hilbert asked whether there was a general algorithm to determine whether a given equation in integer variables had a solution. Even for individual equations figuring this out can be very difficult. For example it was known even in ancient times that x^2+y^2=z^2 had infinitely many integer solutions, but it took Fermat to show that x^4+y^4=z^4 did not. It turned out that there is no general way of answering these sorts of questions. The problem was solved by lot of people, especially Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, , Hilary Putnam, and ultimately finished off by Yuri Matiyasevich. The solution was to show that one can actually model an arbitrary Turing machine as a system of Diophantine equations, where the machine halting is equivalent to the Diophantine equations having a solution. Thus, if one can solve that one can answer whether any given Turing machine can halt, which Turing showed could not be done in general, using a clever trick- this is known as the Halting theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem. Curiously, the equivalent problem over the rationals is still open, and is turning out to be connected to deep issues in topology and the theory of elliptic curves. So Turing's ideas and thoughts are still pushing us forward and making us ask new questions.
NuStar is going to be doing a lot of work searching for and imaging black holes and supernova remnants. The second is very important for understanding the history of our universe, since the elements greater than lithium are made in stars, and supernovae are what spread them around. The elements heavier than iron are only produced in supernova. So understanding supernova and their remnants gives us insight into where we all came from. Understanding supernova better will also help us understand better the size of the universe. Currently one way of measuring distances to very far away objects is that Type Ia supernova http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova are roughly fixed brightness, so if one can identify such a supernova then one knows about how far away it is. Getting better estimates on their light curves will help out, and similarly getting better understanding of the distance to core collapse supernova will also help.
Overall, the technology for x-ray and gamma ray telescopes have improved a lot over the last few years. The basic problem with them is that you can't make what amounts to a lens or a mirror for x-rays since they are too high energy, so you can't make a telescope in the classical designs. However, in the 1950s Hans Wolter came up with some methods of doing almost the same thing using clever designs ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescoperel=url2html-30574http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescope> but it wouldn't be until the late 1970s that any functioning designs existed. Since then there have been a lot of very effective designs such as Chandra and Swift. The technology is improving and the precision and level of information one gets form NuStar will be much better than previous x-ray telescopes and will be able to pick out details from much fainter sources.
Doubtful. Flame was in a lot of the neighboring countries not just Iran, which helps rule out most Middle-Eastern countries as being involved. Moreover, intelligence agencies don't like to spread things around that much because it makes leaks much more likely. The US and Israel would almost certainly not be willing to do that much with the various Islamic countries agencies simply because they won't trust them much. The technical capability involved in both Stuxnet and Flame are immense and it isn't clear that these other countries could offer the US and Israel much in the way of real assistance (the most likely such countries Egypt and Saudi Arabia just don't have that much in the way of high tech hackers). Of course those countries have likely provided the US intelligence which helped in the design of Stuxnet, but actual construction and delivery of the payload it is unlikely that any of them had much to do with it.
Obviously some sort of shadow war is going on here. But your assumptions about the agencies involved seems lacking. Both the US and Israel have relevant agencies other than the CIA and the Mossad. Similarly, it wouldn't surprise me much of Britain was involved in this.
Of course, some willfully-blind, retarded shill out there is going to reply to this and say that those scientists killed themselves and that Stuxnet and Flame were actually created by Iran in an incredibly convoluted attempt to gain world sympathy
This is possibly the most ridiculous strawman I've seen yet. Can you point to anyone who has claimed that Stuxnet was made by Iran?
I suspect Gates does do what he does in part because he wants to be liked. Humans have a lot of trouble not having that as a motivation. However, I agree strongly with your analysis. The real evidence that Gates is trying to really be helpful and that's his primary goal is what he has targeted. He isn't doing flashy stuff in the developed world, but rather looked and said "how can I save the most lives the most efficiently?" and then went and did this. This is what charity should be, not feel good measures but giving money where it is really needed.
You can look at other graphs also, and you will in fact see a decline in many parts of the world as you look at individual countries. This is strongly connected to increased income in those countries. However, the graph I gave takes that into account, as you can see that the graph gives three different predictions for the future depending on various models. In two of those three, the growth continues. The second one is most likely- continued growth at a rapid rate even as the rate does slow down (slowing down and leveling off are not the same things.) Even with the moderate growth estimates, the essential problems here look real.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether Iran considers assassination of their nuclear engineers to be an act of war by Israel isn't that relevant since Iran is in a state of war with Israel. In fact, they are at this point the only country in the region which has essentially refused to ever even remotely attempt to consider sitting down at a negotiating table with Israel. (Even Syria has done more). For all purposes that matter, Israel and Iran are at war. The only marginal way that they might not be from a legal perspective is that Iran doesn't recognize Israel's existence. So assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists just means that the state of war is heating up.
Almost every single sentence you've wrote is wrong as far as I can tell. See Zuckerman's paper I referenced earlier for a very long list of references showing that crime is not reduced by religiosity. There are complicating factors (for example, in a worse off society people may be more inclined to turn to religion) but your claim that there are "numerous studies" backing up this sort of position is simply false. Moreover, if this sort of claim were at all true then one would expect Sweden to be in absolutely awful shape since it is even less religious than Russia and China, yet Sweden is extremely well off.
As to your claim about philosophy, many prominent philosophers, such as Kant, Bentham, and Rahls would disagree. All three would see humans as having innate instincts for moral good. And in fact, studies have shown that many mammals will instinctively help other members of their species even when they have not encountered them before. For example, when another rat is hurt or trapped, nearby rats will help free them http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2011/12/08/helping-your-fellow-rat-rodents-show-empathy-driven-behavior. The instincts for basic moral behavior run deep.
At a temporal level, the claim is also questionable. It is pretty clear that over time, religiosity has gone down. But over the last few hundred years, the overall violence level when measured by the percentage of the population that dies violent deaths has gone down. There's an excellent book about the decline of violence among humans, The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker, which I strongly recommend.
By the way, the first major proponent for National atheism is Carl Marx. This is something to think very strongly about, though I very much doubt that people will do so even after reading that statement.
Ok. So first of all, his name was "Karl". Second, the that's just not true. Marx was born in 1818, when the French revolution was already over. During the French Revolution, major proponents of atheism included Jacques Hébert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_H%C3%A9bert and Chaumette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gaspard_Chaumette. Curiously, the bloody Robespierre strongly favored deism. But let's pretend that your claim was true for a moment and that Karl Marx really had been the first proponent of national atheism. Would this matter? Not really. This is in essence the genetic fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy- who comes up with an idea doesn't impact whether the idea is valid. For example, the mathematician John Nashh is schizophrenic- that doesn't make his math incorrect. And even if the genetic fallacy were valid, Marx's idea of national atheism, a forced destruction of religion, is extremely different than a secular society that simply doesn't care much about religion, (like say Sweden).
You may be operating with unconscious assumptions of a very traditionalist Christian nature. If for example one has a deity that is interested in rewarding the good but isn't that obsessed with punished wrongdoers, then not having hell makes sense. There are a lot of coherent theological positions including some in Christianity that allow for a heaven with no hell.
I'm going to have a cup of tea in a moment. It is either going to be green tea or earl grey. Is there moral content to my choice?
And somehow I wrote "social primes" when I meant to write social problems. Ugh. But the point should be clear. (Incidentally, there is such a thing as a sociable number, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociable_number but no prime is sociable.)
If there's good then there's evil. If there's a God then there's a Devil. If there's a Heaven then there's a Hell.
It might help if you took a comparative religion course. Many people believe in God without a belief in a Devil. This applies for example to many liberal Christians. In Judaism, the closest thing to the Devil is "Satan" who acts more as a prosecuting angel or a gadfly in the heavenly court. This interpretation is based on pretty old sources including the actual mentions of Satan in the Old Testament, especially the book of Job.
Similarly, many forms of Christianity have a notion heaven without any notion of hell. This is common among Christians who ascribe to universal reconciliation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_reconciliation and similar beliefs. Some other groups believe that there is either heaven or oblivion- this belief is common among Jehovah Witnesses for example. Similarly, many forms of Judaism have a notion of purgatory but no equivalent of hell. Indeed, there's a belief common among Orthodox Jews that no matter how bad you are you won't suffer for more than a year in the afterlife. This is related to the tradition of saying, Kaddish, the prayer for the dead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaddish for 11 months- one wants to ease their suffering but one does not want to imply that that someone was so bad that they were being punished for a full year.
In the other direction, you have some belief systems that have a notion similar to hell but no equivalent of heaven. For example, in some forms of Buddhism, there are very unpleasant things one can be reincarnated to to suffer for milllenia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism) but there's no real equivalent of heaven. So one can not only have a belief in heaven with no belief in hell, one can have a belief in hell with no belief in heaven.
I'm curious how this is consistent with http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf which makes a convincing case that religion in an area is correlated with more social primes, including more crime. Putting these together it looks like more religious countries generally have more crime and violence, but controlling for religiosity levels, belief in hell is correlated with a reduction in crime rates. But clearly more research needs to occur.
Are we really going down the personal anecdote road? Because if so we can. My mother is a cancer survivor. Both my grandmothers died of cancer. My aunt is as we speak recovering from a relapse of stomach cancer. My little brother's nanny has cancer and they just made the decision to only give palliative care because there's not much else they can do. So if we're going down that road, I think I'm allowed to say that just because some people feel good from Relay for Life doesn't mean tat Relay for Life is the best or most efficient way to do so. It is possible to do almost everything Relay for Life does and still actually raise money. In fact, many Relay participants don't realize how little money actually goes to anything other than Relay expenses. Whether that's because they haven't looked into it or have been actively misinformed seems to vary from person to person, but either way, lying by either omission or commission to cancer survivors isn't good behavior.
Some of their money does go to things that are arguably worthwhile. But a lot of it isn't even going to things like family support or end of life quality care either. The Relays for example often cost almost as much money to run as they get out of them, so the Relay for Life ends up having no substantial amount of money go anywhere useful http://www.jafsica.com/2010/04/26/life-death-cancer/. This is a big part of why the ACS only gets three stars on financials by Charity Navigator http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6495. Many other groups dedicated to fighting cancer get better numbers from Charity Navigator, either in the financial category or for overall, or both.
Ugh, screwed up the link that should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_11#Chapter_III_-_Pleadings_and_Motions. Sorry about that.
I'm not a fan of the American Cancer Society. They are a highly inefficient charity and very little of their money goes to things like research. But, really suing a charity that's at least trying to fight cancer? I thought FunnyJunk was engaging in really poor PR but that's even worse. I can't even begin to think of a legal argument for why they should sue the ACS in this context, and even if they had a marginally plausible argument that didn't immediately invite Rule 11 sanctions ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_11%23Chapter_III_-_Pleadings_and_Motionsrel=url2html-23882http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_11#Chapter_III_-_Pleadings_and_Motions>, any sane lawyer would say that this would just be a bad idea. The lack of awareness here was impressive before but has no crossed over into a whole other level of stupidity and douchebaggery.
Yes, that's true in a trivial sense. What that essentially amounts to is that one has unbreakable encryption if one has a shared source of randomness that the eavesdropper lacks. So if you can do things like have physical couriers carry bits back and forth between set locations you can do that sort of thing. The problem is that such situations aren't very common. Most encryption contexts that would be much too inefficient or outright impossible (you don't want to be in a situation where in order to securely give your credit card number to Amazon they have to send someone over with a flash drive full of random bits). The key is making practical and close to unbreakable or outright unbreakable crypto that doesn't rely on such ridiculously strong assumptions.
The basic idea of the key exchange is a variant of an older key exchange idea. The very basic idea involves Alice and Bob having a wire that goes between them. Each of the two has two resistors one with very low resistance and one with high resistance. To gain a series of random bits, Alice and Bob both randomly choose a resistor and connect it to the wire and then measure the resistance through the whole system. If they both used the high or both used the low resistance resistors they throw out those exchanges. Whenever they have one medium and one high, they will both know which one had a low and which one had a high because they'll know their own. But Eve the evil eavesdropper even if she has a connection into the line won't be able to get this just from knowing the total resistance. In some weak respects this resembles a physical analog of the Diffie-Hellman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange. The process being proposed here though, a Kish key exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_cypher does some clever stuff with the thermodynamics end to deal with man-in-the-middle and other related attacks.
That's unlikely. For most of the nasty stuff like Ebola, or Marburg or Lassa fever, most humans haven't been exposed at all. Similarly, pretty much no one today has immunity to yellow fever. To some extent, I'm more worried about malaria or yellow fever spreading a lot after a general societal breakdown for some other cause. Without regular drainage programs, diseases which use insects as vectors have a fun time. There's an excellent section in Charles Mann's 1493 covering the effects of those diseases- without any precautions they both got shockingly far north, to the point where you had malaria as a regular problem in some parts of the UK.
Um, you may want to look at what I was responding to. Soporific's question was about lab containment not about use for an attack. In the context of a lab where the concern is spreading from lab animals the hemorrhagic (spelling varies depending on which side of the pond you are on) is not that bad because the environment is well contained.
Ebola is deadly but it isn't that great at spreading. The vast majority of Ebola spread occurs through bodily fluids. This is a problem in less sanitary or hygenic environments- if you don't know the person who is vomiting has Ebola you aren't going to be as careful. Avoiding direct contact works for most purposes and so Ebola research generally occurs in a Biosafety-4 lab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level. This generally means that one has a pressure suit on at all times when working with the agent or infected lab animals. One goes through an ultraviolet scan and a shower system on exiting. But in the case of Ebola most of this is arguably overkill (in comparison most level 4 critters are ones that can spread through the air or through very small droplets). When doctors and nurses are working with Ebola they often just use full face masks without pressure suits (although that is to some extent for the practical reason that bringing pressure suits out to isolated areas would be very tough, and you certainly can't bring the whole lab environment out).
Actually the evidence at this point strongly suggests that the bubonic plague was so severe because there was poor sanitation and they didn't know how to do very basic care. http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/10/13/black-death-not-initiated-by-a/. Simillarly, the 1918 flu was so devastating in part because it occurred at the end of World War I so basic infrastructure was severely damaged, and you had massive numbers of returning troops as well as refugees moving all over thus making it spread easily.
You see this pretty often when someone is very smart and makes revolutionary discoveries in their own field. They essentially convince themselves that they are an expert on everything and have opinions worth having about everything. In the case of the Chomsky that's gotten also wound up in his politics and apparent desire for counter-narratives to standard histories especially when the standard versions are primarily about white Westerners. This isn't that dissimilar to how Linus Pauling developed weird ideas about vitamin C, or how Kary Mullis has decided that global warming is a hoax, that ozone depletion is a hoax, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that the Fed Reserve is part of a big conspiracy, and a few other strange ideas besides. None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.
Turing didn't just help with practical computers. A lot of his ideas mattered in many other fields. For example, his idea of the Turing machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine and related work was vital to a lot of other fields such as the rise of theoretical computer science, and even as far as the study of equations with integer solutions (called Diophantine equations) in the form of Hilbert's Tenth Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem.
Essentially, Hilbert asked whether there was a general algorithm to determine whether a given equation in integer variables had a solution. Even for individual equations figuring this out can be very difficult. For example it was known even in ancient times that x^2+y^2=z^2 had infinitely many integer solutions, but it took Fermat to show that x^4+y^4=z^4 did not. It turned out that there is no general way of answering these sorts of questions. The problem was solved by lot of people, especially Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, , Hilary Putnam, and ultimately finished off by Yuri Matiyasevich. The solution was to show that one can actually model an arbitrary Turing machine as a system of Diophantine equations, where the machine halting is equivalent to the Diophantine equations having a solution. Thus, if one can solve that one can answer whether any given Turing machine can halt, which Turing showed could not be done in general, using a clever trick- this is known as the Halting theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem. Curiously, the equivalent problem over the rationals is still open, and is turning out to be connected to deep issues in topology and the theory of elliptic curves. So Turing's ideas and thoughts are still pushing us forward and making us ask new questions.
NuStar is going to be doing a lot of work searching for and imaging black holes and supernova remnants. The second is very important for understanding the history of our universe, since the elements greater than lithium are made in stars, and supernovae are what spread them around. The elements heavier than iron are only produced in supernova. So understanding supernova and their remnants gives us insight into where we all came from. Understanding supernova better will also help us understand better the size of the universe. Currently one way of measuring distances to very far away objects is that Type Ia supernova http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova are roughly fixed brightness, so if one can identify such a supernova then one knows about how far away it is. Getting better estimates on their light curves will help out, and similarly getting better understanding of the distance to core collapse supernova will also help.
Overall, the technology for x-ray and gamma ray telescopes have improved a lot over the last few years. The basic problem with them is that you can't make what amounts to a lens or a mirror for x-rays since they are too high energy, so you can't make a telescope in the classical designs. However, in the 1950s Hans Wolter came up with some methods of doing almost the same thing using clever designs ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescoperel=url2html-30574http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescope> but it wouldn't be until the late 1970s that any functioning designs existed. Since then there have been a lot of very effective designs such as Chandra and Swift. The technology is improving and the precision and level of information one gets form NuStar will be much better than previous x-ray telescopes and will be able to pick out details from much fainter sources.
Doubtful. Flame was in a lot of the neighboring countries not just Iran, which helps rule out most Middle-Eastern countries as being involved. Moreover, intelligence agencies don't like to spread things around that much because it makes leaks much more likely. The US and Israel would almost certainly not be willing to do that much with the various Islamic countries agencies simply because they won't trust them much. The technical capability involved in both Stuxnet and Flame are immense and it isn't clear that these other countries could offer the US and Israel much in the way of real assistance (the most likely such countries Egypt and Saudi Arabia just don't have that much in the way of high tech hackers). Of course those countries have likely provided the US intelligence which helped in the design of Stuxnet, but actual construction and delivery of the payload it is unlikely that any of them had much to do with it.
Of course, some willfully-blind, retarded shill out there is going to reply to this and say that those scientists killed themselves and that Stuxnet and Flame were actually created by Iran in an incredibly convoluted attempt to gain world sympathy
This is possibly the most ridiculous strawman I've seen yet. Can you point to anyone who has claimed that Stuxnet was made by Iran?
I suspect Gates does do what he does in part because he wants to be liked. Humans have a lot of trouble not having that as a motivation. However, I agree strongly with your analysis. The real evidence that Gates is trying to really be helpful and that's his primary goal is what he has targeted. He isn't doing flashy stuff in the developed world, but rather looked and said "how can I save the most lives the most efficiently?" and then went and did this. This is what charity should be, not feel good measures but giving money where it is really needed.
Yep, sorry, 2*1.4 is around 2.8. I apparently I can't do basic arithmetic. Thanks.
You can look at other graphs also, and you will in fact see a decline in many parts of the world as you look at individual countries. This is strongly connected to increased income in those countries. However, the graph I gave takes that into account, as you can see that the graph gives three different predictions for the future depending on various models. In two of those three, the growth continues. The second one is most likely- continued growth at a rapid rate even as the rate does slow down (slowing down and leveling off are not the same things.) Even with the moderate growth estimates, the essential problems here look real.