The example given was the most extreme of the ones I've heard (from people I know and trust). Other examples are similar to yours, with customs running of with equipment for some length of time, security checkpoint people insisting (against policy and the law) to see the contents of classified Currier bags, a suspicious number of laptops that have gone missing, and a suspicious amount of interest in work expressed by strangers (basically my random stranger in a bar scenario above). The reason that France stands out is probably more to do with the amount of business we do there (aerospace industry working on both NATO defense related things as well as commercial work with Airbus) than it is to do with how common it is. I suspect that it is just as likely to happen in anywhere else.
Android is the fastest selling smartphone OS, there are any number of Android options and lots of people who talk up Androids to their friends and families (myself included). If Android hasn't created a strong enough following to survive (and thrive) with the iPhone as real competition (it never was with it being tied to ATT in my opinion) then it deserves to die, and I say that as a die-hard Android fan. So... maybe not nothing, but it shouldn't really effect Android long term if Android is as serious a competitor for the iPhone as a lot of people think it is.
We always see the same side of the moon because of tidal locking. It doesn't have anything to do with how the moon formed except in that the impact hypothesis puts the new moon close enough to the Earth that it became tidally locked fairly quickly, but that isn't unique to the impact hypothesis. In very basic terms it works like this:
1) Tides cause bulges on one or both bodies 2) The material that the bodies are made of resists that bulge so the bulge is never precisely where it it 'should' be gravitationally speaking. If the body rotates slower than it revolves the bulge will be behind, faster than it revolves and the bulge will be ahead. Let's say the bulge is ahead in this example. 3) The orbiting body (relative to the tidal bulge) is slightly more attracted to the bulge, since it is slightly closer than the rest of the planet. Since the bulge is ahead this pulls the bulge back (causing the bulging body to slow its rotational speed) and pulls the orbiting body as a whole forward (causing it to increase it's revolution speed).
In the Earth/Moon system, this has locked the moon's rotation rate to it's revolution rate. The same isn't (yet) true for the earth, if you stand on the moon you will see all sides of the Earth. However, that is very, very slowly changing. Each trip around the planet, the moon steals some of the Earth's rotational energy and turns it into orbital energy, raising the orbit of the moon a tiny bit and lengthening the day a tiny bit.
China is hardly the only country guilty of this. I've heard more stories from co-workers about issues in France than anywhere else, to the point that it is against company policy to take a company issue laptop there. And I don't mean random guy approaches you in the bar and asks what you do for a living, I mean coming back from dinner to find 3 suits and 2 uniformed cops in your hotel room that all refuse to tell you what they were doing there.
If I had to guess it's because he never attempted to sell or give up any government information, just information about his (non defense related) job. Why he thought 'Country X' would be interested in such information is beyond me, seems to me like he would have been better off offering the information to a foreign competitor directly, unless his goal was just to screw over the company he worked for as much as possible.
nothing can fix that short of altering my genetic code.
To be fair, you don't need to change all of your genetic code, just the code in the cells that make up retina. Nothing a little gene therapy can't take care of in a decade or so.
Odd, I like the industrial look. Like a steampunk mouse built out of modern materials, and the steampunk elements are actually functionally important to the device. It's not exactly the sleek modern look we've become accustomed to, but it is futuristic in it's own way.
How do you figure out what to bill him? Cost of the firefighters time? Cost of the water used? Cost of the fuel used to get out there? Cost of wear and tear on equipment? Cost of insurance for the firefighting personnel? What about equipment that is damaged? Do you negotiate a price before you start helping (which you have no way of knowing the total cost) or do you drop a bill for $10k+ on the guy afterword and have him refuse or be unable to pay?
As decent human beings, I would imagine that many of the firefighters wanted to help the guy out. On the other hand, what kind of precedent does that set? Don't pay and your house is on fire? Well, I guess we'll help out this time. What incentive would there be for anyone to pay the fee if they all knew that the fire department would come and help them out anyway? No... as much as it pains me to say it, the fire department made the right choice, if they had done anything else the whole system would fall apart. Maybe that would have been a good thing, but I don't see that it is the firefighters job to make that decision.
In the way that 'non-depleting' is too hard to say.
Re:More details needed in story summary
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Speculation/rumor is that the attack vector was USB drives used by Russian contractors. That is also it's primary method of spread, but it may be able to spread over networks as well (reports that I've seen seem contradictory on that one). Further speculation/rumor has it that a possible "nuclear accident" at Iran's centrifuge facility last year may have been caused by this worm, if that is the case it is the only report of actual hardware being damaged that I've heard of and would 100% support the idea that the worm was targeted at Iran's nuclear facilities. Given the number of infections in Iran and the artificial three hop limit that the worm's writers gave it, it would seem the attack originated there.
I think it's likely that the writers never planned on having the worm escape the target's network, I'm guessing someone at the nuke facility broke security protocol and took home a thumb drive that they weren't supposed to and it spread from there. The worm doesn't do much except take up cycles on systems that don't match the fingerprint that it is looking for, a fingerprint only makes sense if you're looking to take down a lot of identical systems, which lines up nicely with the centrifuge theory. Basically, it's highly likely that this was a government job, targeting Iran's centrifuges, done with inside knowledge of what systems they were using, and delivered using some pretty basic social engineering (leaving infected USB drives on the ground in the parking lot for instance).
Today's SETI pretty much assumes that ET is trying to get a hold of us. Omnidirectional signals get washed out by the background noise at any appreciable distance, we simply don't have the antennae to detect anything other than a directional blast right at us. And if you're going to assume someone is trying to communicate you're going to look in the parts of the spectrum that will travel the farthest without being washed out. You're going to assume that there is some relatively easy to detect carrier information. You're going to assume that they are going out of their way to be understood.
You can of course make an argument that any alien life will be so different from us that those assumptions don't hold, or that they are so different that we can't even detect their active attempts at communication. But the best method that we've come up with to talk over interplanetary or larger distances is radio, unless we're missing some branch of physics it's likely that any aliens would come to a similar conclusion.
Re:Never thought I would defend Iran, but...
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's worth noting that although many systems have been compromised worldwide, the only reports of equipment actually being damaged are apocryphal reports of 'nuclear accidents' at Iran's centrifuge facilities. The international community has assumed that those accidents were caused by the worm, and Iran calling the worm an attack on their nuclear ambitions seams to support that claim. Personally, I find the second wave of infections more likely to be someone modifying the payload and basic parameters for their own ends, it seems quite different from the mindset that drove the first set of attacks.
There are ways to analyze potential information even if you don't know what you're looking for. Basically, you want to know how 'random' the signal is that you're looking at, regardless of what kind of data or how the data is encoded it is going to be non-random unless it is heavily encrypted.
One thing to keep in mind, it's entirely possible that his detractors were right. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of effort that would have gone into designing, building, operating, and maintaining an analytical engine would have been higher than hiring humans to do the work in the first place. One thing with being 100 years ahead of your time is that... well, your idea is 100 years ahead of everything else; a surprising number of inventions would be totally worthless if taken 100 years out of context.
I'd really love to see some college actually do a study on if it would be possible or not. It's hard to say without real research just how much and what kind of resources an ark ship would need over those kinds of timescales. What's the theoretical rate of atmosphere loss? How efficiently can waste be recycled and put back into the ecosystem?
Using a sperm bank to dramatically increase genetic diversity would significantly reduce the minimum size of the crew, an all woman crew would further reduce the size but would probably cause all new problems. A vegan diet reduces the need to support non-human animal mass, but adds a requirement to be able to synthesize some vitamins and proteins. Enough redundant manufacturing to produce spare parts for everything, including the manufacturing facilities. IMO, it looks hard but not impossible with today's technologies.
now you will have to excuse me, I have some Dexter to watch
You rant about how you're sick of all the commercials, but you need to go watch a show that is shown without commercials. Sorry, but you're part of the problem. The content creators are addressing your complaints and your response is "I'm not paying for content". Wonderful... I'm sure that will solve the problems in no time.
What really gets me is that now movies have 10 minutes of commercials before them. Did I really just pay $10 to watch 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of movie trailers?
Go somewhere else then, seriously. Most often it's the small, independent, or even budget theaters that actual treat their patrons nicely. Even in the relatively small town I live in there is at least one budget theater that promises no commercials, less than 10 minutes of previews, and (as they love to point out as often as possible) real butter on the popcorn. And the manager actually knows the regulars, gives out free tickets and popcorn before the start of many movies, apologizes in person if something is wrong, and actually tries to make the whole experience enjoyable. And all for less than half the price of going to one of the big name theaters. Ok, sure, you won't get to see new releases opening weekend, but how often can you really not wait an extra month or two before you see a movie?
The CEO of Google said "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of".
No he didn't. He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That seems more like a warning to me: if you do something stupid and it gets on the internet, you've already lost. You can't complain about people reposting it, or indexing it, or emailing it; the genie is out of the bottle and it is impossible to delete something from the internet (at least if the collective internet finds it entertaining in some way).
Wow, one story about how Microsoft says you should develop a Windows 7 phone so that you're safe from patent lawsuits immediately followed by a story about MS suing an Android developer for patent infringement. I think maybe someone in MS PR department needs to read up on the definition of subtlety.
Is there any evidence that stem cells have ever been harvested from an embryo which A) was created explicitly for the purpose of harvesting said stem cells or B) Stood any chance of every being implanted into a womb. I suspect that the answer to A is that the embryos were all the 'leftovers' from fertility treatments and the answer to B is that the fertility treatments were terminated (either because of success or giving up) and they would probably have been destroyed or at best remained frozen indefinitely. So... what are we all arguing about again? The embryos already existed and they were already destined to never become a human life.
The 1900 to 1 ratio does not hold in countries where funding for embryonic stem cell research has been withheld and the very legality of it seriously questioned in some circles. If the government thinks that it is wrong enough to withhold funding it isn't a stretch to worry about whether or not it might someday become illegal alltogether. Withholding funding for flimsy ethical reasoning had a chilling effect on the research in general.
3) pipe sewage to huge waste ponds, then spew it out onto open ground. To hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell
It's not a waste pond, it's 100% all natural fertilizer storage the type of which has been in use since humanity began farming, including by those family farms you imagine were run so differently. The alternative is to spread artificial petroleum based fertilizer on everything or not be able to farm the same field after about 10 years. So yeah, to hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell, they don't know what they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
The example given was the most extreme of the ones I've heard (from people I know and trust). Other examples are similar to yours, with customs running of with equipment for some length of time, security checkpoint people insisting (against policy and the law) to see the contents of classified Currier bags, a suspicious number of laptops that have gone missing, and a suspicious amount of interest in work expressed by strangers (basically my random stranger in a bar scenario above). The reason that France stands out is probably more to do with the amount of business we do there (aerospace industry working on both NATO defense related things as well as commercial work with Airbus) than it is to do with how common it is. I suspect that it is just as likely to happen in anywhere else.
Android is the fastest selling smartphone OS, there are any number of Android options and lots of people who talk up Androids to their friends and families (myself included). If Android hasn't created a strong enough following to survive (and thrive) with the iPhone as real competition (it never was with it being tied to ATT in my opinion) then it deserves to die, and I say that as a die-hard Android fan. So... maybe not nothing, but it shouldn't really effect Android long term if Android is as serious a competitor for the iPhone as a lot of people think it is.
We always see the same side of the moon because of tidal locking. It doesn't have anything to do with how the moon formed except in that the impact hypothesis puts the new moon close enough to the Earth that it became tidally locked fairly quickly, but that isn't unique to the impact hypothesis. In very basic terms it works like this:
1) Tides cause bulges on one or both bodies
2) The material that the bodies are made of resists that bulge so the bulge is never precisely where it it 'should' be gravitationally speaking. If the body rotates slower than it revolves the bulge will be behind, faster than it revolves and the bulge will be ahead. Let's say the bulge is ahead in this example.
3) The orbiting body (relative to the tidal bulge) is slightly more attracted to the bulge, since it is slightly closer than the rest of the planet. Since the bulge is ahead this pulls the bulge back (causing the bulging body to slow its rotational speed) and pulls the orbiting body as a whole forward (causing it to increase it's revolution speed).
In the Earth/Moon system, this has locked the moon's rotation rate to it's revolution rate. The same isn't (yet) true for the earth, if you stand on the moon you will see all sides of the Earth. However, that is very, very slowly changing. Each trip around the planet, the moon steals some of the Earth's rotational energy and turns it into orbital energy, raising the orbit of the moon a tiny bit and lengthening the day a tiny bit.
China is hardly the only country guilty of this. I've heard more stories from co-workers about issues in France than anywhere else, to the point that it is against company policy to take a company issue laptop there. And I don't mean random guy approaches you in the bar and asks what you do for a living, I mean coming back from dinner to find 3 suits and 2 uniformed cops in your hotel room that all refuse to tell you what they were doing there.
If I had to guess it's because he never attempted to sell or give up any government information, just information about his (non defense related) job. Why he thought 'Country X' would be interested in such information is beyond me, seems to me like he would have been better off offering the information to a foreign competitor directly, unless his goal was just to screw over the company he worked for as much as possible.
nothing can fix that short of altering my genetic code.
To be fair, you don't need to change all of your genetic code, just the code in the cells that make up retina. Nothing a little gene therapy can't take care of in a decade or so.
Odd, I like the industrial look. Like a steampunk mouse built out of modern materials, and the steampunk elements are actually functionally important to the device. It's not exactly the sleek modern look we've become accustomed to, but it is futuristic in it's own way.
How do you figure out what to bill him? Cost of the firefighters time? Cost of the water used? Cost of the fuel used to get out there? Cost of wear and tear on equipment? Cost of insurance for the firefighting personnel? What about equipment that is damaged? Do you negotiate a price before you start helping (which you have no way of knowing the total cost) or do you drop a bill for $10k+ on the guy afterword and have him refuse or be unable to pay?
As decent human beings, I would imagine that many of the firefighters wanted to help the guy out. On the other hand, what kind of precedent does that set? Don't pay and your house is on fire? Well, I guess we'll help out this time. What incentive would there be for anyone to pay the fee if they all knew that the fire department would come and help them out anyway? No... as much as it pains me to say it, the fire department made the right choice, if they had done anything else the whole system would fall apart. Maybe that would have been a good thing, but I don't see that it is the firefighters job to make that decision.
In the way that 'non-depleting' is too hard to say.
Speculation/rumor is that the attack vector was USB drives used by Russian contractors. That is also it's primary method of spread, but it may be able to spread over networks as well (reports that I've seen seem contradictory on that one). Further speculation/rumor has it that a possible "nuclear accident" at Iran's centrifuge facility last year may have been caused by this worm, if that is the case it is the only report of actual hardware being damaged that I've heard of and would 100% support the idea that the worm was targeted at Iran's nuclear facilities. Given the number of infections in Iran and the artificial three hop limit that the worm's writers gave it, it would seem the attack originated there.
I think it's likely that the writers never planned on having the worm escape the target's network, I'm guessing someone at the nuke facility broke security protocol and took home a thumb drive that they weren't supposed to and it spread from there. The worm doesn't do much except take up cycles on systems that don't match the fingerprint that it is looking for, a fingerprint only makes sense if you're looking to take down a lot of identical systems, which lines up nicely with the centrifuge theory. Basically, it's highly likely that this was a government job, targeting Iran's centrifuges, done with inside knowledge of what systems they were using, and delivered using some pretty basic social engineering (leaving infected USB drives on the ground in the parking lot for instance).
Today's SETI pretty much assumes that ET is trying to get a hold of us. Omnidirectional signals get washed out by the background noise at any appreciable distance, we simply don't have the antennae to detect anything other than a directional blast right at us. And if you're going to assume someone is trying to communicate you're going to look in the parts of the spectrum that will travel the farthest without being washed out. You're going to assume that there is some relatively easy to detect carrier information. You're going to assume that they are going out of their way to be understood.
You can of course make an argument that any alien life will be so different from us that those assumptions don't hold, or that they are so different that we can't even detect their active attempts at communication. But the best method that we've come up with to talk over interplanetary or larger distances is radio, unless we're missing some branch of physics it's likely that any aliens would come to a similar conclusion.
It's worth noting that although many systems have been compromised worldwide, the only reports of equipment actually being damaged are apocryphal reports of 'nuclear accidents' at Iran's centrifuge facilities. The international community has assumed that those accidents were caused by the worm, and Iran calling the worm an attack on their nuclear ambitions seams to support that claim. Personally, I find the second wave of infections more likely to be someone modifying the payload and basic parameters for their own ends, it seems quite different from the mindset that drove the first set of attacks.
There are ways to analyze potential information even if you don't know what you're looking for. Basically, you want to know how 'random' the signal is that you're looking at, regardless of what kind of data or how the data is encoded it is going to be non-random unless it is heavily encrypted.
One thing to keep in mind, it's entirely possible that his detractors were right. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of effort that would have gone into designing, building, operating, and maintaining an analytical engine would have been higher than hiring humans to do the work in the first place. One thing with being 100 years ahead of your time is that... well, your idea is 100 years ahead of everything else; a surprising number of inventions would be totally worthless if taken 100 years out of context.
I'd really love to see some college actually do a study on if it would be possible or not. It's hard to say without real research just how much and what kind of resources an ark ship would need over those kinds of timescales. What's the theoretical rate of atmosphere loss? How efficiently can waste be recycled and put back into the ecosystem?
Using a sperm bank to dramatically increase genetic diversity would significantly reduce the minimum size of the crew, an all woman crew would further reduce the size but would probably cause all new problems. A vegan diet reduces the need to support non-human animal mass, but adds a requirement to be able to synthesize some vitamins and proteins. Enough redundant manufacturing to produce spare parts for everything, including the manufacturing facilities. IMO, it looks hard but not impossible with today's technologies.
now you will have to excuse me, I have some Dexter to watch
You rant about how you're sick of all the commercials, but you need to go watch a show that is shown without commercials. Sorry, but you're part of the problem. The content creators are addressing your complaints and your response is "I'm not paying for content". Wonderful... I'm sure that will solve the problems in no time.
What really gets me is that now movies have 10 minutes of commercials before them. Did I really just pay $10 to watch 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of movie trailers?
Go somewhere else then, seriously. Most often it's the small, independent, or even budget theaters that actual treat their patrons nicely. Even in the relatively small town I live in there is at least one budget theater that promises no commercials, less than 10 minutes of previews, and (as they love to point out as often as possible) real butter on the popcorn. And the manager actually knows the regulars, gives out free tickets and popcorn before the start of many movies, apologizes in person if something is wrong, and actually tries to make the whole experience enjoyable. And all for less than half the price of going to one of the big name theaters. Ok, sure, you won't get to see new releases opening weekend, but how often can you really not wait an extra month or two before you see a movie?
The CEO of Google said "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of".
No he didn't. He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That seems more like a warning to me: if you do something stupid and it gets on the internet, you've already lost. You can't complain about people reposting it, or indexing it, or emailing it; the genie is out of the bottle and it is impossible to delete something from the internet (at least if the collective internet finds it entertaining in some way).
Wow, one story about how Microsoft says you should develop a Windows 7 phone so that you're safe from patent lawsuits immediately followed by a story about MS suing an Android developer for patent infringement. I think maybe someone in MS PR department needs to read up on the definition of subtlety.
Is there any evidence that stem cells have ever been harvested from an embryo which A) was created explicitly for the purpose of harvesting said stem cells or B) Stood any chance of every being implanted into a womb. I suspect that the answer to A is that the embryos were all the 'leftovers' from fertility treatments and the answer to B is that the fertility treatments were terminated (either because of success or giving up) and they would probably have been destroyed or at best remained frozen indefinitely. So... what are we all arguing about again? The embryos already existed and they were already destined to never become a human life.
I supposed blastocystic stem cells is too hard to say, otherwise you might be on to something.
The 1900 to 1 ratio does not hold in countries where funding for embryonic stem cell research has been withheld and the very legality of it seriously questioned in some circles. If the government thinks that it is wrong enough to withhold funding it isn't a stretch to worry about whether or not it might someday become illegal alltogether. Withholding funding for flimsy ethical reasoning had a chilling effect on the research in general.
3) pipe sewage to huge waste ponds, then spew it out onto open ground. To hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell
It's not a waste pond, it's 100% all natural fertilizer storage the type of which has been in use since humanity began farming, including by those family farms you imagine were run so differently. The alternative is to spread artificial petroleum based fertilizer on everything or not be able to farm the same field after about 10 years. So yeah, to hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell, they don't know what they're talking about.
Yeah, they could give each citizen back... oh. $3.50. Why, you could buy a couple of 20oz bottles of Mt.Dew for that much.