Isn't "illegal enemy combatant" a new term invented by Bush administration to describe people they sent to Guantanamo prison in violation of Geneva Convention and pretty much all other laws or treaties relevant to those people?
Bush administration may have invented the term, but you can't really blame them. After all, you have to call them something. They are not uniformed soldiers. They don't even have any affiliation with any sovereign nations as far as their actions go, and if the allegations about what any of these detainees did or planned to do turned out to be true, they sure weren't "innocent civilians".
So, Bush administration can call them either "illegal enemy combatant", or "terrorists", or if they really wanted to, even "freedom fighters". It's just words. It doesn't change the essence of what (a good majority of) these people are.
No, but after reading the article I understand that a use case for this feature is: first harvest data, then win additional time to abuse this data by disabling the computer.
I don't think it works that way. If they wanted to keep using the same virus/trojan, then maybe as my sibling poster says, destroying itself might work (but then, probably not—whoever is trying to come up with a solution probably has a quarantined copy somewhere).
The moment the malware makes itself known (for example, by making the computer unusable) is the moment when the victim can take some action to protect his private data, alert credit card companies and credit record agencies. He doesn't need a personal computer to do that, you know (when worse comes to worst (i.e. no friend's computer to use, etc.), there's always the good ol' phone book and a payphone).
A cracker's primary goal should be in avoiding detection. Once detected, that goal should be in providing some plausible alternatives, hoping that the victim will delay any drastic action. Destroying the computer goes against that, and it's nothing but a vindictive action with no actual financial gain.
Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and knew what you were doing, you could get it out into the local environment.
And it would last a lot longer than the oil spill.
The harms of a little radioactivity has been greatly exaggerated. I wouldn't want to be around the A-bomb (or its fall-out), but there are so many things in nature that are radioactive, that I doubt contents of a single nuclear reactor, dispersed through the ocean, would cause any noticeable harm.
"Dirty bomb" is good for creating panic in the mindless mob, but not for any kind of actual damage. Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)? And not too long ago, people used plates painted with paint containing uranium, and played around with radium like it's glow-in-the-dark fluorescent paint. Of course, we don't do these things (except smoke detector) any more because, well, routine exposure to significant radioactivity isn't healthy, after all.
But as far as a single disastrous incident goes, dirty bomb's most destructive effect would be the explosive aspect of it, not the radioactive material in it.
I don't doubt the contents of nuclear reactor can be used to kill a few even tens of people. But, for ecological disasters, I would still stick with oil tankers. Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature. The real harm is in the vast quantity we can accumulate these things in one place, and this vast quantity is what a nuclear reactor should lack.
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg [fnal.gov]
Control the protons - control the neutrinos.
The part that I can't understand is how they can make such... well-collimated beam, and I can't find any reference that explains the mechanism clearly (say, clear enough to a physicist whose expertise isn't particle physics).
I mean, how exactly should the protons be controlled? Given that neutrinos take away so little momentum and are always ultra relativistic, it probably doesn't matter what direction (and how fast) protons or the decay source were moving at... and AFAICS the only other thing that might produce anisotropic distribution is producing neutrinos from some polarized source (i.e. spin polarized particles)... but at least when I think about them as being analogous to dipole radiation, the angular dependence can't be too sharp.
except that the consequences of a hijacking or attack on the vessel could be a disaster. attacks not a problem for a military vessel but for a boat filled with civilians and maybe some guards bad idea.
Not really. You have to remember that the kind of uranium (only a few percent U-235) that powers a nuclear reactor is different from weapons grade enriched uranium (more than 90% U-235). Chain reaction cannot be produced with such material, although a meltdown that releases the radioactive material into the environment can happen—but how much fuel is a ship going to carry with it?
Pirates can already hijack an oil tanker (or any oil-powered ship) and beach it on some shore and dump the oil to destroy the coast marine life if they wanted.
In fact, to date the most infamous act of terrorism was performed with a transportation "vessel" filled with fossil fuel, not anything containing anything remotely radioactive.
Neutrinos are important for fundamental physics. Since the late 90s, we found out that they have mass (before, most people assumed that these little guys were massless like photons), and since this mass has to enter as a parameter to any fundamental theory of nature, experimental determination of this mass can constrain the proposed extensions to the Standard Model (which we know to be flawed because it doesn't answer some of the basic, fundamental questions).
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam."
I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
If you can't show me how it works or show that it does work in a double blind test with a sufficient sample size, it would not be a good enough argument for me serving on a jury to convict.
In a statistical test, we would also have to apply a pretty strong definition of "it does work". If it works correctly 99% of the time, that means it's falsely accusing innocents 1% of the time.
Just as one can't prove a negative, it would be impossible to produce a breath analyzer that works 100% of the time under every imaginable condition (temperature, humidity, chemicals in the air...), but we do need to set strong enough standards that our conscience can deal with the small fraction of innocents accused and "proven" guilty by the machine.
Or we could stop relying on a machine for our justice system and require multiple corroborating evidences (for one, sobriety tests, which should yield fairly good indicator whether someone is too drunk to drive, especially in conjunction with breath analyzer results) before anyone is accused or convicted of drunk driving.
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Isn't "illegal enemy combatant" a new term invented by Bush administration to describe people they sent to Guantanamo prison in violation of Geneva Convention and pretty much all other laws or treaties relevant to those people?
Bush administration may have invented the term, but you can't really blame them. After all, you have to call them something. They are not uniformed soldiers. They don't even have any affiliation with any sovereign nations as far as their actions go, and if the allegations about what any of these detainees did or planned to do turned out to be true, they sure weren't "innocent civilians".
So, Bush administration can call them either "illegal enemy combatant", or "terrorists", or if they really wanted to, even "freedom fighters". It's just words. It doesn't change the essence of what (a good majority of) these people are.
No, but after reading the article I understand that a use case for this feature is: first harvest data, then win additional time to abuse this data by disabling the computer.
I don't think it works that way. If they wanted to keep using the same virus/trojan, then maybe as my sibling poster says, destroying itself might work (but then, probably not—whoever is trying to come up with a solution probably has a quarantined copy somewhere).
The moment the malware makes itself known (for example, by making the computer unusable) is the moment when the victim can take some action to protect his private data, alert credit card companies and credit record agencies. He doesn't need a personal computer to do that, you know (when worse comes to worst (i.e. no friend's computer to use, etc.), there's always the good ol' phone book and a payphone).
A cracker's primary goal should be in avoiding detection. Once detected, that goal should be in providing some plausible alternatives, hoping that the victim will delay any drastic action. Destroying the computer goes against that, and it's nothing but a vindictive action with no actual financial gain.
Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and knew what you were doing, you could get it out into the local environment.
And it would last a lot longer than the oil spill.
The harms of a little radioactivity has been greatly exaggerated. I wouldn't want to be around the A-bomb (or its fall-out), but there are so many things in nature that are radioactive, that I doubt contents of a single nuclear reactor, dispersed through the ocean, would cause any noticeable harm.
"Dirty bomb" is good for creating panic in the mindless mob, but not for any kind of actual damage. Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)? And not too long ago, people used plates painted with paint containing uranium, and played around with radium like it's glow-in-the-dark fluorescent paint. Of course, we don't do these things (except smoke detector) any more because, well, routine exposure to significant radioactivity isn't healthy, after all.
But as far as a single disastrous incident goes, dirty bomb's most destructive effect would be the explosive aspect of it, not the radioactive material in it.
I don't doubt the contents of nuclear reactor can be used to kill a few even tens of people. But, for ecological disasters, I would still stick with oil tankers. Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature. The real harm is in the vast quantity we can accumulate these things in one place, and this vast quantity is what a nuclear reactor should lack.
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg [fnal.gov]
Control the protons - control the neutrinos.
The part that I can't understand is how they can make such ... well-collimated beam, and I can't find any reference that explains the mechanism clearly (say, clear enough to a physicist whose expertise isn't particle physics).
I mean, how exactly should the protons be controlled? Given that neutrinos take away so little momentum and are always ultra relativistic, it probably doesn't matter what direction (and how fast) protons or the decay source were moving at ... and AFAICS the only other thing that might produce anisotropic distribution is producing neutrinos from some polarized source (i.e. spin polarized particles) ... but at least when I think about them as being analogous to dipole radiation, the angular dependence can't be too sharp.
except that the consequences of a hijacking or attack on the vessel could be a disaster. attacks not a problem for a military vessel but for a boat filled with civilians and maybe some guards bad idea.
Not really. You have to remember that the kind of uranium (only a few percent U-235) that powers a nuclear reactor is different from weapons grade enriched uranium (more than 90% U-235). Chain reaction cannot be produced with such material, although a meltdown that releases the radioactive material into the environment can happen—but how much fuel is a ship going to carry with it?
Pirates can already hijack an oil tanker (or any oil-powered ship) and beach it on some shore and dump the oil to destroy the coast marine life if they wanted.
In fact, to date the most infamous act of terrorism was performed with a transportation "vessel" filled with fossil fuel, not anything containing anything remotely radioactive.
To detect neutrinos.
Neutrinos are important for fundamental physics. Since the late 90s, we found out that they have mass (before, most people assumed that these little guys were massless like photons), and since this mass has to enter as a parameter to any fundamental theory of nature, experimental determination of this mass can constrain the proposed extensions to the Standard Model (which we know to be flawed because it doesn't answer some of the basic, fundamental questions).
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam."
I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
If you can't show me how it works or show that it does work in a double blind test with a sufficient sample size, it would not be a good enough argument for me serving on a jury to convict.
In a statistical test, we would also have to apply a pretty strong definition of "it does work". If it works correctly 99% of the time, that means it's falsely accusing innocents 1% of the time.
Just as one can't prove a negative, it would be impossible to produce a breath analyzer that works 100% of the time under every imaginable condition (temperature, humidity, chemicals in the air ...), but we do need to set strong enough standards that our conscience can deal with the small fraction of innocents accused and "proven" guilty by the machine.
Or we could stop relying on a machine for our justice system and require multiple corroborating evidences (for one, sobriety tests, which should yield fairly good indicator whether someone is too drunk to drive, especially in conjunction with breath analyzer results) before anyone is accused or convicted of drunk driving.