That's not incoherence, that's simple sensitivity to context.
So, considering that many of the Israel citizens lost most of their families to the Holocaust, shouldn't you be a little more sensitive to the context?
Hypocrite! You and all of the Iranian and Arab people, you are nothing but hypocrites.
I'm neither Arab nor Israeli, I'm technically neutral in that context, but I heavily lean toward the Israeli side of the conflict.
There's a whole lot of difference between defending yourself from homemade rockets fired across the border and stoning to death a woman that had sex with another man two years after her husband died.
People also get confused with chants like "Death to America" which isn't as extreme as it sounds once translated.
Yeah, right. The GP said If someone dies, it is considered not polite to just say "Shogi is dead". Yet you say "Death to America" is not that bad. WTF?
If your language is so incoherent, then it's your duty to take better care how you speak.
I don't know why every time someone mentions Mossadegh he is moderated insightful. You don't need a time machine, just try to inform yourself better instead of repeating old political propaganda from the Soviet Union.
First of all, Mossadegh wasn't really that democratic at all. For instance, Wikipedia says "Realizing that the opposition would take the vast majority of the provincial seats, Mosaddegh stopped the voting as soon as 79 deputies just enough to form a parliamentary quorum had been elected."
Second, Iran was in deep economic trouble from the oil industry nationalization under Mossadegh. With or without CIA intervention, he was doomed to fall sooner or later.
Finally, if the CIA were able to manipulate foreign governments that well, they should get better results. If they succeeded in overthrowing Mossadegh then why are they unable to overthrow the Islamic government of Iran?
giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading 'a significant amount of child pornography.'
-"I swear, chief, it's all part of an effort to catch a gang of child pornographers, that's why I've been browsing that site so much"
TL; DR, just skimmed it. However, I found these two contradictory assertions there:
"mob rule and demagoguery result from focusing governance on a few hot-button issues"
"Collaborative governance does not demand that every person participate in every decision. It simply allows people to participate as much or as little as they please in any decision"
If people are able to pick in which decisions they will participate, then most of them will want to participate on a few "hot-button" issues. The result is mob rule and demagoguery.
If there is any problem with relativity wrt black holes, it's that since we can't look past the event horizon, we can't tell if there really exists a mathematical discontinuity in the universe or if something else is happening.
The problem I see with both special and general relativity is that it's an excellent mathematical method, but it's an ad hoc mathematical tool that cannot be extended beyond certain limits.
In relativity nothing can travel beyond light speed because that would imply an infinite energy, but that doesn't preclude some other mathematical solutions. However, if one assumes that space and time are quantized, then it seems like the existence of an absolute limit on the propagation speed of waves is necessary, from the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition. This would be a limitation imposed by the structure of the universe itself, not from our calculations.
In Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" there's a chapter where he explains the concept of "curved" space with an analogy of ants living on a hot plate. Their measuring sticks expand and contract with temperature variations, so their measurements depend on the temperature gradient over the plate. Now suppose an ant engineer invented a new equipment, with a thermometer attached to the ruler which compensates for thermal expansion, they would discover they lived on a flat universe after all.
Starting with SR and its paradoxes, it seems pretty obvious that a theory that compensated for time and length variations would be welcome. Ten years after Einstein's death we discovered a universal velocity reference in the microwave background dipole, so one of the main tenets of special relativity is not true anymore. Perhaps this universal reference could be used to create a new theory separating the observer's perception of time and length from some absolute timespace which would be much simpler than our distorted measurements lead us to believe.
I believe the future lies in information theory. Assuming observable events happen in the universe, and assuming that causality exists, i.e. that if some event causes another that relation will exist under all circumstances, then we can think on how information about different events is transported through the universe. Again, this would be a truly absolute limit, not one imposed by our limitations in measuring and calculation.
Ever heard of Karl Popper? What we currently call the Scientific Method is not even all that old, and mostly formalised by Popper, a philosopher. It's worth knowing his name, because his thinking has had a huge impact on our thinking.
Wow, what a misunderstanding of the scientific method!
When I started engineering college, among the courses I took in the first semester where Physics, of course, and Philosophy of Science.
In the first Physics classes we learned about the birth of science, the professor took us to a planetarium and showed how the planets moved among the stars. Then he explained about how ancient Greek philosophers influenced European thinking, Aristotle being the most prominent in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. Next he told us about Galileo.
In our first Physics lab class we recreated Galileo's experiment about falling bodies. We timed how long it took for marbles to roll down a through. We measured how long it took to roll down trough different lengths. We assumed a hypothesis of constant acceleration and deducted from it a square law, we tested the time vs. distances we had measured against the hypothesis of constant acceleration.
All these procedures followed what Galileo did 300 years before Popper was born.
It's the method, not the words, that make science. Science existed long before Popper put his ideas into words, just like business administration existed before terms like "proactive" and "synergy" were invented.
I read "skeptic" blogs and "established science" blogs on climate change, and frankly I don't know enough to judge much of any of the science, math, or methodology on the merits.
Perhaps if you read scientific papers instead you would become a better judge on that.
When you understand the unique chemicals and items we can synthesize out of this ancient black goop, you realize how stupid we are for simply burning it.
That is where the bad programs really come in. I have seen people just load huge structures into memory for no good reason other than they can.
I thought that not needing to worry about memory management was supposed to be one of the advantages of Java. If you need to take care about which structures you load into memory when, then you are better off writing the whole thing in C, where you have a more finely tuned way to control it.
Automated tools are fine, but only if they work *perfectly*.
The question was "how much does it cost" not "how much are they asking to send a payload up."
What they are asking is pretty much determined by the market, Ariane charges about the same prices.
How much does it cost, that's a question that their accountants could answer and I don't think they are available for comments on this subject. Presumably, however, it costs less than the price, otherwise how could they turn a profit?
The idea seems to be that there are just tons and tons of developers out there with amazing amounts of time that will jump on a project and help, if only it was opened up
This is a common misconception about free software.
"Many eyes" does not mean every user is a developer, as a matter of fact the vast majority is not.
What "many eyes" means is that IF a user is bothered enough about a bug and that user has the ability to develop software, then he CAN fix that bug. There might be a million users, but if only 0.1% of them are interested developers then there will be a thousand people fixing that bug.
The problem with insuring a nuclear reactor is that, if it does fail, the cost is going to be so huge that it would immediately bankrupt pretty much any insurance company.
Oh, really? Then I have the solution for your problems. Spreading risks is what insurance companies know how to do.
We have done tasks equivalent to burying a few hundred tons of radioactive waste in 5000m depth, with no acceptable margin of error? This is not exploring the Titanic, sorry.
You are, obviously, not an engineer. Sorry.
The engineering challenge in sending a robot to do tasks at 5000 meters depth do not depend on details of what those tasks entail. The robot being there and doing what it's told to do is enough.
I do not condone continuing to rely on our limited supply of non-renewable resources like uranium
Then you should probably consider dropping dead as the best option.
Our supply of radioactive materials is certainly finite, and it will sometime come to an end like solar power will, but it will last a humongous amount of time more than petroleum will.
The pro-nuclear side downplays the risks in face of hardly a year going by without some reactor having to shut down due to supposedly harmless technical problems, while going on about nuclear power having no CO2 emissions.
I used to work at a power company that had a couple of nuclear plants.
Every time they had to shut down a nuclear plant for some reason it was front page news. Yet the other couple of dozen or so hydro power plants we operated were shut down routinely for a number of reasons, and the press never took care to mention that.
In the end, the nuclear plants were the most reliable, by very far, in the whole system.
Last I heard the abyssal plains aren't very well explored. Yet we can say they haven't changed in billions of years?
What we know is that plate techtoncis tells us that some areas in the bottom of the oceans have never had any significant geologic forces acting upon them for more than a billion of years.
what are the costs of such an undertaking? What you describe has, to my knowledge, never been done
We have done enough equivalent tasks that we know what it would cost. Robots have been exploring sunken ships, like the Titanic, for decades, it's a routine task by now.
Not to mention all the robots that have been sent to fix the problems in sunken oil platforms, of course, but I suppose that mentioning this would associate getting rid of nuclear waste with the ecologic catastrophe that's our current search for gasoline, right?
It's very hard to tell how stable a location will be over the time required for nuclear waste storage
How about the bottom of the ocean? There are vast regions of the abyssal plains that have been unchanged for a billion years or more.
Send a robot to bury 20 cm diameter x 2 meter long cylinders of vitrified waste under a 100 m layer of mud under a 5000 m of ocean, and come tell me about a scenario where that situation could be changed to harm the environment.
You're saying highly radioactive substances have a short half-life, which makes sense, intuitively. On the other hand, it seems to conflict with common assumptions,
Welcome to marketing!
That's exactly how lobbying works, use common assumptions to reinforce what you are trying to sell, forget about science and the truth.
About the Wikipedia article on nuclear waste, it seemed pretty balanced as I read it. Care to point out what conflicts you found? It says there that high level radioactive waste has a short life and that "It is a common misconception that nuclear waste has to be stored in a cave after its 20-year decommissioning process"
The problem is used correctly nuclear power is not a cheap energy source. As nuclear power plants cut corners they find creative ways to ruin the environment
The problem is that the cost of nuclear power is inflated by the regulations that the anti-nuclear lobby imposed upon everybody as a very effective form of sabotaging the nuclear power industry.
Different from all other power systems, you cannot find examples of how the nuclear power plants have ruined the environment by "cutting corners". What they are doing is storing nuclear waste "temporarily" but in a highly secure way at the power station plants, instead of moving them to the non-existent "permanent" waste storage facilities.
The reason why permanent storage facilities do not exist is only because politicians have never agreed on where those facilities should be located and how they would be constructed. each time some proposal comes up it's immediately shot down by the anti-nuclear lobby.
The anti-nuclear lobby is financed by the taxes we, the citizens, pay. There are NGOs all over the world that get tax-exempt status because they are officially "pro-environment" organizations. Perhaps Wikileaks should tell us how much those NGO directors get in salaries (or do you remotely believe that everybody who works for those organizations is a volunteer?)
What about when those attacks steal or reveal sensitive military information, compromise troop movements, or even better silently alter or changes plans? Or how about if malicious software were to cripple a nations infrastructure such as power and water? Or steal the information regarding the whereabouts of critical personnel in military branches?
You mean like when a spy watches the troops with binoculars and writes down what he sees? Like when someone follows a key military officer by foot?
What shall be subject to treaties and have hotlines next: binoculars, paper, pencil, or shoes?
I know you are also not allowed to own unlicensed radioactive sources over a certain, minuscule, vastly smaller than the critical mass of uranium or plutonium isotopes.
What about materials in the ground? Building materials?
I know this is nitpicking, but there is uranium in many rocks. If you own a big quarry, there could be a lot of uranium, certainly above the limit you are theoretically allowed to own, in those rocks.
Or what about real estate? In some places there's no distinction between soil and underground for ownership purposes. If you own a tract of land you own all that's between the surface and the center of the earth. There's certainly enough uranium to build a bomb in that 6378 km tall inverted pyramid of rock.
The first amendment says CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion.
Article I - The Legislative Branch Section 1 - The Legislature All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Where does the Constitution grant power to the states to establish a religion?
I hope is true because Oz. to Oz Cinnamon will be a safer product to use in the process, but it's not magic.
I know anything about Australia is always accepted at/., but this one is about scientists at the University of Missouri. This has nothing to do wit Oz.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how you try to spin it, the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans trace back to "ONE" female.
To say we all descend from ONE woman does not mean she was the ONLY woman on earth at the time.
Look at it this way: all my brothers, sisters, and cousins descend from my grandmother. But we have TWO grandmothers. Capisce?
That's not incoherence, that's simple sensitivity to context.
So, considering that many of the Israel citizens lost most of their families to the Holocaust, shouldn't you be a little more sensitive to the context?
Hypocrite! You and all of the Iranian and Arab people, you are nothing but hypocrites.
I'm neither Arab nor Israeli, I'm technically neutral in that context, but I heavily lean toward the Israeli side of the conflict.
There's a whole lot of difference between defending yourself from homemade rockets fired across the border and stoning to death a woman that had sex with another man two years after her husband died.
People also get confused with chants like "Death to America" which isn't as extreme as it sounds once translated.
Yeah, right. The GP said If someone dies, it is considered not polite to just say "Shogi is dead". Yet you say "Death to America" is not that bad. WTF?
If your language is so incoherent, then it's your duty to take better care how you speak.
I don't know why every time someone mentions Mossadegh he is moderated insightful. You don't need a time machine, just try to inform yourself better instead of repeating old political propaganda from the Soviet Union.
First of all, Mossadegh wasn't really that democratic at all. For instance, Wikipedia says "Realizing that the opposition would take the vast majority of the provincial seats, Mosaddegh stopped the voting as soon as 79 deputies just enough to form a parliamentary quorum had been elected."
Second, Iran was in deep economic trouble from the oil industry nationalization under Mossadegh. With or without CIA intervention, he was doomed to fall sooner or later.
Finally, if the CIA were able to manipulate foreign governments that well, they should get better results. If they succeeded in overthrowing Mossadegh then why are they unable to overthrow the Islamic government of Iran?
giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading 'a significant amount of child pornography.'
-"I swear, chief, it's all part of an effort to catch a gang of child pornographers, that's why I've been browsing that site so much"
TL; DR, just skimmed it. However, I found these two contradictory assertions there:
If people are able to pick in which decisions they will participate, then most of them will want to participate on a few "hot-button" issues. The result is mob rule and demagoguery.
If there is any problem with relativity wrt black holes, it's that since we can't look past the event horizon, we can't tell if there really exists a mathematical discontinuity in the universe or if something else is happening.
The problem I see with both special and general relativity is that it's an excellent mathematical method, but it's an ad hoc mathematical tool that cannot be extended beyond certain limits.
In relativity nothing can travel beyond light speed because that would imply an infinite energy, but that doesn't preclude some other mathematical solutions. However, if one assumes that space and time are quantized, then it seems like the existence of an absolute limit on the propagation speed of waves is necessary, from the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition. This would be a limitation imposed by the structure of the universe itself, not from our calculations.
In Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" there's a chapter where he explains the concept of "curved" space with an analogy of ants living on a hot plate. Their measuring sticks expand and contract with temperature variations, so their measurements depend on the temperature gradient over the plate. Now suppose an ant engineer invented a new equipment, with a thermometer attached to the ruler which compensates for thermal expansion, they would discover they lived on a flat universe after all.
Starting with SR and its paradoxes, it seems pretty obvious that a theory that compensated for time and length variations would be welcome. Ten years after Einstein's death we discovered a universal velocity reference in the microwave background dipole, so one of the main tenets of special relativity is not true anymore. Perhaps this universal reference could be used to create a new theory separating the observer's perception of time and length from some absolute timespace which would be much simpler than our distorted measurements lead us to believe.
I believe the future lies in information theory. Assuming observable events happen in the universe, and assuming that causality exists, i.e. that if some event causes another that relation will exist under all circumstances, then we can think on how information about different events is transported through the universe. Again, this would be a truly absolute limit, not one imposed by our limitations in measuring and calculation.
Ever heard of Karl Popper? What we currently call the Scientific Method is not even all that old, and mostly formalised by Popper, a philosopher. It's worth knowing his name, because his thinking has had a huge impact on our thinking.
Wow, what a misunderstanding of the scientific method!
When I started engineering college, among the courses I took in the first semester where Physics, of course, and Philosophy of Science.
In the first Physics classes we learned about the birth of science, the professor took us to a planetarium and showed how the planets moved among the stars. Then he explained about how ancient Greek philosophers influenced European thinking, Aristotle being the most prominent in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. Next he told us about Galileo.
In our first Physics lab class we recreated Galileo's experiment about falling bodies. We timed how long it took for marbles to roll down a through. We measured how long it took to roll down trough different lengths. We assumed a hypothesis of constant acceleration and deducted from it a square law, we tested the time vs. distances we had measured against the hypothesis of constant acceleration.
All these procedures followed what Galileo did 300 years before Popper was born.
It's the method, not the words, that make science. Science existed long before Popper put his ideas into words, just like business administration existed before terms like "proactive" and "synergy" were invented.
I read "skeptic" blogs and "established science" blogs on climate change, and frankly I don't know enough to judge much of any of the science, math, or methodology on the merits.
Perhaps if you read scientific papers instead you would become a better judge on that.
As one prof of mine said:
When you understand the unique chemicals and items we can synthesize out of this ancient black goop, you realize how stupid we are for simply burning it.
That's a lot of potential plastic...
Why do you mention it as if it were a good thing?
That is where the bad programs really come in. I have seen people just load huge structures into memory for no good reason other than they can.
I thought that not needing to worry about memory management was supposed to be one of the advantages of Java. If you need to take care about which structures you load into memory when, then you are better off writing the whole thing in C, where you have a more finely tuned way to control it.
Automated tools are fine, but only if they work *perfectly*.
The question was "how much does it cost" not "how much are they asking to send a payload up."
What they are asking is pretty much determined by the market, Ariane charges about the same prices.
How much does it cost, that's a question that their accountants could answer and I don't think they are available for comments on this subject. Presumably, however, it costs less than the price, otherwise how could they turn a profit?
The idea seems to be that there are just tons and tons of developers out there with amazing amounts of time that will jump on a project and help, if only it was opened up
This is a common misconception about free software.
"Many eyes" does not mean every user is a developer, as a matter of fact the vast majority is not.
What "many eyes" means is that IF a user is bothered enough about a bug and that user has the ability to develop software, then he CAN fix that bug. There might be a million users, but if only 0.1% of them are interested developers then there will be a thousand people fixing that bug.
And every user will profit by that fix.
The problem with insuring a nuclear reactor is that, if it does fail, the cost is going to be so huge that it would immediately bankrupt pretty much any insurance company.
Oh, really? Then I have the solution for your problems. Spreading risks is what insurance companies know how to do.
We have done tasks equivalent to burying a few hundred tons of radioactive waste in 5000m depth, with no acceptable margin of error? This is not exploring the Titanic, sorry.
You are, obviously, not an engineer. Sorry.
The engineering challenge in sending a robot to do tasks at 5000 meters depth do not depend on details of what those tasks entail. The robot being there and doing what it's told to do is enough.
I do not condone continuing to rely on our limited supply of non-renewable resources like uranium
Then you should probably consider dropping dead as the best option.
Our supply of radioactive materials is certainly finite, and it will sometime come to an end like solar power will, but it will last a humongous amount of time more than petroleum will.
The pro-nuclear side downplays the risks in face of hardly a year going by without some reactor having to shut down due to supposedly harmless technical problems, while going on about nuclear power having no CO2 emissions.
I used to work at a power company that had a couple of nuclear plants.
Every time they had to shut down a nuclear plant for some reason it was front page news. Yet the other couple of dozen or so hydro power plants we operated were shut down routinely for a number of reasons, and the press never took care to mention that.
In the end, the nuclear plants were the most reliable, by very far, in the whole system.
Last I heard the abyssal plains aren't very well explored. Yet we can say they haven't changed in billions of years?
What we know is that plate techtoncis tells us that some areas in the bottom of the oceans have never had any significant geologic forces acting upon them for more than a billion of years.
what are the costs of such an undertaking? What you describe has, to my knowledge, never been done
We have done enough equivalent tasks that we know what it would cost. Robots have been exploring sunken ships, like the Titanic, for decades, it's a routine task by now.
Not to mention all the robots that have been sent to fix the problems in sunken oil platforms, of course, but I suppose that mentioning this would associate getting rid of nuclear waste with the ecologic catastrophe that's our current search for gasoline, right?
It's very hard to tell how stable a location will be over the time required for nuclear waste storage
How about the bottom of the ocean? There are vast regions of the abyssal plains that have been unchanged for a billion years or more.
Send a robot to bury 20 cm diameter x 2 meter long cylinders of vitrified waste under a 100 m layer of mud under a 5000 m of ocean, and come tell me about a scenario where that situation could be changed to harm the environment.
You're saying highly radioactive substances have a short half-life, which makes sense, intuitively. On the other hand, it seems to conflict with common assumptions,
Welcome to marketing!
That's exactly how lobbying works, use common assumptions to reinforce what you are trying to sell, forget about science and the truth.
About the Wikipedia article on nuclear waste, it seemed pretty balanced as I read it. Care to point out what conflicts you found? It says there that high level radioactive waste has a short life and that "It is a common misconception that nuclear waste has to be stored in a cave after its 20-year decommissioning process"
The problem is used correctly nuclear power is not a cheap energy source. As nuclear power plants cut corners they find creative ways to ruin the environment
The problem is that the cost of nuclear power is inflated by the regulations that the anti-nuclear lobby imposed upon everybody as a very effective form of sabotaging the nuclear power industry.
Different from all other power systems, you cannot find examples of how the nuclear power plants have ruined the environment by "cutting corners". What they are doing is storing nuclear waste "temporarily" but in a highly secure way at the power station plants, instead of moving them to the non-existent "permanent" waste storage facilities.
The reason why permanent storage facilities do not exist is only because politicians have never agreed on where those facilities should be located and how they would be constructed. each time some proposal comes up it's immediately shot down by the anti-nuclear lobby.
The anti-nuclear lobby is financed by the taxes we, the citizens, pay. There are NGOs all over the world that get tax-exempt status because they are officially "pro-environment" organizations. Perhaps Wikileaks should tell us how much those NGO directors get in salaries (or do you remotely believe that everybody who works for those organizations is a volunteer?)
What about when those attacks steal or reveal sensitive military information, compromise troop movements, or even better silently alter or changes plans? Or how about if malicious software were to cripple a nations infrastructure such as power and water? Or steal the information regarding the whereabouts of critical personnel in military branches?
You mean like when a spy watches the troops with binoculars and writes down what he sees? Like when someone follows a key military officer by foot?
What shall be subject to treaties and have hotlines next: binoculars, paper, pencil, or shoes?
I know you are also not allowed to own unlicensed radioactive sources over a certain, minuscule, vastly smaller than the critical mass of uranium or plutonium isotopes.
What about materials in the ground? Building materials?
I know this is nitpicking, but there is uranium in many rocks. If you own a big quarry, there could be a lot of uranium, certainly above the limit you are theoretically allowed to own, in those rocks.
Or what about real estate? In some places there's no distinction between soil and underground for ownership purposes. If you own a tract of land you own all that's between the surface and the center of the earth. There's certainly enough uranium to build a bomb in that 6378 km tall inverted pyramid of rock.
No OS is secure. There is -always- a way in, even if it's just social-engineering the guy with the passwords.
True. But I'd bet that the lock in the safe in my bank is more secure than the lock in my suitcase.
To say "No OS is secure" is very different than saying all OSes are equally insecure.
The first amendment says CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion.
Article I - The Legislative Branch
Section 1 - The Legislature
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Where does the Constitution grant power to the states to establish a religion?
I hope is true because Oz. to Oz Cinnamon will be a safer product to use in the process, but it's not magic.
I know anything about Australia is always accepted at /., but this one is about scientists at the University of Missouri. This has nothing to do wit Oz.