Personally I think that this kind of thing should be allowable, under one condition. Namely, that the credit card companies set about fixing this problem as quickly as possible, sparing no expense. If there is a big problem with these cards and they are willing to fix it now that someone has told them about it, I think it would only be reasonable to allow them to keep the information secret for a short time while they square things away.
Now, of course, the odds that this is what they'll actually do are only slightly better than my odds of scoring with a pair of Japanese twins tonight. But it is a scenario I could imagine where this might be justified.
Of course if this were the rule, and they claimed this in order to shut something down and then didn't actually do what they said they would do, they ought to be liable for triple damages to the defendant.
Indeed, solar radiation (including but not limited to neutrino flux) has been varying over a period of years and decades to even centuries. It can even vary from month to month. I am simply rejecting your premise that the sun is a constant source of radiation of any kind, including neutrinos, and I'm trying to back that up with some hard data.
Well let's define our terms, here. I'm using "constant" to mean that the Sun's neutrino flux is unchanged to within, say, 5% of the average. In reality this number is vastly higher than the actual amount of variation.
There is no way that you can know for certain that neutrino flux has remained constant over the period of about the last 40,000 years (the "carbon dating horizon"), and my assertion is that it has not, certainly over that period of time.
Absolutely constant? Sure, it hasn't. "Constant", to a degree where other sources of error (like changing cosmic ray flux and changes in Earth's carbon dioxide transport) totally swamp it out.
You seem to think of carbon dating as being much more simplistic than it actually is. Carbon dating does not simply assume a certain ratio of carbon 14, then calculate based on the exponential decay due to that element's half life. The starting ratio of atmospheric carbon has varied significantly over the period which carbon dating is useful for. This means that any use of carbon dating must first be calibrated using using a sample whose age can be determined through other means. Even if the solar neutrino flux varied enough to cause a significant change in the decay rate of carbon 14, that change would have already been taken into account during the calibration process. The estimate of the ratio of atmospheric carbon isotopes would be affected, but this error would cancel out when used for actually determining the ages of things.
The physics of solar neutrino production simply isn't that complicated. You pile an unimaginably large amount of hydrogen together. Self gravitation causes it to collapse in on itself, and the high temperatures and pressures cause fusion to occur. There are a lot of subtleties with magnetic fields and such, but the overall changes in output are very small, and a lot of those changes are in how fast the reaction energy is emitted, not how fast it's produced. (There is an enormous time lag between when energy is produced at the core of the Sun and when it shows up through your window, roughly 50 million years. This delay only applies to photons, however, not neutrinos, which escape from the core fusion reaction directly into space.)
So to sum up. This effect, first of all, is hypothetical. If it does exist, the idea of it being due to neutrino flux is also hypothetical. If it is due to neutrino flux, the effect is extremely small. The annual variation of about 7% neutrino flux would produce a change in decay rate of well under 1% according to the data that they've collated. There is no known physical mechanism which would produce anything near that kind of change in the long-term neutrino flux from the Sun over the period of time that carbon dating covers. This extremely small effect would be totally swamped out by much larger effects, such as changes in the rate of carbon 14 production and changes in the absorbption and release of carbon by the Earth. And this effect, even if it exists, even if it's caused by neutrinos, even if the Sun's neutrino output varied much more than is known, even if the extremely small effect on radioactive decay produced enough variation to influence the carbon ratio in samples of old organic material, would still be compensated for by the calibration procedures used in carbon dating.
The problem is not whether such an explosive can exist. The problem is whether such an explosive could be mixed in an airplane bathroom without anyone noticing and remain unexploded long enough for Our Villain to get it out of the bathroom and up next to the skin where it might do some serious damage.
Everything I've heard about such binary explosives indicates that the outcome is an explosion while mixing the stuff in the bathroom, one badly injured terrorist, and one trashed airplane lavatory.
I realize it's not exactly the same thing, but....
For five grand you could pay for all the training you need to get an actual pilot's license, and then you could go up and do as many zero-gee parabolas as you want. They won't last thirty seconds, and you don't get a big chamber to float around in doing weird experiments. But on the other hand you'll have a pilot's license to do all sorts of other fun things with, and your cumulative zero-gee time could be vastly higher!
If you send someone to prison for life, then exonerate him after five years, he has only lost five years of his life. You can still give him back the rest. Is this as good as never sending him to prison in the first place? Of course not. But it's a hell of a lot better than losing one's entire life.
Now, if you execute someone, and then exonerate him, well, too bad. Nothing can be changed.
Personally I would much rather not punish an innocent at all. But given that wrongful convictions will happen, I'd much rather send people to prison for life than execute them. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with execution as a punishment, but as a purely practical matter it seems to add a lot of complication and return no benefit.
The nice thing about life in prison is that, if exonerating evidence should come to light later on, you can let the guy out. It's much harder to bring wrongly convicted innocents back from the dead.
If murder carries the harshest possible punishment, then what punishment should be carried out for murdering somebody plus murdering the police who come to arrest you?
This is the fundamental practical problem with this school of thought. You always need a harsher punishment to hit a criminal with if they misbehave further. How would you like to be a policeman coming to arrest someone whose crime has automatically earned them the harshest possible punishment, and therefore has absolutely nothing to lose?
As Sun Tzu says, leave the enemy a path of escape. An enemy driven into a corner acts irrationally.
Given the poor history of ReiserFS and its tendency to zero files, to lie about the availablility of files in failing hardware, or to destroy itself if you actually run the repair tools on it, why would you want him to continue to work on it?
You claim that wrongful convictions are "extreme exceptions". Do you have evidence for this? Data on wrongful convictions is difficult to obtain for obvious reasons.
I did manage to find this article which indicates that the wrongful conviction rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-5%, depending on what data you listen to. That strikes me as enormously high, particularly given the huge US prison population.
Your point seems kind of irrelevant. I was only illustrating why the cable company can let you watch TV 24/7 with no impact to their network, while they can't let you download at full blast 24/7 in the same manner.
My point is that we don't need historical neutrino data to know that the solar neutrino flux has remained essentially constant for the entire carbon dating horizon.
And your discussion about how carbon dating has many larger sources of error is exactly what I'm saying. There's little point in wringing hands over the potential error introduced by a speculative phenomenon which would have a miniscule effect even if it does exist when the whole thing gives only a coarse measurement anyway.
They were in place even back when they advertised "unlimited". Every consumer-level broadband service I've ever heard of has had unofficial, unpublished limits that would result in a warning or in cancellation of service. This is just one further reason why nobody should be in the least bit surprised about Comcast's move. They're opening up, they're communicating their terms of service much more clearly, and they're making their limits official and explicit instead of letting you trip over them in the dark. And yet somehow you want to complain about them being uncommunicative!
Got it in text format anywhere? I can barely stand to read the nonsense that spouts forth from these politicians, and listening to them is pure death.
I did skim the video. Sounds like he basically said that the FISA bill was a good idea because it made it illegal to not go through FISA (guess what, it was already illegal!) and because it appoints an inspector to check out the abuses (guess what, he's going to be powerless, and people suing these companies are the only thing that might have actually made something happen). So great, he responded, and confirmed that he is, in fact, a politician, and therefore sleazy and not worth my vote.
It's fine to discuss creationism in the context of comparative religion. It's not fine to discuss it in a science classroom, because any argument against creationism can be easily rebutted with a simple, "God did it".
Exactly! Go ahead and teach creationism and intelligent design. Teach it in exactly the same class where you teach about Greek and Roman mythology, about Gilgamesh, the Japanese God-Emperor, and "turtles all the way down". It's religion, and it belongs in classes which discuss religion.
I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm saying that it can't be disproven no matter what the facts are. No matter what you find, no matter what you prove, a creationist can always come back and say "well, God put it there that way".
An Earth which formed out of a dust cloud five billion years ago and evolved natural life on it in the intervening period is indistinguishable from an Earth which God created 6,000 years ago to give all of the appearance of having formed out of a dust cloud and evolved naturally.
And that, not the fact that it's wrong, is why creationism has no place in a science classroom. It is fantasy, pure and simple. A kinder man might call it "religion".
Now, a lot of creationists don't seem to grasp this and try to "prove" it, even though there's no need to prove it and no point in doing so. It can be educational to look at the individual claims and show how they falter. But creationism itself just isn't science.
Sorry, but I'm not going to say "We don't know" when that most certainly is not the case. Solar neutrinos are not some magical mystery. Solar neutrinos are a direct product of the fusion reaction which drives the Sun. Four protons fuse to produce one helium nucleus, two positrons, two neutrinos, and excess energy. Everything we know about stars indicates that these fusion reactions continue constantly and at essentially the same rate. While it's true that some stars have variable output, nothing that is known about the Sun indicates that its rate of fusion reactions has varied at anything close to the amount needed to influence carbon dating processes in any significant manner.
Now, could there be things happening beyond known science? Sure. But that's a far cry from "we don't know". It's possible that the science may be wrong on this, but if that's what you're trying to claim, come out and say it straight.
"Failure to communicate"? What a bunch of bullshit. How do you think everybody found out about their grand October plan in advance? Oh right, because Comcast announced it.
What does your $2/month actually count? I can't imagine anything other than that it's missing significant portions of the cost, but I don't know what you're missing unless I know what you're counting. Total costs leading to your bill include but are not limited to depreciation of equipment and cabling, repair crews for same, installation technicians, customer service, billing, system administration, and of course bandwidth costs with upstream providers.
They are providing what they advertise! They stopped saying "unlimited" years ago, you admit this yourself. It should come as absolutely no shock whatsoever that, years after they stop advertising "unlimited", they now stop providing it.
I'll say it again: you have no contract. Everything is subject to change at any time. If you go to the grocery store and suddenly the price of your favorite bread has doubled, you have no real grounds for complaint. Likewise here.
Change is the only constant in life. If you signed up with Comcast service years ago expecting to receive exactly the same service at exactly the same price until the end of time, that misconception is your fault, not theirs.
Except that they currently aren't advertising "unlimited", and as far as I know they have not done so for quite a while.
Not to mention, 250GB/month is functionally equivalent to "unlimited" for 99% of their customers. The wants to either get rid of or force to change.
As for a "dramatic" change in the terms of service, I don't buy it. They've gone from "you can use all you want as long as you don't hurt the network so much that other users are affected" to "here's a hard limit you can live by". That limit is far beyond what most people could possibly use. If you are using more than 250GB/month, then maybe a cheap home-grade connection is not for you.
No, his point is not valid. He was talking about VoIP. If he wanted to make a point about IPTV then maybe he should have discussed IPTV.
In any case, his point was that there are classes of unicast, arbitrary-destination traffic which don't adversely affect the network. But the only reason this is so is because it's such a small amount of traffic.
I get that, I just don't understand why you'd make such a request. Without a contract, they have every right to make changes to their services at any time. Large companies never do things to be "nice". The purpose of the contract from the customer's point of view is exactly to protect against this sort of sudden change in service. If you don't have one, tough kittens.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think that this kind of thing should be allowable, under one condition. Namely, that the credit card companies set about fixing this problem as quickly as possible, sparing no expense. If there is a big problem with these cards and they are willing to fix it now that someone has told them about it, I think it would only be reasonable to allow them to keep the information secret for a short time while they square things away.
Now, of course, the odds that this is what they'll actually do are only slightly better than my odds of scoring with a pair of Japanese twins tonight. But it is a scenario I could imagine where this might be justified.
Of course if this were the rule, and they claimed this in order to shut something down and then didn't actually do what they said they would do, they ought to be liable for triple damages to the defendant.
Indeed, solar radiation (including but not limited to neutrino flux) has been varying over a period of years and decades to even centuries. It can even vary from month to month. I am simply rejecting your premise that the sun is a constant source of radiation of any kind, including neutrinos, and I'm trying to back that up with some hard data.
Well let's define our terms, here. I'm using "constant" to mean that the Sun's neutrino flux is unchanged to within, say, 5% of the average. In reality this number is vastly higher than the actual amount of variation.
There is no way that you can know for certain that neutrino flux has remained constant over the period of about the last 40,000 years (the "carbon dating horizon"), and my assertion is that it has not, certainly over that period of time.
Absolutely constant? Sure, it hasn't. "Constant", to a degree where other sources of error (like changing cosmic ray flux and changes in Earth's carbon dioxide transport) totally swamp it out.
You seem to think of carbon dating as being much more simplistic than it actually is. Carbon dating does not simply assume a certain ratio of carbon 14, then calculate based on the exponential decay due to that element's half life. The starting ratio of atmospheric carbon has varied significantly over the period which carbon dating is useful for. This means that any use of carbon dating must first be calibrated using using a sample whose age can be determined through other means. Even if the solar neutrino flux varied enough to cause a significant change in the decay rate of carbon 14, that change would have already been taken into account during the calibration process. The estimate of the ratio of atmospheric carbon isotopes would be affected, but this error would cancel out when used for actually determining the ages of things.
The physics of solar neutrino production simply isn't that complicated. You pile an unimaginably large amount of hydrogen together. Self gravitation causes it to collapse in on itself, and the high temperatures and pressures cause fusion to occur. There are a lot of subtleties with magnetic fields and such, but the overall changes in output are very small, and a lot of those changes are in how fast the reaction energy is emitted, not how fast it's produced. (There is an enormous time lag between when energy is produced at the core of the Sun and when it shows up through your window, roughly 50 million years. This delay only applies to photons, however, not neutrinos, which escape from the core fusion reaction directly into space.)
So to sum up. This effect, first of all, is hypothetical. If it does exist, the idea of it being due to neutrino flux is also hypothetical. If it is due to neutrino flux, the effect is extremely small. The annual variation of about 7% neutrino flux would produce a change in decay rate of well under 1% according to the data that they've collated. There is no known physical mechanism which would produce anything near that kind of change in the long-term neutrino flux from the Sun over the period of time that carbon dating covers. This extremely small effect would be totally swamped out by much larger effects, such as changes in the rate of carbon 14 production and changes in the absorbption and release of carbon by the Earth. And this effect, even if it exists, even if it's caused by neutrinos, even if the Sun's neutrino output varied much more than is known, even if the extremely small effect on radioactive decay produced enough variation to influence the carbon ratio in samples of old organic material, would still be compensated for by the calibration procedures used in carbon dating.
The problem is not whether such an explosive can exist. The problem is whether such an explosive could be mixed in an airplane bathroom without anyone noticing and remain unexploded long enough for Our Villain to get it out of the bathroom and up next to the skin where it might do some serious damage.
Everything I've heard about such binary explosives indicates that the outcome is an explosion while mixing the stuff in the bathroom, one badly injured terrorist, and one trashed airplane lavatory.
'Nuff said.
I occasionally do zero-gee parabolas in a glider. While running out of altitude can be a downer (pun intended), I never have problems with fuel flow!
I realize it's not exactly the same thing, but....
For five grand you could pay for all the training you need to get an actual pilot's license, and then you could go up and do as many zero-gee parabolas as you want. They won't last thirty seconds, and you don't get a big chamber to float around in doing weird experiments. But on the other hand you'll have a pilot's license to do all sorts of other fun things with, and your cumulative zero-gee time could be vastly higher!
If you send someone to prison for life, then exonerate him after five years, he has only lost five years of his life. You can still give him back the rest. Is this as good as never sending him to prison in the first place? Of course not. But it's a hell of a lot better than losing one's entire life.
Now, if you execute someone, and then exonerate him, well, too bad. Nothing can be changed.
Personally I would much rather not punish an innocent at all. But given that wrongful convictions will happen, I'd much rather send people to prison for life than execute them. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with execution as a punishment, but as a purely practical matter it seems to add a lot of complication and return no benefit.
The nice thing about life in prison is that, if exonerating evidence should come to light later on, you can let the guy out. It's much harder to bring wrongly convicted innocents back from the dead.
If murder carries the harshest possible punishment, then what punishment should be carried out for murdering somebody plus murdering the police who come to arrest you?
This is the fundamental practical problem with this school of thought. You always need a harsher punishment to hit a criminal with if they misbehave further. How would you like to be a policeman coming to arrest someone whose crime has automatically earned them the harshest possible punishment, and therefore has absolutely nothing to lose?
As Sun Tzu says, leave the enemy a path of escape. An enemy driven into a corner acts irrationally.
Given the poor history of ReiserFS and its tendency to zero files, to lie about the availablility of files in failing hardware, or to destroy itself if you actually run the repair tools on it, why would you want him to continue to work on it?
I dunno, so that he can fix it?
You claim that wrongful convictions are "extreme exceptions". Do you have evidence for this? Data on wrongful convictions is difficult to obtain for obvious reasons.
I did manage to find this article which indicates that the wrongful conviction rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-5%, depending on what data you listen to. That strikes me as enormously high, particularly given the huge US prison population.
Your point seems kind of irrelevant. I was only illustrating why the cable company can let you watch TV 24/7 with no impact to their network, while they can't let you download at full blast 24/7 in the same manner.
My point is that we don't need historical neutrino data to know that the solar neutrino flux has remained essentially constant for the entire carbon dating horizon.
And your discussion about how carbon dating has many larger sources of error is exactly what I'm saying. There's little point in wringing hands over the potential error introduced by a speculative phenomenon which would have a miniscule effect even if it does exist when the whole thing gives only a coarse measurement anyway.
They were in place even back when they advertised "unlimited". Every consumer-level broadband service I've ever heard of has had unofficial, unpublished limits that would result in a warning or in cancellation of service. This is just one further reason why nobody should be in the least bit surprised about Comcast's move. They're opening up, they're communicating their terms of service much more clearly, and they're making their limits official and explicit instead of letting you trip over them in the dark. And yet somehow you want to complain about them being uncommunicative!
Got it in text format anywhere? I can barely stand to read the nonsense that spouts forth from these politicians, and listening to them is pure death.
I did skim the video. Sounds like he basically said that the FISA bill was a good idea because it made it illegal to not go through FISA (guess what, it was already illegal!) and because it appoints an inspector to check out the abuses (guess what, he's going to be powerless, and people suing these companies are the only thing that might have actually made something happen). So great, he responded, and confirmed that he is, in fact, a politician, and therefore sleazy and not worth my vote.
It's fine to discuss creationism in the context of comparative religion. It's not fine to discuss it in a science classroom, because any argument against creationism can be easily rebutted with a simple, "God did it".
Exactly! Go ahead and teach creationism and intelligent design. Teach it in exactly the same class where you teach about Greek and Roman mythology, about Gilgamesh, the Japanese God-Emperor, and "turtles all the way down". It's religion, and it belongs in classes which discuss religion.
But in the end, creationism simply isn't science.
I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm saying that it can't be disproven no matter what the facts are. No matter what you find, no matter what you prove, a creationist can always come back and say "well, God put it there that way".
An Earth which formed out of a dust cloud five billion years ago and evolved natural life on it in the intervening period is indistinguishable from an Earth which God created 6,000 years ago to give all of the appearance of having formed out of a dust cloud and evolved naturally.
And that, not the fact that it's wrong, is why creationism has no place in a science classroom. It is fantasy, pure and simple. A kinder man might call it "religion".
Now, a lot of creationists don't seem to grasp this and try to "prove" it, even though there's no need to prove it and no point in doing so. It can be educational to look at the individual claims and show how they falter. But creationism itself just isn't science.
Sorry, but I'm not going to say "We don't know" when that most certainly is not the case. Solar neutrinos are not some magical mystery. Solar neutrinos are a direct product of the fusion reaction which drives the Sun. Four protons fuse to produce one helium nucleus, two positrons, two neutrinos, and excess energy. Everything we know about stars indicates that these fusion reactions continue constantly and at essentially the same rate. While it's true that some stars have variable output, nothing that is known about the Sun indicates that its rate of fusion reactions has varied at anything close to the amount needed to influence carbon dating processes in any significant manner.
Now, could there be things happening beyond known science? Sure. But that's a far cry from "we don't know". It's possible that the science may be wrong on this, but if that's what you're trying to claim, come out and say it straight.
"Failure to communicate"? What a bunch of bullshit. How do you think everybody found out about their grand October plan in advance? Oh right, because Comcast announced it.
What does your $2/month actually count? I can't imagine anything other than that it's missing significant portions of the cost, but I don't know what you're missing unless I know what you're counting. Total costs leading to your bill include but are not limited to depreciation of equipment and cabling, repair crews for same, installation technicians, customer service, billing, system administration, and of course bandwidth costs with upstream providers.
They are providing what they advertise! They stopped saying "unlimited" years ago, you admit this yourself. It should come as absolutely no shock whatsoever that, years after they stop advertising "unlimited", they now stop providing it.
I'll say it again: you have no contract. Everything is subject to change at any time. If you go to the grocery store and suddenly the price of your favorite bread has doubled, you have no real grounds for complaint. Likewise here.
Change is the only constant in life. If you signed up with Comcast service years ago expecting to receive exactly the same service at exactly the same price until the end of time, that misconception is your fault, not theirs.
Except that they currently aren't advertising "unlimited", and as far as I know they have not done so for quite a while.
Not to mention, 250GB/month is functionally equivalent to "unlimited" for 99% of their customers. The wants to either get rid of or force to change.
As for a "dramatic" change in the terms of service, I don't buy it. They've gone from "you can use all you want as long as you don't hurt the network so much that other users are affected" to "here's a hard limit you can live by". That limit is far beyond what most people could possibly use. If you are using more than 250GB/month, then maybe a cheap home-grade connection is not for you.
No, his point is not valid. He was talking about VoIP. If he wanted to make a point about IPTV then maybe he should have discussed IPTV.
In any case, his point was that there are classes of unicast, arbitrary-destination traffic which don't adversely affect the network. But the only reason this is so is because it's such a small amount of traffic.
I get that, I just don't understand why you'd make such a request. Without a contract, they have every right to make changes to their services at any time. Large companies never do things to be "nice". The purpose of the contract from the customer's point of view is exactly to protect against this sort of sudden change in service. If you don't have one, tough kittens.