Clearly not in the post I was responding it. Let's say I was just heading off the "Private Sector Meme" before it got a chance to start, because the poster looked like a decent, competent, and responsible public sector worker.
The right thing to do is a mix. I have no problem with private enterprise, I have a problem when people start insisting that private enterprise is the only way to get things done, and that governments can't possibly do anything right or well.
Shame on you for wrongthinking... You MUST remember the mantras...
Government is worst at EVERYTHING. The Free Market is the solution to EVERY problem. The private sector can ALWAYS do it better. Regulation is ALWAYS the WORST way, voluntary compliance ALWAYS works BETTER.
Only a few minor problems - evacuating a continent of the most entitled-feeling people in the world, and then coping with what is essentially nuclear winter. Yeah, world politics are stable enough to handle that one. And we always heed warning signs, proceeding in a sane, rational, timely fashion.
I can agree with that sentiment, there are many much more urgent things to worry about. But in the context of tapping geothermal energy, I wouldn't want to start doing it in any sort of large-scale way without a better understanding of the potential side-effects. We have a habit of getting ourselves into trouble when we see something that looks "free and infinite" and go for it, in a big way.
In general, on any hierarchy of worries, Yellowstone is pretty darned low - somewhere around an asteroid/comet strike. Just as unlikely, and about as lethal.
Of course the question is who would be around after the next eruption, to prevent the one after that. I'm sure people would survive, but civilization in its present form wouldn't. Rebuilding would be really tough, given that we've used up the easy resources. Except for energy, scavenging the old civilization would be viable.
Yellowstone is about 60,000 years "overdue" for its periodic eruption, as the worlds largest volcano. When it goes, it'll render North America unfit for modern civilization, if past eruptions are any clue.
Geothermal energy comes from 2 sources, the primordial heat of the Earth's formation and radioactive decay. The former is clearly non-renewable, the latter is renewing constantly, whether we tap it or not. To say the source is SO HUGE that we could never cause any adverse effects is probably naive. But if properly studied, and keeping our geothermal appetite in proper check, it would be a great source of energy.
Back to Yellowstone... Somehow I don't think our power taps would be deep enough to truly fend off a Yellowstone eruption, but I wonder what sort of effect we would have on it? Would we mellow it a bit, or make it madder?
Then tell us what you're really doing and why you're doing it.
Let's grant that what they say is true, and that they need to do what they're doing. Then tell us. Stop the CRAP about "We don't block bittorrent," but instead say, "For these reasons, bitborrent will cripple our network, so we're taking these steps."
Extra points on guidelines on how to set up bittorrent to not cripple the network.
When I think of QoS I think of prioritization and such. I don't think of filtering or forging RST packets. An ISP can put it into their Terms Of Service to reserve the right to filter packets, even forge RST packets. But that's all "filtering", not QoS.
> I disagree, because it's more a reflection of the limits of technology
But then are we being morally negligent by doing nothing to even develop the technology, nor to even try and quantify the issue? The estimate I cited was merely a side-effect of other studies. We've never even really studied this as a problem. Is that omission immoral?
IMHO life ain't simple. Attempts to make it simple are generally doomed to failure with much attendant pain and suffering. I'm bringing up a straw-man with the failure-to-implant issue just to make a bit of a point about considering a fertilized egg "human life." In that same article I used as a basis, they indicated that they felt that many of these "early miscarriages" were just too defective to continue. The problem here is that we now have observational tools that let us see squarely into a horribly gray ethical zone. The bigger problem is that we're trying to simplify it.
Oops, I meant to say first and third, not the second. I can't quite stomach the second for ordinary human life, either. Incidentally, people who put Laws 1 and 3 in that order are generally considered "noble" and "heroic." Most of us reverse that order, most of the time.
Besides, Asimov said his 3 laws were really meant as fiction-fodder, and in that they excel. What's so fascinating is that so few, such apparently logical and unambiguous words, can generate such subtlety and variation. I used the 3 laws as an example against real life because of that apparent simplicity. That fetal rights and the 3 Laws are both such complex issues may have made the example appropriate, too.
Note that I used the term "fetal rights" above... There has been call for an "antiabortion amendment." Whether or not you agree with the right of choice or not, IMHO such an amendment is STUPID. The Constitution outlines how the Government works, and gives guidelines for the balancing of rights between the Government, the States and the People. Only once has a Constitutional amendment been used to prohibit a specific class of acts by people, and that is also the only amendment that has been repealed. If you want Constitutional protection for the life of the unborn, then an appropriate amendment would need to be in the form of a "Fetal Rights Amendment.' As such it would need to outline rights granted to the fetus, and balance those rights against the Governement, the States, and other People, most notably the Mother and Father.
I don't think most people realize what a reversal it was for the Bush administration to put Petraeus in charge in Iraq. He had demonstrated workable techniques years before in Mosul. (?) From what I heard, he was removed, told "We don't do nation-building," and his unit was replaced with "the Striker Brigade," which shows a certain bias or viewpoint from the higher-ups in the war management. To put him back in charge of Baghdad was something of a repudiation of the "Striker Brigade" mentality. Even if I liked what Petraeus did in Mosul, (?) I don't know if the same can be done this much later, with a social/political environment this poisoned, in a place as big as Baghdad, with the resources available.
One thing I don't think the Bush administration understands is that continued occupation time is poisoning the well in Iraq. IMHO we had 60-90 days of good will after the invasion, to begin making daily life for Iraqis better. We squandered it, in fact we did worse, in that we didn't even set the stage well for a hostile occupation. We did things like allow them to carry the weapons and explosives out of their own military bases, and some estimate that with what they took, they can run the current level of insurgency for decades. So it's not a simple case of try this, if it fails try that. Every thing we try that fails, makes the starting point for the next attempt worse. Every month that passes is another month of occupation, and that makes it worse.
Whatever you feel about whether we should or should not have invaded Iraq, just about every aspect afterward has been horribly incompetently managed.
I'm not making that point... I'm trying to expand the moral quandary.
Standing by and seeing a person get killed, when there was something minor you could have done, say shouting a warning is considered wrong.
So if you know that a fertilized egg has failed to implant, and it's in your power to save it, is inaction wrong there, too?
If it's not, then that fertilized egg isn't as human a life as the person in the first instance. It has then taken "person" and put it into shades of gray, where the early development is concerned, as opposed to being a simple black or white issue.
It was the most succinct way. To get rid of the SF for a moment,
It's pretty clear that killing a person (with no extenuating circumstances, like war) is wrong.
It's also pretty well accepted that standing there and watching a person be killed, when a simple warning or offer of no-skin-off-your-nose assistance could have saved him/her is also wrong.
It's the whole active vs passive issue, both can be wrong, though clearly an active role is worse.
Or if you still don't like the SF analogy, even if it is clear and short, consider the argument like this:
It's like the way Doolittle was arguing philosophy with Bomb #20 (or was it #19?) in Dark Star. Just because he may well be fictitious has no bearing on the validity of his arguments.
> So they lie. We may find that those oil fields run dry all of a sudden and nobody knew it was going to happen.
These 2 statements form an inherent contradiction. What I think we really mean is that they are keeping 2 sets of book about the reserves of the oil field, the real books and the ones they let the rest of the world see. That's the lie. So if the fields were to suddenly run dry, nobody using the public books would know that it was going to happen, but those using the real books would have. That's not "nobody," just "almost nobody."
I thoroughly agree. What's more, the Constitution states exactly and specifically what you have just said, though at the moment I forget exactly where.
So how is it that these people (I use the term somewhat loosely, though technically correctly) who call themselves "strict constructionists" state that some given right doesn't exist because it isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution. How and by what measure of sanity, by what measure of "strict construction" do they gloss right over that explicit statement. Incidentally, part of the opposition to the Bill of Rights by some was not that they felt it too broad, but that they felt it might be taken as a specific enumeration, and might act to limit rights in the future. How the @$#% can so-called "strict constructionists" ignore these VERY SPECIFIC statements by the authors? (Time to drop this and let my blood pressure go back to normal.)
> it's when you think a collection of cells deserves human rights.
It's not just that, it's balancing the rights of that collection of cells against the rights of the fully-formed person that is the mother. Certainly our society is full of balancing acts of the livelihood of poor against further accumulation by the wealthy, so it can't be considered cut-and-dried.
Beyond that, I heard that by one estimate, something like 25% of acts of fertilization fail to properly implant, in essence are spontaneously aborted. We never knew the number was anything near that high without modern medical monitoring of the type that's only done during studies. So if a fertilized egg has full human rights, is it then medical negligence when that spontaneous abortion is allowed to happen? Compare that to RU486, which is essentially the same action, only artificially induced. Asimov's first law places the two co-equal, "A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm." I know it's reaching into science fiction, but others have suggested that Asimov's 3 Laws, or at least the first 2, aren't bad guidelines for humans, either.
>Companies are much too skilled at... assume that the free market will just work itself out.
Personally I think it's far too much to assume that the free market will remain free. IMHO anyone who is a fan of the free market is only a fan as long as it benefits them. Once they're in a position of market power, they do everything they can to maintain and extend that market power, and a free market is to their detriment, at least in their core market. Maybe they still like the free market outside of their core, where they don't have market power. (yet)
The Libertarian response to this is that it's government regulation that allows abusive corporate monopolies to happen. In the case of intellectual property base monopolies, like Microsoft and the mafIAA, I can certainly see their point. But absent trustbuster legislation, I'm not quite sure how any sort of free market action would have unwound the likes of Standard Oil or Carnegie steel.
At the risk of being pedantic, files are really anchored to inodes, and that's why you can delete or copy over an in-use file. Opening the file returns the inode to the opening process. From that point, you can "replace" or "delete" the file by pointing its directory entry to a new file/inode, or deleting the directory entry. But the filesystem code keeps track of the fact that someone is still using the inode, and doesn't let its space be reclaimed until it's unused.
OTOH, this introduces a new risk, especially where people brag about their uptimes. Let's boot our machine in January, and start all of its services after it's booted. Pretend for argument that one of those services is OpenSSH, and for instance it uses libwrap.so. Now let's have a fiasco like we did about 10 years ago, where someone put a compromised tcp-wrappers out there, and assume that this machine was installed during that timeframe. (I know that would be tough, because the evil tcp-wrappers was discovered and corrected within a few days, maybe even 1.) At this point sshd has attached the bogus libwrap.so to it's process. Now let's discover the evil tcp-wrappers and replace it with a good copy. At this point, we now have a good libwrap installed. All is well, right?
Wrong. At this point, any new code that starts will get the good libwrap. But any code that has been running since before the update is still pointing to the now-anonymous inode that contains the evil libwrap.
In order to propagate a library fix, services that depend on that fix need to be restarted.
> The only reliable means we have of producing energy are fuel powered reactors/power stations and hydro-electric plants and > these are what a country should base it's energy policy on.
You've completely ignored the whole raft of problems that come along with hydro-electric. I'll agree that they're primarily environmental problems, but that doesn't make them any less problems and doesn't make them "not economic problems," either. For instance, silting eventually impairs the hydroelectric facility itself without some amount of maintenance. People whose livelihood is based on fishing wouldn't think that cutting off fish runs is "merely environmental." Both of these problems have solutions, and those solutions are being practices. (Though there are still many people who would like to see the Niagara and Colorado rage free, at least periodically, not just for the "raw nature," but for the downstream ecosystem health.) But to pretend that anything is problem free is naive.
For that matter, geothermal uses up one of those non-renewable energy sources - the original heat from the Earth's creation. Yea, there's some radioactive-generated heat there too, but the Earth is still radiating the heat of its birth.
As for fossil fuels, the only reason there isn't an outcry about them is that we're used to it. From what I've heard, fossil fuels send more radioactivity up the smokestack in the fly ash than we've released in nuclear accidents. (Caveat - I don't know how effective current scrubbing is at removing the radioactive components.)
I don't remember all the details, but the gist I got was that the detector itself was enough to constitute observation, even if its output was unplugged. Consciousness was not part of the issue.
Several years back I read about an experiment I would have thought would be authoritative on this. It was a classic split-beam type of thing, with detectors that could determine which path the photon went down. In normal circumstances, when you insert the detectors, the interference pattern goes away and you get a classical distribution. When you remove the detectors, you get an interference pattern in the quantum mechanical distribution.
That's all wellandgood, but here's the twist. They inserted the detectors, and disconnected the outputs from any sort of meter or display device. Therefore the detectors "observed," but no conscious knowledge could be gained.
The interference pattern went away, and they got a classical distribution.
IMHO, the wave "collapses" when the potential error exceeds Heisenberg's limit, and that constitutes "observation." Most any other answer makes a special place for consciousness in the universe, and cascades into telepathy, clairvoyance, the Force, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly not in the post I was responding it. Let's say I was just heading off the "Private Sector Meme" before it got a chance to start, because the poster looked like a decent, competent, and responsible public sector worker.
The right thing to do is a mix. I have no problem with private enterprise, I have a problem when people start insisting that private enterprise is the only way to get things done, and that governments can't possibly do anything right or well.
Shame on you for wrongthinking... You MUST remember the mantras...
Government is worst at EVERYTHING.
The Free Market is the solution to EVERY problem.
The private sector can ALWAYS do it better.
Regulation is ALWAYS the WORST way, voluntary compliance ALWAYS works BETTER.
Repeat until you Believe!
Quite simple. Bush is well known for his malapropisms, so let's file this one into the same category.
It's a spelling error, and I suspect we're the ones making it. When they say the word "Just-us" we hear it and think they mean "Justice."
Only a few minor problems - evacuating a continent of the most entitled-feeling people in the world, and then coping with what is essentially nuclear winter. Yeah, world politics are stable enough to handle that one. And we always heed warning signs, proceeding in a sane, rational, timely fashion.
I can agree with that sentiment, there are many much more urgent things to worry about. But in the context of tapping geothermal energy, I wouldn't want to start doing it in any sort of large-scale way without a better understanding of the potential side-effects. We have a habit of getting ourselves into trouble when we see something that looks "free and infinite" and go for it, in a big way.
In general, on any hierarchy of worries, Yellowstone is pretty darned low - somewhere around an asteroid/comet strike. Just as unlikely, and about as lethal.
Of course the question is who would be around after the next eruption, to prevent the one after that. I'm sure people would survive, but civilization in its present form wouldn't. Rebuilding would be really tough, given that we've used up the easy resources. Except for energy, scavenging the old civilization would be viable.
Yellowstone is about 60,000 years "overdue" for its periodic eruption, as the worlds largest volcano. When it goes, it'll render North America unfit for modern civilization, if past eruptions are any clue.
Geothermal energy comes from 2 sources, the primordial heat of the Earth's formation and radioactive decay. The former is clearly non-renewable, the latter is renewing constantly, whether we tap it or not. To say the source is SO HUGE that we could never cause any adverse effects is probably naive. But if properly studied, and keeping our geothermal appetite in proper check, it would be a great source of energy.
Back to Yellowstone... Somehow I don't think our power taps would be deep enough to truly fend off a Yellowstone eruption, but I wonder what sort of effect we would have on it? Would we mellow it a bit, or make it madder?
This is Slashdot.
We're talking about NASA.
So of course it's wrong, by definition. NASA can do no right, on Slashdot.
Then tell us what you're really doing and why you're doing it.
Let's grant that what they say is true, and that they need to do what they're doing. Then tell us. Stop the CRAP about "We don't block bittorrent," but instead say, "For these reasons, bitborrent will cripple our network, so we're taking these steps."
Extra points on guidelines on how to set up bittorrent to not cripple the network.
When I think of QoS I think of prioritization and such. I don't think of filtering or forging RST packets. An ISP can put it into their Terms Of Service to reserve the right to filter packets, even forge RST packets. But that's all "filtering", not QoS.
> I disagree, because it's more a reflection of the limits of technology
But then are we being morally negligent by doing nothing to even develop the technology, nor to even try and quantify the issue? The estimate I cited was merely a side-effect of other studies. We've never even really studied this as a problem. Is that omission immoral?
IMHO life ain't simple. Attempts to make it simple are generally doomed to failure with much attendant pain and suffering. I'm bringing up a straw-man with the failure-to-implant issue just to make a bit of a point about considering a fertilized egg "human life." In that same article I used as a basis, they indicated that they felt that many of these "early miscarriages" were just too defective to continue. The problem here is that we now have observational tools that let us see squarely into a horribly gray ethical zone. The bigger problem is that we're trying to simplify it.
Oops, I meant to say first and third, not the second. I can't quite stomach the second for ordinary human life, either. Incidentally, people who put Laws 1 and 3 in that order are generally considered "noble" and "heroic." Most of us reverse that order, most of the time.
Besides, Asimov said his 3 laws were really meant as fiction-fodder, and in that they excel. What's so fascinating is that so few, such apparently logical and unambiguous words, can generate such subtlety and variation. I used the 3 laws as an example against real life because of that apparent simplicity. That fetal rights and the 3 Laws are both such complex issues may have made the example appropriate, too.
Note that I used the term "fetal rights" above... There has been call for an "antiabortion amendment." Whether or not you agree with the right of choice or not, IMHO such an amendment is STUPID. The Constitution outlines how the Government works, and gives guidelines for the balancing of rights between the Government, the States and the People. Only once has a Constitutional amendment been used to prohibit a specific class of acts by people, and that is also the only amendment that has been repealed. If you want Constitutional protection for the life of the unborn, then an appropriate amendment would need to be in the form of a "Fetal Rights Amendment.' As such it would need to outline rights granted to the fetus, and balance those rights against the Governement, the States, and other People, most notably the Mother and Father.
I don't think most people realize what a reversal it was for the Bush administration to put Petraeus in charge in Iraq. He had demonstrated workable techniques years before in Mosul. (?) From what I heard, he was removed, told "We don't do nation-building," and his unit was replaced with "the Striker Brigade," which shows a certain bias or viewpoint from the higher-ups in the war management. To put him back in charge of Baghdad was something of a repudiation of the "Striker Brigade" mentality. Even if I liked what Petraeus did in Mosul, (?) I don't know if the same can be done this much later, with a social/political environment this poisoned, in a place as big as Baghdad, with the resources available.
One thing I don't think the Bush administration understands is that continued occupation time is poisoning the well in Iraq. IMHO we had 60-90 days of good will after the invasion, to begin making daily life for Iraqis better. We squandered it, in fact we did worse, in that we didn't even set the stage well for a hostile occupation. We did things like allow them to carry the weapons and explosives out of their own military bases, and some estimate that with what they took, they can run the current level of insurgency for decades. So it's not a simple case of try this, if it fails try that. Every thing we try that fails, makes the starting point for the next attempt worse. Every month that passes is another month of occupation, and that makes it worse.
Whatever you feel about whether we should or should not have invaded Iraq, just about every aspect afterward has been horribly incompetently managed.
You seem to think the funds will go to worthy causes, rather than piddled away on wars, corporate welfare, etc.
I'm not making that point... I'm trying to expand the moral quandary.
Standing by and seeing a person get killed, when there was something minor you could have done, say shouting a warning is considered wrong.
So if you know that a fertilized egg has failed to implant, and it's in your power to save it, is inaction wrong there, too?
If it's not, then that fertilized egg isn't as human a life as the person in the first instance. It has then taken "person" and put it into shades of gray, where the early development is concerned, as opposed to being a simple black or white issue.
It was the most succinct way. To get rid of the SF for a moment,
It's pretty clear that killing a person (with no extenuating circumstances, like war) is wrong.
It's also pretty well accepted that standing there and watching a person be killed, when a simple warning or offer of no-skin-off-your-nose assistance could have saved him/her is also wrong.
It's the whole active vs passive issue, both can be wrong, though clearly an active role is worse.
Or if you still don't like the SF analogy, even if it is clear and short, consider the argument like this:
It's like the way Doolittle was arguing philosophy with Bomb #20 (or was it #19?) in Dark Star. Just because he may well be fictitious has no bearing on the validity of his arguments.
> So they lie. We may find that those oil fields run dry all of a sudden and nobody knew it was going to happen.
These 2 statements form an inherent contradiction. What I think we really mean is that they are keeping 2 sets of book about the reserves of the oil field, the real books and the ones they let the rest of the world see. That's the lie. So if the fields were to suddenly run dry, nobody using the public books would know that it was going to happen, but those using the real books would have. That's not "nobody," just "almost nobody."
I thoroughly agree. What's more, the Constitution states exactly and specifically what you have just said, though at the moment I forget exactly where.
So how is it that these people (I use the term somewhat loosely, though technically correctly) who call themselves "strict constructionists" state that some given right doesn't exist because it isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution. How and by what measure of sanity, by what measure of "strict construction" do they gloss right over that explicit statement. Incidentally, part of the opposition to the Bill of Rights by some was not that they felt it too broad, but that they felt it might be taken as a specific enumeration, and might act to limit rights in the future. How the @$#% can so-called "strict constructionists" ignore these VERY SPECIFIC statements by the authors? (Time to drop this and let my blood pressure go back to normal.)
> it's when you think a collection of cells deserves human rights.
It's not just that, it's balancing the rights of that collection of cells against the rights of the fully-formed person that is the mother. Certainly our society is full of balancing acts of the livelihood of poor against further accumulation by the wealthy, so it can't be considered cut-and-dried.
Beyond that, I heard that by one estimate, something like 25% of acts of fertilization fail to properly implant, in essence are spontaneously aborted. We never knew the number was anything near that high without modern medical monitoring of the type that's only done during studies. So if a fertilized egg has full human rights, is it then medical negligence when that spontaneous abortion is allowed to happen? Compare that to RU486, which is essentially the same action, only artificially induced. Asimov's first law places the two co-equal, "A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm." I know it's reaching into science fiction, but others have suggested that Asimov's 3 Laws, or at least the first 2, aren't bad guidelines for humans, either.
>Companies are much too skilled at ... assume that the free market will just work itself out.
Personally I think it's far too much to assume that the free market will remain free. IMHO anyone who is a fan of the free market is only a fan as long as it benefits them. Once they're in a position of market power, they do everything they can to maintain and extend that market power, and a free market is to their detriment, at least in their core market. Maybe they still like the free market outside of their core, where they don't have market power. (yet)
The Libertarian response to this is that it's government regulation that allows abusive corporate monopolies to happen. In the case of intellectual property base monopolies, like Microsoft and the mafIAA, I can certainly see their point. But absent trustbuster legislation, I'm not quite sure how any sort of free market action would have unwound the likes of Standard Oil or Carnegie steel.
Does Windows have the equivalent of an inode?
At the risk of being pedantic, files are really anchored to inodes, and that's why you can delete or copy over an in-use file. Opening the file returns the inode to the opening process. From that point, you can "replace" or "delete" the file by pointing its directory entry to a new file/inode, or deleting the directory entry. But the filesystem code keeps track of the fact that someone is still using the inode, and doesn't let its space be reclaimed until it's unused.
OTOH, this introduces a new risk, especially where people brag about their uptimes. Let's boot our machine in January, and start all of its services after it's booted. Pretend for argument that one of those services is OpenSSH, and for instance it uses libwrap.so. Now let's have a fiasco like we did about 10 years ago, where someone put a compromised tcp-wrappers out there, and assume that this machine was installed during that timeframe. (I know that would be tough, because the evil tcp-wrappers was discovered and corrected within a few days, maybe even 1.) At this point sshd has attached the bogus libwrap.so to it's process. Now let's discover the evil tcp-wrappers and replace it with a good copy. At this point, we now have a good libwrap installed. All is well, right?
Wrong. At this point, any new code that starts will get the good libwrap. But any code that has been running since before the update is still pointing to the now-anonymous inode that contains the evil libwrap.
In order to propagate a library fix, services that depend on that fix need to be restarted.
> The only reliable means we have of producing energy are fuel powered reactors/power stations and hydro-electric plants and
> these are what a country should base it's energy policy on.
You've completely ignored the whole raft of problems that come along with hydro-electric. I'll agree that they're primarily environmental problems, but that doesn't make them any less problems and doesn't make them "not economic problems," either. For instance, silting eventually impairs the hydroelectric facility itself without some amount of maintenance. People whose livelihood is based on fishing wouldn't think that cutting off fish runs is "merely environmental." Both of these problems have solutions, and those solutions are being practices. (Though there are still many people who would like to see the Niagara and Colorado rage free, at least periodically, not just for the "raw nature," but for the downstream ecosystem health.) But to pretend that anything is problem free is naive.
For that matter, geothermal uses up one of those non-renewable energy sources - the original heat from the Earth's creation. Yea, there's some radioactive-generated heat there too, but the Earth is still radiating the heat of its birth.
As for fossil fuels, the only reason there isn't an outcry about them is that we're used to it. From what I've heard, fossil fuels send more radioactivity up the smokestack in the fly ash than we've released in nuclear accidents. (Caveat - I don't know how effective current scrubbing is at removing the radioactive components.)
I don't remember all the details, but the gist I got was that the detector itself was enough to constitute observation, even if its output was unplugged. Consciousness was not part of the issue.
Several years back I read about an experiment I would have thought would be authoritative on this. It was a classic split-beam type of thing, with detectors that could determine which path the photon went down. In normal circumstances, when you insert the detectors, the interference pattern goes away and you get a classical distribution. When you remove the detectors, you get an interference pattern in the quantum mechanical distribution.
That's all wellandgood, but here's the twist. They inserted the detectors, and disconnected the outputs from any sort of meter or display device. Therefore the detectors "observed," but no conscious knowledge could be gained.
The interference pattern went away, and they got a classical distribution.
IMHO, the wave "collapses" when the potential error exceeds Heisenberg's limit, and that constitutes "observation." Most any other answer makes a special place for consciousness in the universe, and cascades into telepathy, clairvoyance, the Force, etc.
Wish I could remember the reference.