It's not the key, it's a key. Defense in depth, etcetera.
Also, if by "this democracy" you are referring to the United States: the names of many of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were initially kept secret, for fear of British reprisals.
Excuse me, I think you left "violating Pakistani airspace" out of your post.
No matter what you or I or anyone else may think, the fact is that if Pakistan declares its airspace off limits to U.S. drones and follows whatever the proper international processes are for this sort of thing, then U.S. drones being shot down by Pakistani forces in Pakistani airspace under Pakistani government orders would be entirely legal. Just as it would be were the positions reversed.
And pause a moment to think about what just happened. Imran Kahn isn't some two-bit small-town politician. He's famous in quite a few parts of the world and he might also be Pakistan's next head of state. It would be like Mitt Romney getting unexpectedly pulled off a plane by Pakistani immigration officials and questioned for two hours about his political policies regarding, um, Guantanamo Bay... can you imagine the response by the US populace/media/government?
"If I was a terrorist leader I'd blow up a few bags of ball bearings in the lines of people waiting to nudie-scanned. The country would implode overnight...
The only reason this isn't happening is that there are no terrorists."
If I was a terrorist leader, I'd do nothing. Why increase your risk of dying to make the enemy miserable when you can get the enemy's government to do it for you?
I'll blow my moderations on this topic to answer you.
* I'd opine, "(a) it is majority abhorrent (like racism)", and that the TSA is - even at best - an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. * There have been attempts to "understand the benefits of TSA", but I think the slashdot hive minds (note plural) reached consensus some discussions back. It has, after all, been ten years since the TSA was created ("9/11" occurred 2001-09-11 and the law creating the TSA was signed 2001-11-19). * The reason I think so many arguments sound like a bad "Rage Against the Machine" is a sense of powerlessness many people feel from living in countries that were the product of the Enlightenment but in which the rule of money has since returned to - at least partly - trump the rule of law whilst living in its house, wearing its clothing and signing its name on bills.
It's not like there weren't people already doing what the TSA was created to federalise (this Australian finds its kinda weird that a "capitalist" government would nationalise a large commercial industry that was obviously poised for (pardon the pun) explosive growth, but as I am a foreigner maybe I'm missing something).
And 9/11 would not have happened if the crew cabin had had reinforced doors and/or the passengers had swarmed the terrorists; since the TSA is not responsible for either of those, the people have sacrificed essential liberties for... what, exactly?
(this is now the part where you post that +5 argument in favour of the TSA, if you wish to; I'll read it, even if I may not reply)
Hmm. Good points. Or, "necessary evil" points, perhaps. Hmm. My wording might get a little rough (as in, unpolished, not rude, I hope).
"Bob, at least, is acting as a rational actor, getting payment for his contribution. You, on the other hand, are an altruist - noble, but unpredictable."
Or, from another perspective, Bob is seeking immediate personal returns by pushing back society's returns, while I am accepting lesser or no immediate personal returns by bringing forward society's returns - of which I shall hopefully partake as a member. Bob's a short-term investor while I'm a long-term investor. Regarding the "unpredictable" tag, how so? You know Bob is selfish, he will go for the quick reward, you know I am altruistic, I will go for the long reward. Or are you using it in the sense that, since you can't as easily predict what I will do with a given discovery because I will attempt to consider its societal ramifications, you can't as easily take financial advantage of my actions? I don't immediately see how that's bad for society (you, perhaps, but not society)?
"thanks to Bob's publication, Charlie uses that knowledge as a stepping stone to create widget Y, which he patents and publishes. Bob wants a license to Y, and being a rational actor, cross-licenses with Charlie. Now, society gets access to both widget Y and widget X, at a reduced cost because now there are two competitors in the market. Society is looking really good right now."
Whereas if Bob had published without patenting, Charlie could still have used that knowledge, created widget Y, and it would be even cheaper because - all else being equal - Charlie's costs would've been less without having to pay Bob royalties. Now, Charlie could of course decide not to pass on those savings, but then all else is not equal.
It relies on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, and it is a self-fulfilling mechanism.
As noted above, your suggested system would rely on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally altruistic... an assumption that has never been true and led to the downfall of several socialist states.
I didn't explicitly suggest a system, but since we're here: First, as you point out, we can't rely on humanity being fundamentally altruistic. Therefore, those who suggest simply abolishing patents are (presumably?) proposing that society would at least be better off with a return to trade secrets and reverse engineering. Since your argument has been succinct and informative so far, I'm curious as to why you think this would be truly worse for society (not for the inventors; for society)?
Second, as I point out, the current system's reliance on the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish is a self-fulfilling mechanism; it encourages selfishness. Society admires people like Jonas Salk for their nobility at the same time as it continues to rely on, even defend and entrench, the systems that discourage others from emulating him. We spend years teaching our children the virtues of altruism ("share your toys!") and then as adults they discover our dog-eat-dog world of high politics and high finance - where it doesn't matter if your overseas reps are pimping kids in return for lucrative access to countries under sanction, so long as nobody back home finds out and management can pocket a nice bonus. Unless you're the kids in question, of course. I daresay it matters to them.
Sorry, I may have started to ramble. But I think I'll leave that in as an example of how selfish we humans can get, since it's based on actual events, and selfishness is what the patent system rewards. The patent system is such a massive current (pillar? root?) in our society's economy that it inevitably has social/political/historical consequences. If "progress" is what society truly wants, society needs to come up with something better. How would you improve things? Or do you think this is as good as we can get?
(this probably needs more work, but I'll post it now)
You spend a year researching widget X. Bob on the other side of the country also spends a year researching widget X, but he starts a day before you. On Monday he patents his discovery, and begins making and selling it. On Tuesday you publish your discovery in a journal but don't patent it, since you believe it's better for society that everyone share their knowledge freely, and begin making and selling it. Unfortunately it turns out Bob is a complete selfish prick, and when the two of you find out about each other, demands far more money than you can afford - and thanks to his government-issued piece of paper now nobody but him will be selling widget X (and at an exorbitant price) for the next seventeen years.
So tell me, in such cases, how is it better for society that there be patents? Why is it that our justice system claims to believe in "innocent until proven guilty" but applies the reverse when it comes to patents and independent invention?
Also, feel free to replace "widget X" with "polio vaccine". Salks, the inventor of the vaccine, refused to patent his discovery. What if a "Bob" had discovered the vaccine a week earlier, patented it, and restricted its availability only to the wealthy - because hey, he can make more money that way?
And how many people are already stuck wasting time checking whether one of the other seven+ billion people on the planet has already patented what they want to work on, when instead they could simply be getting on with it? Patents are Big Business these days. Patent chests, patent thickets, patent hedges, obfuscated patents... greed is taking over. The system is being abused, and increasingly abused, because it is fundamentally flawed. It relies on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, and it is a self-fulfilling mechanism.
By "winner takes all" I meant that if you arrive at an invention independently, the law still commands you to pay any existing patent holder if you want to earn an income from your efforts.
Seriously though, has anyone ever subjected the patent system to a proper, scientifically rigorous examination of its socioeconomic optimality?
Seems to me that it has last two fundamental flaws; it relies on "winner takes all" rewards and "obey us and suffer, or disobey us and suffer a lot more" penalties. It's about as democratic as a dictatorship, and it also seems to me that the system rapidly becomes inefficient once society's R&D resources grow beyond certain points. We have, in my opinion, hit those points some time ago.
Look, I get it... you're pirating material.. and you're telling yourself all day long, it's ok... this *used* to be legal.
But it's NOT true. If you want to have a reasonable discussion about copyright law.. then YOU NEED TO STICK TO THE FACTS.
Yes, let's. What was the legal status of copyright in the US before 1790? And as for the Statute of Anne, that was not the first copyright law. It was the first law in Britain that made the regulation of copyright the province of government rather than of a (government supported) guild and it should be noted that (a) the statute was lobbied for by the guild in question, to ensure their profits, and (b) that the guild then lobbied for extensions and expansions, and was variously successful.
Fundamentally, copyright (and patent) has always been about the control of the many for the profit of a few. All that's changed is the methods of coercion used in the process, but it's still coercion. That some cloak it as a "necessary" evil doesn't make it good, and I hold that it has never been necessary either.
I thought his goal was more about circumventing, highlighting and opposing filtering that doesn't have ethical human oversight and due process. I remember several occasions over the years where filtering software has made the news for blocking sites for "pornography", "gambling" or the like that were actually about something completely different - e.g. just happening to have opposing political or religious views to the producers of the software, or just plain laziness on the part of the filter makers. I also spent seven years as a network administrator for primary schools which were part of a state filtering scheme, and successive governments in my country have toyed with the idea of a national filter - for children and adults alike - so I'm quite familiar with the pros and cons of filtering.
We adults can have a bad habit of not listening to what children have to say; it's harder to ignore a fellow adult when they speak up for the children too.
But... we've already got mechanical simulacra of humans. We've already got stereoscopic hand-eye (hand-camera) coordination software. We've already got neural net learning software. Etcetera. All the basic fundamentals are there. All that's needed now is sufficient (okay a lot of) development, refinement, and a decent high-level suite to tie everything together into a neat package so that a single programmer can do a show-and-tell for a factory's robotic workforce.
So, any bets on whether the Droid Age begins in the first or second half of this century?
Hi, I read the wikipedia articles linked by the GP. Your assertion doesn't seem to match what was presented there. Do you know something the GP/wikipedia does not?
I prefer Australia's method: your name is crossed off on the local copy of the register, but the ballot forms are totally anonymous. That way voting fraud can be detected without creating an opportunity for more of it. Some people complain about the mandatory voting, but rights are like muscles: if they're not exercised regularly, they waste away.
A question (if you've the time to spare). I imagine the "delivered" KE of the asteroid wouldn't be evenly distributed; rather it'd be highest at or near the centre of impact between the asteroid and the earth. On the other hand, as you point out, it won't all go into compressing/heating our rather conveniently placed blob of deuterium at ground zero. Can this sort of thing still be worked out with napkin math, and would it get much closer to the extra four orders of magnitude needed for a 'maybe'?
P.S. I assumed a density of 3000kg/m^3 (taken from the website); at 4/3*pi*r^3*d that's just under 2e17 grams. You were generous to me.:)
My napkin math (and a handy asteroid impact website) suggests 14.4 tons TNT yield equivalent KE per square centimetre for a 5km wide stony asteroid at a lazy 11km/sec.
By comparison, wikipedia claims the 4MT Mk-21 thermonuclear bomb weighed in at only 6.8t with dimensions of 3.8m by 1.4m - what does that suggest to you?
I was under the impression that so-called "hydrogen bombs" typically rely on three+ stages: a conventional KE explosive component (stage 1) to force an explosive fission chain reaction in a sub-critical heavy-element component (stage 2), which in turn is used to force an explosive fusion chain reaction in a light-element component (stage 3), which is used to further boost the efficiency of the fissioning component. More or less.
A multiple-kilometers-wide iron-nickel asteroid impacting a solid planet at multiple-kilometres-per-second speed? I was imagining that was in the ballpark, but alright:
We'll start with the most conservative choice: a 5 km stony asteroid travelling at a minimal 11 km/s. KE before atmospheric entry is 1.19 x 10^22 Joules = 2.84 x 10^6 MegaTons TNT. So almost three billion megatons of "conventional" force. Mind you, that results in an estimated crater only 33.6km across rather than the 90km of the actual Popigai crater.
Now, that's spread over a significant surface area, which (we'll wildly assume) is a circle: pi*r*r, or about 19634954 m^2. So a "mere" 14.4 tons of TNT per square centimetre. Is that enough for fission or fusion reactions in materials "caught in the middle" to occur? Given wikipedia lists the 4MT Mk-21 as weighing 6.8t and being 3.8m by 1.4m, I'd guess easily enough for fission and even for fusion too.
Please feel free to correct me, this is totally napkin math.:)
How an impact could produce radioactives is easy enough - our nuclear weapons still rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission and/or fusion, and we're talking an asteroid impact here that was sufficiently massive and fast to leave a crater over sixty miles across - but I'd like to see actual citations also.
Dear AC, the fact that with an infinite number of coin tosses you should tend to average tails half the time? It in no way prevents you from rolling heads several times in a row - or a billion times, for that matter.
The gizmag article is about statistical homogeneity while the newscientist article is about an empirical anomaly. The two are quite compatible in that respect.
It should also be mentioned that the fine article mentions the study is ongoing and has only mapped less than 1% of the observable universe, so it's perhaps a tad hasty to leap to any conclusions just yet: "Further work is clearly required to fully pin down this result. In the future researchers will cover more of the sky at larger distances, and thereby reach a final resolution of the validity of the Cosmological principle. But this study is the first serious step toward that resolution."
They aren't melting all at once, though. If you wanted an edge, something that would help you beat everyone else to those nice prime ocean routes and drilling sites before just any old ship could get through....
Sorry, that's what I meant - a user-friendly app that presented a neatly tabulated output of the deciphered content of nearby WEP-protected traffic.
"Black Hat Siri, tabulate nearby LAN traffic and announce items of interest" "Decrypting... IP123 is downloading email (context AI suggests mid-level executive)... IP321 is banking with Acme bank (old TLS detected, exploit available)... IP456 is surfing porn (old TLS detected, exploit available)... IP987 is running MITM exploit against IP321.... IP989 is streaming webcam (remote exploit available)..." "Black Hat Siri, display locations of IP321, IP987 and IP989 on local street map." "Displaying."
Oh, joy. So if you've got one of those remotes that can start the car, don't get drunk while the remote's in your pocket. After all you're "in a position to operate the controls".
And the stupidest part is that if we applied the same reasoning to rape laws then every single non-castrated human being would be auto-magically guilty of rape. We have the equipment and the controls are built-in, after all. Yet despite it being obvious this is faulty logic, it's still considered (motor vehicle) law.
What's considered "standard software"? If I were to put a user-friendly app on the apple and android app stores so that anyone (the "probably 98% of the community" you mention) could have a neatly tabulated output of the content of nearby WEP-protected traffic, what effect does that have on law enforcement from your described perspective?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the key, it's a key. Defense in depth, etcetera.
Also, if by "this democracy" you are referring to the United States: the names of many of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were initially kept secret, for fear of British reprisals.
Excuse me, I think you left "violating Pakistani airspace" out of your post.
No matter what you or I or anyone else may think, the fact is that if Pakistan declares its airspace off limits to U.S. drones and follows whatever the proper international processes are for this sort of thing, then U.S. drones being shot down by Pakistani forces in Pakistani airspace under Pakistani government orders would be entirely legal. Just as it would be were the positions reversed.
And pause a moment to think about what just happened. Imran Kahn isn't some two-bit small-town politician. He's famous in quite a few parts of the world and he might also be Pakistan's next head of state. It would be like Mitt Romney getting unexpectedly pulled off a plane by Pakistani immigration officials and questioned for two hours about his political policies regarding, um, Guantanamo Bay... can you imagine the response by the US populace/media/government?
If I was a terrorist leader, I'd do nothing. Why increase your risk of dying to make the enemy miserable when you can get the enemy's government to do it for you?
I'll blow my moderations on this topic to answer you.
* I'd opine, "(a) it is majority abhorrent (like racism)", and that the TSA is - even at best - an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
* There have been attempts to "understand the benefits of TSA", but I think the slashdot hive minds (note plural) reached consensus some discussions back. It has, after all, been ten years since the TSA was created ("9/11" occurred 2001-09-11 and the law creating the TSA was signed 2001-11-19).
* The reason I think so many arguments sound like a bad "Rage Against the Machine" is a sense of powerlessness many people feel from living in countries that were the product of the Enlightenment but in which the rule of money has since returned to - at least partly - trump the rule of law whilst living in its house, wearing its clothing and signing its name on bills.
It's not like there weren't people already doing what the TSA was created to federalise (this Australian finds its kinda weird that a "capitalist" government would nationalise a large commercial industry that was obviously poised for (pardon the pun) explosive growth, but as I am a foreigner maybe I'm missing something).
And 9/11 would not have happened if the crew cabin had had reinforced doors and/or the passengers had swarmed the terrorists; since the TSA is not responsible for either of those, the people have sacrificed essential liberties for... what, exactly?
(this is now the part where you post that +5 argument in favour of the TSA, if you wish to; I'll read it, even if I may not reply)
Hmm. Good points. Or, "necessary evil" points, perhaps. Hmm. My wording might get a little rough (as in, unpolished, not rude, I hope).
Or, from another perspective, Bob is seeking immediate personal returns by pushing back society's returns, while I am accepting lesser or no immediate personal returns by bringing forward society's returns - of which I shall hopefully partake as a member. Bob's a short-term investor while I'm a long-term investor. Regarding the "unpredictable" tag, how so? You know Bob is selfish, he will go for the quick reward, you know I am altruistic, I will go for the long reward. Or are you using it in the sense that, since you can't as easily predict what I will do with a given discovery because I will attempt to consider its societal ramifications, you can't as easily take financial advantage of my actions? I don't immediately see how that's bad for society (you, perhaps, but not society)?
Whereas if Bob had published without patenting, Charlie could still have used that knowledge, created widget Y, and it would be even cheaper because - all else being equal - Charlie's costs would've been less without having to pay Bob royalties. Now, Charlie could of course decide not to pass on those savings, but then all else is not equal.
I didn't explicitly suggest a system, but since we're here: First, as you point out, we can't rely on humanity being fundamentally altruistic. Therefore, those who suggest simply abolishing patents are (presumably?) proposing that society would at least be better off with a return to trade secrets and reverse engineering. Since your argument has been succinct and informative so far, I'm curious as to why you think this would be truly worse for society (not for the inventors; for society)?
Second, as I point out, the current system's reliance on the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish is a self-fulfilling mechanism; it encourages selfishness. Society admires people like Jonas Salk for their nobility at the same time as it continues to rely on, even defend and entrench, the systems that discourage others from emulating him. We spend years teaching our children the virtues of altruism ("share your toys!") and then as adults they discover our dog-eat-dog world of high politics and high finance - where it doesn't matter if your overseas reps are pimping kids in return for lucrative access to countries under sanction, so long as nobody back home finds out and management can pocket a nice bonus. Unless you're the kids in question, of course. I daresay it matters to them.
Sorry, I may have started to ramble. But I think I'll leave that in as an example of how selfish we humans can get, since it's based on actual events, and selfishness is what the patent system rewards. The patent system is such a massive current (pillar? root?) in our society's economy that it inevitably has social/political/historical consequences. If "progress" is what society truly wants, society needs to come up with something better. How would you improve things? Or do you think this is as good as we can get?
(this probably needs more work, but I'll post it now)
Let's take your position and try an example.
You spend a year researching widget X. Bob on the other side of the country also spends a year researching widget X, but he starts a day before you. On Monday he patents his discovery, and begins making and selling it. On Tuesday you publish your discovery in a journal but don't patent it, since you believe it's better for society that everyone share their knowledge freely, and begin making and selling it. Unfortunately it turns out Bob is a complete selfish prick, and when the two of you find out about each other, demands far more money than you can afford - and thanks to his government-issued piece of paper now nobody but him will be selling widget X (and at an exorbitant price) for the next seventeen years.
So tell me, in such cases, how is it better for society that there be patents? Why is it that our justice system claims to believe in "innocent until proven guilty" but applies the reverse when it comes to patents and independent invention?
Also, feel free to replace "widget X" with "polio vaccine". Salks, the inventor of the vaccine, refused to patent his discovery. What if a "Bob" had discovered the vaccine a week earlier, patented it, and restricted its availability only to the wealthy - because hey, he can make more money that way?
And how many people are already stuck wasting time checking whether one of the other seven+ billion people on the planet has already patented what they want to work on, when instead they could simply be getting on with it? Patents are Big Business these days. Patent chests, patent thickets, patent hedges, obfuscated patents... greed is taking over. The system is being abused, and increasingly abused, because it is fundamentally flawed. It relies on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, and it is a self-fulfilling mechanism.
By "winner takes all" I meant that if you arrive at an invention independently, the law still commands you to pay any existing patent holder if you want to earn an income from your efforts.
Uh, "legitimate patent trolls"?
Seriously though, has anyone ever subjected the patent system to a proper, scientifically rigorous examination of its socioeconomic optimality?
Seems to me that it has last two fundamental flaws; it relies on "winner takes all" rewards and "obey us and suffer, or disobey us and suffer a lot more" penalties. It's about as democratic as a dictatorship, and it also seems to me that the system rapidly becomes inefficient once society's R&D resources grow beyond certain points. We have, in my opinion, hit those points some time ago.
Yes, let's. What was the legal status of copyright in the US before 1790? And as for the Statute of Anne, that was not the first copyright law. It was the first law in Britain that made the regulation of copyright the province of government rather than of a (government supported) guild and it should be noted that (a) the statute was lobbied for by the guild in question, to ensure their profits, and (b) that the guild then lobbied for extensions and expansions, and was variously successful.
Fundamentally, copyright (and patent) has always been about the control of the many for the profit of a few. All that's changed is the methods of coercion used in the process, but it's still coercion. That some cloak it as a "necessary" evil doesn't make it good, and I hold that it has never been necessary either.
I thought his goal was more about circumventing, highlighting and opposing filtering that doesn't have ethical human oversight and due process. I remember several occasions over the years where filtering software has made the news for blocking sites for "pornography", "gambling" or the like that were actually about something completely different - e.g. just happening to have opposing political or religious views to the producers of the software, or just plain laziness on the part of the filter makers. I also spent seven years as a network administrator for primary schools which were part of a state filtering scheme, and successive governments in my country have toyed with the idea of a national filter - for children and adults alike - so I'm quite familiar with the pros and cons of filtering.
We adults can have a bad habit of not listening to what children have to say; it's harder to ignore a fellow adult when they speak up for the children too.
But... we've already got mechanical simulacra of humans. We've already got stereoscopic hand-eye (hand-camera) coordination software. We've already got neural net learning software. Etcetera. All the basic fundamentals are there. All that's needed now is sufficient (okay a lot of) development, refinement, and a decent high-level suite to tie everything together into a neat package so that a single programmer can do a show-and-tell for a factory's robotic workforce.
So, any bets on whether the Droid Age begins in the first or second half of this century?
Hi, I read the wikipedia articles linked by the GP. Your assertion doesn't seem to match what was presented there. Do you know something the GP/wikipedia does not?
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri
I prefer Australia's method: your name is crossed off on the local copy of the register, but the ballot forms are totally anonymous. That way voting fraud can be detected without creating an opportunity for more of it. Some people complain about the mandatory voting, but rights are like muscles: if they're not exercised regularly, they waste away.
You may note he used the word 'squalor', not the word 'glorious'.
Also, our corporate overlords? They don't seem to spend much time caring about long-term sustainable economic plans.
Thankyou for demolishing my napkin. :)
A question (if you've the time to spare). I imagine the "delivered" KE of the asteroid wouldn't be evenly distributed; rather it'd be highest at or near the centre of impact between the asteroid and the earth. On the other hand, as you point out, it won't all go into compressing/heating our rather conveniently placed blob of deuterium at ground zero. Can this sort of thing still be worked out with napkin math, and would it get much closer to the extra four orders of magnitude needed for a 'maybe'?
P.S. I assumed a density of 3000kg/m^3 (taken from the website); at 4/3*pi*r^3*d that's just under 2e17 grams. You were generous to me. :)
Nevermind, my napkin math has been rebutted. Apparently I may need to find another four orders of magnitude. :)
My napkin math (and a handy asteroid impact website) suggests 14.4 tons TNT yield equivalent KE per square centimetre for a 5km wide stony asteroid at a lazy 11km/sec.
By comparison, wikipedia claims the 4MT Mk-21 thermonuclear bomb weighed in at only 6.8t with dimensions of 3.8m by 1.4m - what does that suggest to you?
I was under the impression that so-called "hydrogen bombs" typically rely on three+ stages: a conventional KE explosive component (stage 1) to force an explosive fission chain reaction in a sub-critical heavy-element component (stage 2), which in turn is used to force an explosive fusion chain reaction in a light-element component (stage 3), which is used to further boost the efficiency of the fissioning component. More or less.
A multiple-kilometers-wide iron-nickel asteroid impacting a solid planet at multiple-kilometres-per-second speed? I was imagining that was in the ballpark, but alright:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popigai_Astroblem - "either an 8 km (5.0 mi) diameter chondrite asteroid, or a 5 km (3.1 mi) diameter stony asteroid"
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ - "Welcome to the Earth Impact Effects Program"
We'll start with the most conservative choice: a 5 km stony asteroid travelling at a minimal 11 km/s. KE before atmospheric entry is 1.19 x 10^22 Joules = 2.84 x 10^6 MegaTons TNT. So almost three billion megatons of "conventional" force. Mind you, that results in an estimated crater only 33.6km across rather than the 90km of the actual Popigai crater.
Now, that's spread over a significant surface area, which (we'll wildly assume) is a circle: pi*r*r, or about 19634954 m^2. So a "mere" 14.4 tons of TNT per square centimetre. Is that enough for fission or fusion reactions in materials "caught in the middle" to occur? Given wikipedia lists the 4MT Mk-21 as weighing 6.8t and being 3.8m by 1.4m, I'd guess easily enough for fission and even for fusion too.
Please feel free to correct me, this is totally napkin math. :)
How an impact could produce radioactives is easy enough - our nuclear weapons still rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission and/or fusion, and we're talking an asteroid impact here that was sufficiently massive and fast to leave a crater over sixty miles across - but I'd like to see actual citations also.
Dear AC, the fact that with an infinite number of coin tosses you should tend to average tails half the time? It in no way prevents you from rolling heads several times in a row - or a billion times, for that matter.
The gizmag article is about statistical homogeneity while the newscientist article is about an empirical anomaly. The two are quite compatible in that respect.
It should also be mentioned that the fine article mentions the study is ongoing and has only mapped less than 1% of the observable universe, so it's perhaps a tad hasty to leap to any conclusions just yet: "Further work is clearly required to fully pin down this result. In the future researchers will cover more of the sky at larger distances, and thereby reach a final resolution of the validity of the Cosmological principle. But this study is the first serious step toward that resolution."
They aren't melting all at once, though. If you wanted an edge, something that would help you beat everyone else to those nice prime ocean routes and drilling sites before just any old ship could get through....
Sorry, that's what I meant - a user-friendly app that presented a neatly tabulated output of the deciphered content of nearby WEP-protected traffic.
"Black Hat Siri, tabulate nearby LAN traffic and announce items of interest"
"Decrypting... IP123 is downloading email (context AI suggests mid-level executive)... IP321 is banking with Acme bank (old TLS detected, exploit available)... IP456 is surfing porn (old TLS detected, exploit available)... IP987 is running MITM exploit against IP321.... IP989 is streaming webcam (remote exploit available)..."
"Black Hat Siri, display locations of IP321, IP987 and IP989 on local street map."
"Displaying."
Oh, joy. So if you've got one of those remotes that can start the car, don't get drunk while the remote's in your pocket. After all you're "in a position to operate the controls".
And the stupidest part is that if we applied the same reasoning to rape laws then every single non-castrated human being would be auto-magically guilty of rape. We have the equipment and the controls are built-in, after all. Yet despite it being obvious this is faulty logic, it's still considered (motor vehicle) law.
What's considered "standard software"? If I were to put a user-friendly app on the apple and android app stores so that anyone (the "probably 98% of the community" you mention) could have a neatly tabulated output of the content of nearby WEP-protected traffic, what effect does that have on law enforcement from your described perspective?