You said: I don't see a difference between sustainable and cancerous growth.
This is just cribbed from my original statement: The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
I'm also bemused over your need to dispute the lyrics of a song called "Free Will":
Let us keep in mind that choosing not to choose may be by far the best choice.
Quantify "by far". Planning to take no action is indeed often the best choice. Planning to save yourself the overhead of planning in all cases is naively self-serving and short-sighted. Planning to subvert the right of the rest of society to ever create a coherent plan is an inane plank for a political soapbox. None skip the planning phase entirely; some simply plan to benefit from fear, uncertainty and doubt.
It really does seem to be precisely the thought of a planning process open to all stakeholders that inflames you. The magic hand of the marketplace is a mystical force, not an aspect of coherent engineering management. I'll do you a favor and ignore your more inflammatory rhetoric.
The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
So as long as there's a "plan" for including the "needs of the many", that is, I go limply through the motions of pretending to follow the moral fad of the day, cancerous growth is ok.
It is certainly possible to pay lip service to some fad, or to exploit loopholes in regulatory oversight. But it would be naive to infer that all attempts at oversight are therefore pointless.
Now, I'm "sustainable", whatever the hell that means.
I suspect we could find a definition of "unsustainable" that we could both agree on. Sustainable is everything else in the Venn diagram. As far as "cancerous growth", the point is the cancer part, not the growth part. Not all growth is bad. Some growth is very bad. "Cancerous growth" is by definition the result of successful technology. If it didn't succeed, it couldn't grow like cancer.
What is the definition of "success", however? Some define success as something that is not unsustainable (over some period of time deemed pertinent to the system in question). Others, however, clearly define success as "obsession for wealth and power". Such folks are often quite good at what they do - and numerous government policies encourage such pursuits. Rapidly accumulating wealth and power is unsustainable unless you use your power to deny others the same. Power is a zero sum game. So is wealth - over the short term. Sustainable wealth is slowly accumulated.
Or maybe you are taking exception to the notion of planning itself? Everything made is doomed to fade. By what logic should plans only cover the former?
"Far better to plan the inevitable downsizing than to pretend it isn't going to happen."
Why is that?
If you plan the decommissioning of neighborhoods you can turn them into useful things like parks and truck gardens. This may even add value to the remaining residential and commercial properties. If you don't plan, the neighborhoods decay into nightmare landscapes of collapsed and burnt architecture. This certainly won't accrue to the benefit of those who remain.
Planning also permits rightsizing of city services in a coherent and potentially positive fashion. No need to run utilities or roads to neighborhoods that no longer exist. Police and fire protection may even expand while funding pressure diminishes since a park is easier to patrol than a deserted industrial district and there will be nothing left to burn.
In the immortal words of Geddy Lee: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Take a look at http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html. Houses decay if they are not maintained. They decay rather rapidly. Unless ownership can be conveyed in some fashion to attentive stewards, a house will come down one way or another. Far better to plan the inevitable downsizing than to pretend it isn't going to happen.
All engineering should consider the full lifecycle. These houses were built in more optimistic times, but was it thought they would stand forever? The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
Look at how roundly and thoroughly Alfred Wegener was attacked when he first proposed plate tectonics
I can't comment on Wegener's personal story, although I may see about tracking down a biography. Plate tectonics, however, is a perfect example of an extreme (but true) scientific inference that required extreme evidence, ie., evidence the gathering of which required not only submarines but sensitive magnetometers unavailable to Wegener: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/developing.html.
Somehow the creationists still manage to interpret this as evidence of Noah's flood: http://creationwiki.org/Geomagnetic_reversal. This slavish adherence to a single preselected position is precisely why creationism is an "ism", not "creation science".
Note how this dishes the favorite argument of pseudoscientists, who always (always, always) claim that the scientific "establishment" refuses to hear evidence that conflicts with accepted wisdom. Rather - to the extent that such an establishment can be said to actually exist - science will entertain any sort of extreme argument, as long as it is cogently - and entertainingly - presented. To overturn competing theories extreme arguments ultimately demand extreme evidence, however.
2) most people aren't prepared to formulate an educated opinion
This is a tautology. If they aren't educated, they aren't prepared. It is also an unsubstantiated assertion. Most people are prepared to formulate a number of educated opinions. Whether these include philosophizing about mind-body dualism is a different question. The original article was called "The Perils of Pop Philosophy", after all.
Among my points was to say (as you elided from your response): "you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions". I posted to a mailing list, you replied to my post presumably to seek a conversation. I conversed.
This is just Sturgeon's law. It is also the definition of "average". The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about any topic you want to name. It has nothing to do with highbrow notions of philosophy.
Of course, given enough words, you can explain any concept.
I doubt that. Given enough words (and a few pictures) you can explain arbitrarily complex expressions of concepts that our brains have evolved to handle. You will run aground past some point with underlying concepts of physics and mathematics, precisely because our brains aren't formatted to visualize a tesseract or grasp the collapse of the wave function.
On the other hand, one might assert that after some point words become a hindrance when trying to express ideas that (for good or bad) are disconnected from the underlying reality. You can read all the philosophy books you want, but the arguments will never gel into a single coherent picture of reality - because each author has a different notion of what that is. Truth is to be found in the synthesis of disparate ideas, but a lot of synthesis involves discarding dreck.
And then you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions:
most readers aren't interested in hearing the full explanation
and you can fool most of the people most of the time...
They're fine with a glossed over version
As are we all for various purposes under various conditions at various times.
to the point of being a flat out lie... and they won't be able to tell
The big lie! But then, they would accept the big truth, too. The issue is perhaps that our public communication channels require no referees, no peer review.
Worse, they may believe themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to detect a false explanation when, in fact, they aren't.
And this was the link back to the other blog entry. Perhaps we should require all students to have a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer.
The modern world at least supports the notion of subverting the dominant paradigm. The real issue here isn't the ability to discern truth - it is the ability to discern the opposite
"So, no, this isn't just a problem in philosophy. It's a problem with any complex concept that, to truly understand it, requires understanding on a large number of first principles that, themselves, may be difficult to grasp. And that characterizes modern science, mathematics, and, as you point out, philosophy as well."
Except that science is intrinsically incremental. Your objections to experimentation - to empirical fact - as being unacceptable in modern communication channels is outdated. A blog entry can include audio, video, applets, all sorts of content beyond "mere" text. And an expert explainer like, say, Isaac Asimov can certainly convey vast amounts of facts - incrementally - in proportional numbers of words (and a few pictures).
You are implicitly asserting an inappropriate application of the principle of math induction - that no fact can be communicated in one word, therefore that no fact can be communicated in two or ten or hundred words - and that therefore nothing whatsoever can be communicated in a one thousand word blog entry. It isn't a question of complexity, because even a simple assertion like "torture is bad" requires enough context to parse that people can disagree about this overtly obvious statement. Whatever Hirsch says, not all discourse is an exercise in Cultural Literacy. Rather, there most certainly is an actual real world underlying what we like to regard as the "real world" of human concepts and civilization. Descartes said that - and I think most people comprehend it.
"'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
Or perhaps this is a problem limited to philosophy? Perhaps this non-linear and recursive characteristic defines philosophy? The difference between science and philosophy is that science is ineluctably rooted in physical reality, in the natural world. Indeed the original name for science was natural philosophy.
On the other hand philosophy - or its varied analogues of religion, politics and economics - is rooted in extremely shallow real world soil. Every word that has ever been spoken on these topics has been thrashed and pounded, mashed and strained through some pedagogue's fevered ontological imagination.
Ohm's law is demonstrable to a freshman in the first week of school (high school or college) with 19th century instruments. The basis of the argument here is that absolutely no concepts of philosophy can be conveyed so directly. Doesn't this say more about philosophy than it does about communication?
Much of science is immediately graspable and usable with a brief explanation from a good teacher. It is the aggregate that is a challenge to fathom - the aggregate and the startling quantum and relativistic foundations underneath it all. These are true mysteries.
Even kindergarten philosophy presents challenges, however, because the systems being modeled - us and a putative deity - are inherently complex. Rather than suggesting that we need to spend more time wrestling with these ponderous issues, how about simply spending our time more productively by engaging with more tractable material?
As the name "horseless carriage" suggests, technological evolution is as much - or more - about subtracting things from society as about adding them. The Popular Science view of a jetpack in every garage and a submarine in every bathtub also neglects the layers of infrastructure needed to make a new paradigm work.
Combine these two and you must face dark economic wizards like Malthus, and evil powers like the Tragedy of the Commons. James Bond (or rather, Q) can employ a single jetpack. But a Robert Moses is needed to bring us all to the promised land of some new visionary technology (casually crushing the South Bronx along the way, of course).
As with politics, it is the cover-up that does the real damage. That said, the real issue here is that the school papers in question are in effect republishing these articles many years later. Did it occur to them to even hold a staff meeting on the ethics of - in effect - posting billboards full of stale information about individuals no longer associated with their institution?
In the past it was easier to find information in recent newspapers than in the back issues. Now it is often easier to find information from ancient sources that have been fully archived, than from the recent volumes that may be kept wholly proprietary to paying customers.
The old paradigm was that information ages, that new information is worth more - and the publishers used this fact to sell physical copy. The old copies were burned or filed in the library stacks, never to be seen again.
The new paradigm is that information ages, that new information is worth more - and the publishers use this fact to sell electronic copy. The old copies are free - including index.
Surely the best response for fretful alumni is to put their efforts into coming up with good explanations. Society will be better off with a more nuanced attitude toward "youthful indiscretions" than having the family lawyer threaten or bribe your alma mater.
Good luck sweeping actual criminal charges under the rug. It is truly sad, however, that there are those who want to squash their own youthful opinion pieces. Wouldn't a response like "I was young. My opinions today are..." be suitable to almost any occasion?
Very interesting! It's good to see a completely positive story about DoD activities.
Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own but only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations is allowed to take down a US network.
How about inverting the competition? Presumably this "arsenal of waivers" could be used as a letter of marque to protect the various academy teams when attacking an NSA prepared target. It could be even more revealing to see "No Such Agency" playing defense.
If the price point is right, community peer review can function just as well after publication. It is certainly preferable to having biased or imaginary reviewers.
The idea that code should be perfect is a stupid idea: consumers don't want that. They want "good enough," not perfect. Perfect costs a great deal of money
Your comment is "insightful", but it is beside the point. This is exactly the same issue with all engineering. An object manufactured to better standards than needed for the purpose is an overly expensive object. The question rather is the web of responsibility. If Microsoft or Google or even somebody's shareware makes a claim of suitability, certainly the consumer should have redress when it proves unsuitable.
There are many other dimensions of this issue. For instance, the software industry is well known for adding pointless complexity - features that nobody ever asked for. If GE added a can opener to a toaster, they would be liable for any unexpected risks this reveals, but Microsoft can make Word so complex that businesses using it accrue large expenses related to training, etc., and risks related to misformatted and delayed documents and so forth - and yet Microsoft currently faces no significant market pressure from liabilities associated with having broken their own product.
A filing cabinet with 50 year old government secrets might need to be as physically secure now as it was 50 years ago. Where as my expired and canceled credit card numbers, not so much.
Yes, but the value of physical security is cumulative. If you manage to protect government secrets for 50 years - even if this involves a $2 padlock and a footlocker - the security can be upgraded at any point to a higher level suitable for current threats. Cyber security on the other hand is only as good as its weakest expression over those 50 years. Expose a rot13 copy of a file even one time and it doesn't matter if you later re-encrypt the file using the NSA's latest and greatest algorithm.
They're like locks, they make getting in hard enough that most people will look for an easier target.
And they're unlike locks, in that a fruitful attack can occur many years afterwards. A lock need only supply protection for a specific period of time - if no bad guys get in during that period, then the security can be regarded as perfect no matter how insipid in design. In cyber-security, even "near-perfect" is as imperfect as "completely lacking" - at least for high priority targets with legacy value.
Because moving the farmers would require something approaching socialism, and not moving the farmers would require something appraching starvation. Moving the desert is a better choice.
...assuming socialism can be equated with starvation. Many might even choose stone-cold communism (if this were ever proffered as a choice, not a mandate) over starvation.
The issue has aspects of political theory and of environmental ethics, but the most basic questions are of engineering. Civil engineering, surely, but also environmental and/or social engineering. Changing farm policy in Northern Africa might have some effect on desertification at this late date. Or it might simply be too little, too late. The answer to this isn't for speculation, but for numerical analysis of well constructed models of the system-of-systems in question.
Similarly, one would anticipate some effort might occur first at predicting the results of wall building across the Sahara - whether the technology is bacteria or concrete. Would this really do anything useful? Only after demonstrating the practicality of the idea should cycles be wasted speculating on the ethical dimension - it would certainly be unethical to invest resources on schemes that can't possibly succeed.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg
"Now one at hypersonic speeds will be challenging."
Depends strongly on the density of the atmosphere and the drogue's size. A ballute might even be designed to grow or shrink as the spacecraft slows and the atmosphere becomes more dense. The necessary scaling might be vastly different between Mars with a thin atmosphere and Venus with a very dense atmosphere. The temperature would also be an issue since the planets vary from cryogenic to hot enough to melt lead.
The fundamental point doesn't have much to do with environmental impact, although large data centers do have a large footprint in whatever units. The real issue is who pays the price and whether society should reward such behavior. The only people who would argue for spam providing a "benefit" are the spammers and meta-spammers themselves.
The economic footprint of an activity almost always comes down to the tragedy of the commons. Not just why should society put up with such antisocial and expensive behavior - but how can we practically dissuade malfactors from engaging in such?
That said, it is often surprisingly straightforward to compute the expense (in some measure) of an activity. For instance, the marginal cost of gzip versus Rice compression was computed to be $2.83 more per image for an archival project I was involved in. The precise cost would be different now (three years later) but would be quite significant.
As with spam, an archive is a store and forward (and replicate and persist) system. Each permanent copy has an expense. Each temporary copy has an expense. Each network replication has an expense. It is the aggregate throughput of the workflow. I wouldn't personally think that carbon footprint was the best way to express this, but someone has to pay that cost - and very frequently it isn't the party creating the mess in the first place.
"The point is that we have two different kinds of systems capturing the same kind of physics," says string theorist Clifford Johnson
Back in the day it was commonplace to construct analogs of mechanical systems, for instance, using electronic components. If the differential equations describing the two systems are similar, so will their solutions be.
That the topic is string theory is also reminiscent of how soap works. Half of a soap molecule is soluble in water, the other half insoluble - thus bridging between wet and oily substances. Very yin and yang.
"They could probably take care of that by etching a description in multiple languages in epoxy. And who knows, in the future, it may turn out to be useful as a sort of Rosetta stone."
Slashdot Mirror
You said: I don't see a difference between sustainable and cancerous growth.
This is just cribbed from my original statement: The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
I'm also bemused over your need to dispute the lyrics of a song called "Free Will":
Let us keep in mind that choosing not to choose may be by far the best choice.
Quantify "by far". Planning to take no action is indeed often the best choice. Planning to save yourself the overhead of planning in all cases is naively self-serving and short-sighted. Planning to subvert the right of the rest of society to ever create a coherent plan is an inane plank for a political soapbox. None skip the planning phase entirely; some simply plan to benefit from fear, uncertainty and doubt.
It really does seem to be precisely the thought of a planning process open to all stakeholders that inflames you. The magic hand of the marketplace is a mystical force, not an aspect of coherent engineering management. I'll do you a favor and ignore your more inflammatory rhetoric.
So as long as there's a "plan" for including the "needs of the many", that is, I go limply through the motions of pretending to follow the moral fad of the day, cancerous growth is ok.
It is certainly possible to pay lip service to some fad, or to exploit loopholes in regulatory oversight. But it would be naive to infer that all attempts at oversight are therefore pointless.
Now, I'm "sustainable", whatever the hell that means.
I suspect we could find a definition of "unsustainable" that we could both agree on. Sustainable is everything else in the Venn diagram. As far as "cancerous growth", the point is the cancer part, not the growth part. Not all growth is bad. Some growth is very bad. "Cancerous growth" is by definition the result of successful technology. If it didn't succeed, it couldn't grow like cancer.
What is the definition of "success", however? Some define success as something that is not unsustainable (over some period of time deemed pertinent to the system in question). Others, however, clearly define success as "obsession for wealth and power". Such folks are often quite good at what they do - and numerous government policies encourage such pursuits. Rapidly accumulating wealth and power is unsustainable unless you use your power to deny others the same. Power is a zero sum game. So is wealth - over the short term. Sustainable wealth is slowly accumulated.
Or maybe you are taking exception to the notion of planning itself? Everything made is doomed to fade. By what logic should plans only cover the former?
"Far better to plan the inevitable downsizing than to pretend it isn't going to happen."
Why is that?
If you plan the decommissioning of neighborhoods you can turn them into useful things like parks and truck gardens. This may even add value to the remaining residential and commercial properties. If you don't plan, the neighborhoods decay into nightmare landscapes of collapsed and burnt architecture. This certainly won't accrue to the benefit of those who remain.
Planning also permits rightsizing of city services in a coherent and potentially positive fashion. No need to run utilities or roads to neighborhoods that no longer exist. Police and fire protection may even expand while funding pressure diminishes since a park is easier to patrol than a deserted industrial district and there will be nothing left to burn.
In the immortal words of Geddy Lee: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Take a look at http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html. Houses decay if they are not maintained. They decay rather rapidly. Unless ownership can be conveyed in some fashion to attentive stewards, a house will come down one way or another. Far better to plan the inevitable downsizing than to pretend it isn't going to happen.
All engineering should consider the full lifecycle. These houses were built in more optimistic times, but was it thought they would stand forever? The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
I wanna see some of the cosmos up close before i die.
Look at the WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft Research: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ and Sky from Google: http://www.google.com/sky/about.html
These fill somewhat different niches and both provide compiled and web-based clients.
The entry should clarify that it is the largest infrared telescope ever launched.
...and perhaps also that there may well be larger telescopes looking down than up.
Look at how roundly and thoroughly Alfred Wegener was attacked when he first proposed plate tectonics
I can't comment on Wegener's personal story, although I may see about tracking down a biography. Plate tectonics, however, is a perfect example of an extreme (but true) scientific inference that required extreme evidence, ie., evidence the gathering of which required not only submarines but sensitive magnetometers unavailable to Wegener: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/developing.html.
Somehow the creationists still manage to interpret this as evidence of Noah's flood: http://creationwiki.org/Geomagnetic_reversal. This slavish adherence to a single preselected position is precisely why creationism is an "ism", not "creation science".
Note how this dishes the favorite argument of pseudoscientists, who always (always, always) claim that the scientific "establishment" refuses to hear evidence that conflicts with accepted wisdom. Rather - to the extent that such an establishment can be said to actually exist - science will entertain any sort of extreme argument, as long as it is cogently - and entertainingly - presented. To overturn competing theories extreme arguments ultimately demand extreme evidence, however.
1) Humans did come from goo, and
2) most people aren't prepared to formulate an educated opinion
This is a tautology. If they aren't educated, they aren't prepared. It is also an unsubstantiated assertion. Most people are prepared to formulate a number of educated opinions. Whether these include philosophizing about mind-body dualism is a different question. The original article was called "The Perils of Pop Philosophy", after all.
Among my points was to say (as you elided from your response): "you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions". I posted to a mailing list, you replied to my post presumably to seek a conversation. I conversed.
you've just lost 99% of average readers
This is just Sturgeon's law. It is also the definition of "average". The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about any topic you want to name. It has nothing to do with highbrow notions of philosophy.
Of course, given enough words, you can explain any concept.
I doubt that. Given enough words (and a few pictures) you can explain arbitrarily complex expressions of concepts that our brains have evolved to handle. You will run aground past some point with underlying concepts of physics and mathematics, precisely because our brains aren't formatted to visualize a tesseract or grasp the collapse of the wave function.
On the other hand, one might assert that after some point words become a hindrance when trying to express ideas that (for good or bad) are disconnected from the underlying reality. You can read all the philosophy books you want, but the arguments will never gel into a single coherent picture of reality - because each author has a different notion of what that is. Truth is to be found in the synthesis of disparate ideas, but a lot of synthesis involves discarding dreck.
And then you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions:
most readers aren't interested in hearing the full explanation
and you can fool most of the people most of the time...
They're fine with a glossed over version
As are we all for various purposes under various conditions at various times.
to the point of being a flat out lie... and they won't be able to tell
The big lie! But then, they would accept the big truth, too. The issue is perhaps that our public communication channels require no referees, no peer review.
Worse, they may believe themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to detect a false explanation when, in fact, they aren't.
And this was the link back to the other blog entry. Perhaps we should require all students to have a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer.
The modern world at least supports the notion of subverting the dominant paradigm. The real issue here isn't the ability to discern truth - it is the ability to discern the opposite
"So, no, this isn't just a problem in philosophy. It's a problem with any complex concept that, to truly understand it, requires understanding on a large number of first principles that, themselves, may be difficult to grasp. And that characterizes modern science, mathematics, and, as you point out, philosophy as well."
Except that science is intrinsically incremental. Your objections to experimentation - to empirical fact - as being unacceptable in modern communication channels is outdated. A blog entry can include audio, video, applets, all sorts of content beyond "mere" text. And an expert explainer like, say, Isaac Asimov can certainly convey vast amounts of facts - incrementally - in proportional numbers of words (and a few pictures).
You are implicitly asserting an inappropriate application of the principle of math induction - that no fact can be communicated in one word, therefore that no fact can be communicated in two or ten or hundred words - and that therefore nothing whatsoever can be communicated in a one thousand word blog entry. It isn't a question of complexity, because even a simple assertion like "torture is bad" requires enough context to parse that people can disagree about this overtly obvious statement. Whatever Hirsch says, not all discourse is an exercise in Cultural Literacy. Rather, there most certainly is an actual real world underlying what we like to regard as the "real world" of human concepts and civilization. Descartes said that - and I think most people comprehend it.
"'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
Or perhaps this is a problem limited to philosophy? Perhaps this non-linear and recursive characteristic defines philosophy? The difference between science and philosophy is that science is ineluctably rooted in physical reality, in the natural world. Indeed the original name for science was natural philosophy.
On the other hand philosophy - or its varied analogues of religion, politics and economics - is rooted in extremely shallow real world soil. Every word that has ever been spoken on these topics has been thrashed and pounded, mashed and strained through some pedagogue's fevered ontological imagination.
Ohm's law is demonstrable to a freshman in the first week of school (high school or college) with 19th century instruments. The basis of the argument here is that absolutely no concepts of philosophy can be conveyed so directly. Doesn't this say more about philosophy than it does about communication?
Much of science is immediately graspable and usable with a brief explanation from a good teacher. It is the aggregate that is a challenge to fathom - the aggregate and the startling quantum and relativistic foundations underneath it all. These are true mysteries.
Even kindergarten philosophy presents challenges, however, because the systems being modeled - us and a putative deity - are inherently complex. Rather than suggesting that we need to spend more time wrestling with these ponderous issues, how about simply spending our time more productively by engaging with more tractable material?
As the name "horseless carriage" suggests, technological evolution is as much - or more - about subtracting things from society as about adding them. The Popular Science view of a jetpack in every garage and a submarine in every bathtub also neglects the layers of infrastructure needed to make a new paradigm work.
Combine these two and you must face dark economic wizards like Malthus, and evil powers like the Tragedy of the Commons. James Bond (or rather, Q) can employ a single jetpack. But a Robert Moses is needed to bring us all to the promised land of some new visionary technology (casually crushing the South Bronx along the way, of course).
As with politics, it is the cover-up that does the real damage. That said, the real issue here is that the school papers in question are in effect republishing these articles many years later. Did it occur to them to even hold a staff meeting on the ethics of - in effect - posting billboards full of stale information about individuals no longer associated with their institution?
In the past it was easier to find information in recent newspapers than in the back issues. Now it is often easier to find information from ancient sources that have been fully archived, than from the recent volumes that may be kept wholly proprietary to paying customers.
The old paradigm was that information ages, that new information is worth more - and the publishers used this fact to sell physical copy. The old copies were burned or filed in the library stacks, never to be seen again.
The new paradigm is that information ages, that new information is worth more - and the publishers use this fact to sell electronic copy. The old copies are free - including index.
Surely the best response for fretful alumni is to put their efforts into coming up with good explanations. Society will be better off with a more nuanced attitude toward "youthful indiscretions" than having the family lawyer threaten or bribe your alma mater.
Good luck sweeping actual criminal charges under the rug. It is truly sad, however, that there are those who want to squash their own youthful opinion pieces. Wouldn't a response like "I was young. My opinions today are..." be suitable to almost any occasion?
Very interesting! It's good to see a completely positive story about DoD activities.
Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own but only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations is allowed to take down a US network.
How about inverting the competition? Presumably this "arsenal of waivers" could be used as a letter of marque to protect the various academy teams when attacking an NSA prepared target. It could be even more revealing to see "No Such Agency" playing defense.
Who needs a journal at all, when you have http://lulu.com/?
If the price point is right, community peer review can function just as well after publication. It is certainly preferable to having biased or imaginary reviewers.
The idea that code should be perfect is a stupid idea: consumers don't want that. They want "good enough," not perfect. Perfect costs a great deal of money
Your comment is "insightful", but it is beside the point. This is exactly the same issue with all engineering. An object manufactured to better standards than needed for the purpose is an overly expensive object. The question rather is the web of responsibility. If Microsoft or Google or even somebody's shareware makes a claim of suitability, certainly the consumer should have redress when it proves unsuitable.
There are many other dimensions of this issue. For instance, the software industry is well known for adding pointless complexity - features that nobody ever asked for. If GE added a can opener to a toaster, they would be liable for any unexpected risks this reveals, but Microsoft can make Word so complex that businesses using it accrue large expenses related to training, etc., and risks related to misformatted and delayed documents and so forth - and yet Microsoft currently faces no significant market pressure from liabilities associated with having broken their own product.
A filing cabinet with 50 year old government secrets might need to be as physically secure now as it was 50 years ago. Where as my expired and canceled credit card numbers, not so much.
Yes, but the value of physical security is cumulative. If you manage to protect government secrets for 50 years - even if this involves a $2 padlock and a footlocker - the security can be upgraded at any point to a higher level suitable for current threats. Cyber security on the other hand is only as good as its weakest expression over those 50 years. Expose a rot13 copy of a file even one time and it doesn't matter if you later re-encrypt the file using the NSA's latest and greatest algorithm.
They're like locks, they make getting in hard enough that most people will look for an easier target.
And they're unlike locks, in that a fruitful attack can occur many years afterwards. A lock need only supply protection for a specific period of time - if no bad guys get in during that period, then the security can be regarded as perfect no matter how insipid in design. In cyber-security, even "near-perfect" is as imperfect as "completely lacking" - at least for high priority targets with legacy value.
Because moving the farmers would require something approaching socialism, and not moving the farmers would require something appraching starvation. Moving the desert is a better choice.
...assuming socialism can be equated with starvation. Many might even choose stone-cold communism (if this were ever proffered as a choice, not a mandate) over starvation.
The issue has aspects of political theory and of environmental ethics, but the most basic questions are of engineering. Civil engineering, surely, but also environmental and/or social engineering. Changing farm policy in Northern Africa might have some effect on desertification at this late date. Or it might simply be too little, too late. The answer to this isn't for speculation, but for numerical analysis of well constructed models of the system-of-systems in question.
Similarly, one would anticipate some effort might occur first at predicting the results of wall building across the Sahara - whether the technology is bacteria or concrete. Would this really do anything useful? Only after demonstrating the practicality of the idea should cycles be wasted speculating on the ethical dimension - it would certainly be unethical to invest resources on schemes that can't possibly succeed.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
Many fewer than a few per billion. The mean free path of a neutrino is light years - in lead: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg
Control the protons - control the neutrinos.
"Now one at hypersonic speeds will be challenging."
Depends strongly on the density of the atmosphere and the drogue's size. A ballute might even be designed to grow or shrink as the spacecraft slows and the atmosphere becomes more dense. The necessary scaling might be vastly different between Mars with a thin atmosphere and Venus with a very dense atmosphere. The temperature would also be an issue since the planets vary from cryogenic to hot enough to melt lead.
The fundamental point doesn't have much to do with environmental impact, although large data centers do have a large footprint in whatever units. The real issue is who pays the price and whether society should reward such behavior. The only people who would argue for spam providing a "benefit" are the spammers and meta-spammers themselves.
The economic footprint of an activity almost always comes down to the tragedy of the commons. Not just why should society put up with such antisocial and expensive behavior - but how can we practically dissuade malfactors from engaging in such?
That said, it is often surprisingly straightforward to compute the expense (in some measure) of an activity. For instance, the marginal cost of gzip versus Rice compression was computed to be $2.83 more per image for an archival project I was involved in. The precise cost would be different now (three years later) but would be quite significant.
As with spam, an archive is a store and forward (and replicate and persist) system. Each permanent copy has an expense. Each temporary copy has an expense. Each network replication has an expense. It is the aggregate throughput of the workflow. I wouldn't personally think that carbon footprint was the best way to express this, but someone has to pay that cost - and very frequently it isn't the party creating the mess in the first place.
"The point is that we have two different kinds of systems capturing the same kind of physics," says string theorist Clifford Johnson
Back in the day it was commonplace to construct analogs of mechanical systems, for instance, using electronic components. If the differential equations describing the two systems are similar, so will their solutions be.
That the topic is string theory is also reminiscent of how soap works. Half of a soap molecule is soluble in water, the other half insoluble - thus bridging between wet and oily substances. Very yin and yang.
"They could probably take care of that by etching a description in multiple languages in epoxy. And who knows, in the future, it may turn out to be useful as a sort of Rosetta stone."
That's another Long Now project:
Project Rosetta