"...not poor enough to qualify for a lot of aid, and not rich enough to pay it without a lot of pain. So I didn't go to MIT, I went to my local in-state engineering school, and I'm perfectly happy with the result."
I'm not arguing against this sort of calculation, I think that's perfectly reasonable. The nursing option was, I admit, a straw man I set up. What I'm really arguing against is the notion that, as in the FPP, no one derives benefit from PELL grants, for instance, other than university administrators. That government-funded loans and scholarships are the primary driver of higher educational costs (people elsewhere in this thread are doing a fair job of pointing out that federal and state subsidies of schools have plummeted to historically low levels. And yes, a certain level of administrative cruft is adding to costs without producing much of value to most institutions.) And I'm arguing against the Objectivist notion that the government has no business putting money into public or private colleges and universities. And the presumption that the average college-age kids must be lazy, decadent, and surely must be looking to rip the system.
And I'm arguing against the adjunct belief that education should be a free market without any regulation, oversight, selectivity or interference by the government. The government, and the people, have a vested interest in making the process fair, open, productive, reasonably accessible to all. Everybody doesn't have a right to get whatever degree they want at whatever price they want, but there should be reasonable means by which young people with skills, knowledge, and earnest effort can eventually attempt the degree they want and have a fair chance to distinguish themselves, without obscenely burdening themselves or their families with decades-long debt. If middle-class families are priced out of the market for a university education, that's one marker of a faltering standard of living in America, and it can't be good for our future. We shouldn't just roll over and say, "Oh, well, the market has spoken."
I can't believe I'd have to spell this out. Is this a troll?
Look, there's no guarantee of anything in life, you could get run over by a bus tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure most people starting out in life will live a happier life, or a life at least with profoundly more satisfaction and closure, if they're allow to initially pursue something that matches their aptitudes and interests. You're not guaranteed to be a world-class pianist, but you ought to be allowed to try the piano at least, see if you have the skill and fortitude to pursue it. Maybe someone born without any fingers or any perception of musical pitch should be gently encouraged to look elsewhere.
Yes, by college age, actual competitive music performers should have already distinguished themselves, but I'm hoping you get the metaphor here.
I think the presumption that only people whose parents have accumulated "enough" money should be allowed to pursue the education of their interest is kind of a good starting definition of an unjust society. How is that any different from a feudal society? At the age of 16, you're unlikely to have had the opportunity to earn enough money to pay cash for a four-year education. And if you had, I'd say that's pretty likely a function of your family's wealth and available opportunities rather than your own.
Yes some people plainly can't afford college and some people clearly aren't qualified or ready for it. If you turn away a lot of talented young people who would otherwise do well in their chosen fields, solely for money reasons, that's society's loss as well as their own. If only some aristocratic top echelon can afford to educate their kids, the system is broken.
But I also think it's smug and disingenuous for you to say "I'm confused..." Did you pay for your education out of your own pocket? I'm betting you, like most people, got some amount of financial aid, some amount of loans, and lo, someone probably co-signed. Somebody else gave you some amount of lift to get your start in life. I doubt you wouldn't have objected if someone suggested you go study (some other field you are disinterested in) instead of what you really wanted to do.
The problem is that not everything should be, in a reasonably just society, subject to the unmitigated forces of the market. Senator Ryan imagines families taking their medicare vouchers and shopping very carefully for the most cost-efficient medical care. It doesn't happen that way. If your grandmother arrives at the emergency room, having received CPR on the ambulance ride, you don't want to have to shop around. You want care right then - in the room that she's currently occupying.
Similarly, your daughter wants to be a geologist. But the best geology program is (I'm making this up) North Dakota State. You don't have the option of moving your family to North Dakota to score in-state tuition. You can't tell her that her best option financially is to study to become a nurse instead. Education is not a commodity that you buy by the pound or by the linear foot.
Most people understand that a higher education is their best option for improving their lot in life. It's dawned on universities that they sell something of high, but uncertain, value. They realize they can raise their prices to compensate (and some, simply to take advantage). Do you want the higher education your kids are getting to be a shell game, where some of them are guaranteed to get the value out of it that they put into it, and some of them do not?
The truth of the matter is that, over the course of the last few decades, federal and state subsidies to private and public universities, and also to academic research generally, have shrunk and shrunk. Private loans to individual students are a poor compensation for that. Even people who never have kids of their own derive some value from living in a society where higher education is valued and pursued.
One of the reasons that the best and the brightest from around the world come to America is that they perceive the value of a university education here to be high compared to elsewhere. If that becomes no longer true, there will be less motivation for talented people to come here and participate in our economy.
That's what you've got? 'He got a good price on a house'?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't pursue this but I can't help myself. Obama is president of the United States. Presidential-level corruption isn't "He got a great price on a house". You're not even using your imagination.
Presidential-level corruption could be something like "He started a war that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of people in a foreign country, lying in the face of the American people, while trashing the credibility of the entire intelligence community, and with the explicit intent of enriching all his cronies in the military contracting business", for instance. Or "He undermined the rule of law, disregarded habeus corpus, violated the privacy rights of millions, reinstated torture as a means of statecraft, disappeared dissidents to third-world prisons, imprisoned thousands of people for years on end who were never charged, had no court date or means of calling for redress. Just to show his own father who was the tougher man." Etc. See, that would be some Presidential-grade corruption there.
Some of those things I mentioned might even be valid criticisms of Obama, since he seems satisfied to allow the continuation of Bush-era policies with regard to the war on terror, electronic privacy, homeland security etc. But I can't believe that getting even a $400k pop on a house is going to have much influence. That's just someone trying to suck up. Next you're going to be telling me he's parking in handicapped spaces.
Think bigger. Obama had a fund raiser last month where his re-election campaign gathered up $15M over the course of dinner. If you're looking at corruption, look at the Citizens United decision and the filthy circus it's made of the election process for both parties. That would be a start.
My point is that, if someone thinks the President has done something corrupt, they should definitely point that out. But being a Chicago politician itself is not a crime. Everybody has to be from somewhere. Just discounting entire regions of the country based on identity politics is divisive, it's unhelpful, and it's just lazy thinking.
Not ever from there, but I want to object to the way the city of Chicago has been turned into political invective. If I said "Everybody from Dallas is a jackass", that would be just plain wrong. But somehow NYC and now Chicago are always fair targets. And if the next Democratic president were from, say, Toledo, then I'm sure suddenly being from the Toledo would be a tremendous mark against him.
I'm pretty certain Mr. Obama did not learn any political tricks from Richard Daley, who died in 1976 and is the only mayor of Chicago most people can name besides the current one. I think it's fair to let the president be defined by his own actions rather than geographic location.
When you refuse, in an argument, to let the other side describe themselves in a term that is neutral and descriptive, you remove yourself from the group of civil and persuadable actors.
> The people of RI were stupid in giving this company so much (or any) money with no collateral > except Aeron chairs, and were stupid to be in the business of angel investing.
That's a problem if you are one of the people in Rhode Island, or one of the people who Schilling employed (now holding a rubber check), or somebody that extended credit or resources to a (now broke) startup, or even one of the people who bought a great computer game that now has no support or upgrade path. Being stupid is not some kind of big flag that says "come exploit me, I deserve to have bad things happen to me". It's not a game, its people's money and livelihoods.
Maybe what you instead mean to say is "I fail to see the problem -- for me." Or maybe "I have no empathy for anybody that does anything I wouldn't, in hindsight, do."
See that's the problem. He took, how much, $75 million, of the state of Rhode Island's money (as a loan.) And spent it. It's gone. If you seize the company and put it up at auction, all you're going to get is a bunch of scratched-up aeron chairs and three-year-old computers. The state is out the money.
Gah - there's so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.
Yes, the voting on this bill happened quite quickly after it was finalized. But A.) it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior, and B.) it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior (oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks) and C.) it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account. Its transparent, you can read it, its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.
Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details. People have been trying to get similar legislation passed in America for nearly a hundred years, they were supposed to call the whole thing off because of one last-minute hold out? Is it not clear that Congressman Nelson simply wanted a bribe, rather than him having substantial issues with the legislation?
Yes the bottom-line price of this legislation and the system it creates kinda-sorta is an estimate. Given the size of the system, the vagaries of predicting medical advances, etc, there's absolutely no way to write laws for any system where the bottom-line cost were absolutely known in advance.
The Tea Party. Basically everybody slept through George W. Bush's two terms as he blew through tremendous chunks of taxpayer money - giving tax breaks up the wazoo, laying out a huge new medicare benefit, created the largest new bureaucracy in fifty years, entering us into a war just on his own whim, apparently. I didn't see a single tea party person throughout all of that. Suddenly a Democrat comes to office, and every dime his administration spends is an affront to LIBERTY! TO THE BARRICADES! BUT WAIT WHILE I STAPLE THESE TEA BAGS TO MY HAT!
Nobody hates John Hodgman - he's an ACTOR, not an operating system, in those commercials. Maybe that wasn't obvious enough? John was teh funny in those commercials. Mac guy was just this bemused observer.
Geez I'm sincerely sorry, I don't mean to pepper you with questions, I should just go ahead and hire on optical physicist to explain this to me, but here goes -
Is there a way for Alice to discern that a specific entangled photon, sent from Alice (or Charlie) was received by Bob? Alice gets an entangled photon, assumes that Bob has the entangled twin for it, and does her joint Bell-state measurement. Now, Bob's entangle photon is instantaneously altered, right? But Alice doesn't really know whether that photon is in Bob's possession, or Max's (the adversary), does she? She knows that she sent some amount of entangled photons in Bob's direction, and that maybe Bob received X% of them. Max can intentionally scoop up (100-X) percent of the photons, and, Alice not being able to discern which actually reached Bob or not, she will encode her message using all of her entangled photons. Presumably she and Bob will implement some kind of error correction scheme to make up for losses.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's leakage inherent in any system that's sending photons through free-space, and neither Bob nor Alice has a realistic way of discerning natural losses from intentional third-party interceptions. I can't imagine Bob sending back through a classical channel "Hey Alice I got photon #12 go ahead and do your BSM now!", but again that could be spoofed because it would be on a classical channel. Max is probably sending back variants of that same message with the numbers of all the photons he received.
The third party then would have to intercept the classical channel (but that should be easier, because it's classical) and somehow match bits of information from that to the bits he'd intercepted or eavesdropped on. There's nothing in even the ideal system that prevents this. The only way to really prevent this is to make sure every entangled photon is accounted for.
But the other aspect of this is that it sounds like a supremely fragile system. It's a great step forward for security (maybe) but not reliable or robust in the kinds of ways that you might wish for in a system meant to convey strategic communications.
Ah, but the abstract of the paper itself says "Over a 35-53 dB high-loss quantum channel, an average fidelity of 80.4(9) % is achieved for six distinct initial states." That sounds like a lossy channel to me. Plus, I simply don't believe it's possible to send a laser beam over X kilometers, including an atmosphere, and have them ALL reach their destination - it's a limitation of the medium.
Also, the Physics ArXiv blog post for this paper includes this; "Inevitably photons get lost and entanglement is destroyed in such a process. Imperfections in the optics and air turbulence account for some of these losses but the biggest problem is beam widening (they did the experiment at an altitude of about 4000 metres). Since the beam spreads out as it travels, many of the photons simply miss the target altogether. "
and
"That's interesting because it's the same channel attenuation that you'd have to cope with when beaming photons to a satellite with, say, 20 centimetre optics orbiting at about 500 kilometres. "The successful quantum teleportation over such channel losses in combination with our high-frequency and high-accuracy [aiming] technique show the feasibility of satellite-based ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation," say Juan and co."
So it looks to me as though even the paper's author is admitting some "channel losses". The question I still have is, how is it possible to distinguish channel losses from adversarial interception of photons?
I'm not sure I get why this method is thought to be any more secure than a conventional line-of-sight laser link.
It seems as though a line of sight laser that had conventionally encoded data in it would be pretty secure. Well, you'd have to get close to the laser light to observe it, and maybe use some super-fancy optics to couple to it and make a copy of the data. Highly unlikely but possible. But if the (assumed full-duplex) beams were obstructed, the link would be assumed compromised and sending could be halted.
In the case of the quantum version, it is said that the photons are entangled, so if an adversary inspected them, he'd "collapse the wave function" and it would be obvious to both the receiver and the sender, is that right? But, because its an optical beam, some amount of those entangled photons diverge, go astray, and are not ever received (at the receiver.) How does the sender distinguish between those that are legitimately received and those that go astray? Between those that are intercepted by an adversary and those that go astray? Could not then an adversary just choose to inspect those photons that weren't going to make it to the receiver anyway? And then, by 'collapsing the wavefunction' him or herself, be privy to (some portion of) the message?
I'd like to overlook all of the political arguments on this thread, but this statement "About the only thing NASA can do now is put a satellite in low orbit" is simply false, either intentionally so or misinformed. I don't know why such sentiment keeps appearing here at Slashdot of all places. Let's take a look at the recent record;
Kepler - increases by something like an order of magnitude the number of known exoplanets. Way into extended mission time now. Spirit and Opportunity rovers - nominal thirty day mission, they've now been operating on Mars' service for over eight years. New Horizons - on its way to be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and (potentially) other Kuiper Belt objects MESSENGER - first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, been there for over a year now. NEAR Shoemaker - orbits and lands on asteroid 433 Eros (a first?) Cassini - discovers open liquid lakes and oceans on Titan, cryovolcanoes on Enceladus, new dynamics in Saturn's rings, and on and on. A freaking awesome mission. Hubble - still working, still doing real science. 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (dark energy, expansion of the universe is accelerating) largely done using Hubble data. STEREO - just captured incidental images of a new Nova. Returning new data on the Sun every day. JUNO - on it's way to Jupiter, first solar powered mission to that planet. Mars Science Laboratory - over budget, yes, but on its way to Mars, and by far the most sophisticated robot ever to be sent to another planet.
Keep in mind that space is hard. Let's take a look at what other space programs have been up to lately -
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to even escape Earth's orbit
- Russia's resupply mission to ISS exploded less than six minutes after takeoff (August 2011)
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed? nobody knows)
- Cassini's Huygens probe (ESA) had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing, rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)
For the record, other current NASA missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.
Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other functioning programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's not good for anything anymore" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.
This, a million times this. The authors here are not some group of crunchy, kumbayaa-strumming hemp-skirt wearing lefties; they are straight out of right-wing "think-tanks" so one would assume their opinions would have some degree of relevance to the workings of the Republican party.
The price of the bulb is, unsurprisingly, like just about everything else, related to the number of bulbs produced and sold. If you bought a one-off handmade automobile, it would cost a lot more, even if it performed exactly the same as a stock car that rolled off a manufacturing line.
Over time, as more of these bulbs are produced, the price per item is going to come down. Phillips doesn't want to subsidize the price of the early bulbs (to take the risk that they'll never sell enough of them to back out the cost of the subsidy), so they're pricing them to cost, apparently. I'm sure its dawned on Phillips that a $30 light bulb is not going to be an easy sell. I'd bet that the pricing also indicates that they don't expect a consumer with a house full of these would need to replace them very often.
It's not some kind of socialist plot. It's business.
I know it's a lot to ask, but RTFA. The actual heading of the FPP is "Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage". I think Malcom Gladwell is smart enough to consider the whole correlation-vs-causation question before he submits an article to a national publication, and, amazingly, the New Yorker still has an independent (and quite highly regarded) fact-checking department.
With such a tremendous amount of actually useful and interesting research work sitting around waiting to be done, I think pursuing this, largely because it reminds people of their favorite SF series, is kind of a misuse of resources. Just sayin'.
P.S. I absolutely CANNOT see this coming in handy for shipwreck recovery. What is really handy for shipwreck recovery is a ship with a winch and a really long cable.
I may not be so well informed on this, but I don't believe Mr. Lovelock took any of your tax money for climate or weather science. For starters, he lives in Great Britain, and is a British citizen. According to the Google.
But if you're paying taxes in Great Britain, he still hasn't taken any of your money. Mostly he just writes books. There's no public subsidy for what he does, and very little science involved. He's essentially a crank.
Rather than fill a battery up in five minutes, I'd prefer to just plug it in when I drive it back into my garage at the end of the day. That covers almost every situation (except for those crazy road trips - but even then, it's unlikely we're driving non-stop for days on end.)
I'm sorry, but every little half-understood news blurb regarding particle or condensed matter physics, or spintronics or lasers or topological insulators or what-ever, "could also aid the quest to build a quantum computer". That's a total blarney. Could we just admit that we don't really know an practicable way to build a useful quantum computer yet, and leave it at that?
However, a missile defense system disables the opponents ability to retaliate our first strike, and is a crucial element to enabling us to first strike with impunity. That is a very VERY offensive element to missle defense systems.
Nobody wants to risk everything on a worldwide missle defense system that's never been operationally tested. Nobody wants to live in a world where several other continents have been nuked into radioactive ash. Believe me, the people planning and building missle defense systems sincerely hope that they never have to be used. Nobody's imagining it as an enabler for a first-strike capability.
Slashdot Mirror
"...not poor enough to qualify for a lot of aid, and not rich enough to pay it without a lot of pain. So I didn't go to MIT, I went to my local in-state engineering school, and I'm perfectly happy with the result."
I'm not arguing against this sort of calculation, I think that's perfectly reasonable. The nursing option was, I admit, a straw man I set up. What I'm really arguing against is the notion that, as in the FPP, no one derives benefit from PELL grants, for instance, other than university administrators. That government-funded loans and scholarships are the primary driver of higher educational costs (people elsewhere in this thread are doing a fair job of pointing out that federal and state subsidies of schools have plummeted to historically low levels. And yes, a certain level of administrative cruft is adding to costs without producing much of value to most institutions.) And I'm arguing against the Objectivist notion that the government has no business putting money into public or private colleges and universities. And the presumption that the average college-age kids must be lazy, decadent, and surely must be looking to rip the system.
And I'm arguing against the adjunct belief that education should be a free market without any regulation, oversight, selectivity or interference by the government. The government, and the people, have a vested interest in making the process fair, open, productive, reasonably accessible to all. Everybody doesn't have a right to get whatever degree they want at whatever price they want, but there should be reasonable means by which young people with skills, knowledge, and earnest effort can eventually attempt the degree they want and have a fair chance to distinguish themselves, without obscenely burdening themselves or their families with decades-long debt. If middle-class families are priced out of the market for a university education, that's one marker of a faltering standard of living in America, and it can't be good for our future. We shouldn't just roll over and say, "Oh, well, the market has spoken."
I can't believe I'd have to spell this out. Is this a troll?
Look, there's no guarantee of anything in life, you could get run over by a bus tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure most people starting out in life will live a happier life, or a life at least with profoundly more satisfaction and closure, if they're allow to initially pursue something that matches their aptitudes and interests. You're not guaranteed to be a world-class pianist, but you ought to be allowed to try the piano at least, see if you have the skill and fortitude to pursue it. Maybe someone born without any fingers or any perception of musical pitch should be gently encouraged to look elsewhere.
Yes, by college age, actual competitive music performers should have already distinguished themselves, but I'm hoping you get the metaphor here.
I think the presumption that only people whose parents have accumulated "enough" money should be allowed to pursue the education of their interest is kind of a good starting definition of an unjust society. How is that any different from a feudal society? At the age of 16, you're unlikely to have had the opportunity to earn enough money to pay cash for a four-year education. And if you had, I'd say that's pretty likely a function of your family's wealth and available opportunities rather than your own.
Yes some people plainly can't afford college and some people clearly aren't qualified or ready for it. If you turn away a lot of talented young people who would otherwise do well in their chosen fields, solely for money reasons, that's society's loss as well as their own. If only some aristocratic top echelon can afford to educate their kids, the system is broken.
But I also think it's smug and disingenuous for you to say "I'm confused..." Did you pay for your education out of your own pocket? I'm betting you, like most people, got some amount of financial aid, some amount of loans, and lo, someone probably co-signed. Somebody else gave you some amount of lift to get your start in life. I doubt you wouldn't have objected if someone suggested you go study (some other field you are disinterested in) instead of what you really wanted to do.
The problem is that not everything should be, in a reasonably just society, subject to the unmitigated forces of the market. Senator Ryan imagines families taking their medicare vouchers and shopping very carefully for the most cost-efficient medical care. It doesn't happen that way. If your grandmother arrives at the emergency room, having received CPR on the ambulance ride, you don't want to have to shop around. You want care right then - in the room that she's currently occupying.
Similarly, your daughter wants to be a geologist. But the best geology program is (I'm making this up) North Dakota State. You don't have the option of moving your family to North Dakota to score in-state tuition. You can't tell her that her best option financially is to study to become a nurse instead. Education is not a commodity that you buy by the pound or by the linear foot.
Most people understand that a higher education is their best option for improving their lot in life. It's dawned on universities that they sell something of high, but uncertain, value. They realize they can raise their prices to compensate (and some, simply to take advantage). Do you want the higher education your kids are getting to be a shell game, where some of them are guaranteed to get the value out of it that they put into it, and some of them do not?
The truth of the matter is that, over the course of the last few decades, federal and state subsidies to private and public universities, and also to academic research generally, have shrunk and shrunk. Private loans to individual students are a poor compensation for that. Even people who never have kids of their own derive some value from living in a society where higher education is valued and pursued.
One of the reasons that the best and the brightest from around the world come to America is that they perceive the value of a university education here to be high compared to elsewhere. If that becomes no longer true, there will be less motivation for talented people to come here and participate in our economy.
Schneier goes commando! Every day!
That's what you've got? 'He got a good price on a house'?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't pursue this but I can't help myself. Obama is president of the United States. Presidential-level corruption isn't "He got a great price on a house". You're not even using your imagination.
Presidential-level corruption could be something like "He started a war that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of people in a foreign country, lying in the face of the American people, while trashing the credibility of the entire intelligence community, and with the explicit intent of enriching all his cronies in the military contracting business", for instance. Or "He undermined the rule of law, disregarded habeus corpus, violated the privacy rights of millions, reinstated torture as a means of statecraft, disappeared dissidents to third-world prisons, imprisoned thousands of people for years on end who were never charged, had no court date or means of calling for redress. Just to show his own father who was the tougher man." Etc. See, that would be some Presidential-grade corruption there.
Some of those things I mentioned might even be valid criticisms of Obama, since he seems satisfied to allow the continuation of Bush-era policies with regard to the war on terror, electronic privacy, homeland security etc. But I can't believe that getting even a $400k pop on a house is going to have much influence. That's just someone trying to suck up. Next you're going to be telling me he's parking in handicapped spaces.
Think bigger. Obama had a fund raiser last month where his re-election campaign gathered up $15M over the course of dinner. If you're looking at corruption, look at the Citizens United decision and the filthy circus it's made of the election process for both parties. That would be a start.
My point is that, if someone thinks the President has done something corrupt, they should definitely point that out. But being a Chicago politician itself is not a crime. Everybody has to be from somewhere. Just discounting entire regions of the country based on identity politics is divisive, it's unhelpful, and it's just lazy thinking.
Not ever from there, but I want to object to the way the city of Chicago has been turned into political invective. If I said "Everybody from Dallas is a jackass", that would be just plain wrong. But somehow NYC and now Chicago are always fair targets. And if the next Democratic president were from, say, Toledo, then I'm sure suddenly being from the Toledo would be a tremendous mark against him.
I'm pretty certain Mr. Obama did not learn any political tricks from Richard Daley, who died in 1976 and is the only mayor of Chicago most people can name besides the current one. I think it's fair to let the president be defined by his own actions rather than geographic location.
When you refuse, in an argument, to let the other side describe themselves in a term that is neutral and descriptive, you remove yourself from the group of civil and persuadable actors.
> The people of RI were stupid in giving this company so much (or any) money with no collateral
> except Aeron chairs, and were stupid to be in the business of angel investing.
That's a problem if you are one of the people in Rhode Island, or one of the people who Schilling employed (now holding a rubber check), or somebody that extended credit or resources to a (now broke) startup, or even one of the people who bought a great computer game that now has no support or upgrade path. Being stupid is not some kind of big flag that says "come exploit me, I deserve to have bad things happen to me". It's not a game, its people's money and livelihoods.
Maybe what you instead mean to say is "I fail to see the problem -- for me." Or maybe "I have no empathy for anybody that does anything I wouldn't, in hindsight, do."
See that's the problem. He took, how much, $75 million, of the state of Rhode Island's money (as a loan.) And spent it. It's gone. If you seize the company and put it up at auction, all you're going to get is a bunch of scratched-up aeron chairs and three-year-old computers. The state is out the money.
Gah - there's so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.
Yes, the voting on this bill happened quite quickly after it was finalized. But A.) it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior, and B.) it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior (oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks) and C.) it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account. Its transparent, you can read it, its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.
Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details. People have been trying to get similar legislation passed in America for nearly a hundred years, they were supposed to call the whole thing off because of one last-minute hold out? Is it not clear that Congressman Nelson simply wanted a bribe, rather than him having substantial issues with the legislation?
Yes the bottom-line price of this legislation and the system it creates kinda-sorta is an estimate. Given the size of the system, the vagaries of predicting medical advances, etc, there's absolutely no way to write laws for any system where the bottom-line cost were absolutely known in advance.
The Tea Party. Basically everybody slept through George W. Bush's two terms as he blew through tremendous chunks of taxpayer money - giving tax breaks up the wazoo, laying out a huge new medicare benefit, created the largest new bureaucracy in fifty years, entering us into a war just on his own whim, apparently. I didn't see a single tea party person throughout all of that. Suddenly a Democrat comes to office, and every dime his administration spends is an affront to LIBERTY! TO THE BARRICADES! BUT WAIT WHILE I STAPLE THESE TEA BAGS TO MY HAT!
Um. Those commercials were funny.
Nobody hates John Hodgman - he's an ACTOR, not an operating system, in those commercials. Maybe that wasn't obvious enough? John was teh funny in those commercials. Mac guy was just this bemused observer.
Geez I'm sincerely sorry, I don't mean to pepper you with questions, I should just go ahead and hire on optical physicist to explain this to me, but here goes -
Is there a way for Alice to discern that a specific entangled photon, sent from Alice (or Charlie) was received by Bob? Alice gets an entangled photon, assumes that Bob has the entangled twin for it, and does her joint Bell-state measurement. Now, Bob's entangle photon is instantaneously altered, right? But Alice doesn't really know whether that photon is in Bob's possession, or Max's (the adversary), does she? She knows that she sent some amount of entangled photons in Bob's direction, and that maybe Bob received X% of them. Max can intentionally scoop up (100-X) percent of the photons, and, Alice not being able to discern which actually reached Bob or not, she will encode her message using all of her entangled photons. Presumably she and Bob will implement some kind of error correction scheme to make up for losses.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's leakage inherent in any system that's sending photons through free-space, and neither Bob nor Alice has a realistic way of discerning natural losses from intentional third-party interceptions. I can't imagine Bob sending back through a classical channel "Hey Alice I got photon #12 go ahead and do your BSM now!", but again that could be spoofed because it would be on a classical channel. Max is probably sending back variants of that same message with the numbers of all the photons he received.
The third party then would have to intercept the classical channel (but that should be easier, because it's classical) and somehow match bits of information from that to the bits he'd intercepted or eavesdropped on. There's nothing in even the ideal system that prevents this. The only way to really prevent this is to make sure every entangled photon is accounted for.
But the other aspect of this is that it sounds like a supremely fragile system. It's a great step forward for security (maybe) but not reliable or robust in the kinds of ways that you might wish for in a system meant to convey strategic communications.
Ah, but the abstract of the paper itself says "Over a 35-53 dB high-loss quantum channel, an average fidelity of 80.4(9) % is achieved for six distinct initial states." That sounds like a lossy channel to me. Plus, I simply don't believe it's possible to send a laser beam over X kilometers, including an atmosphere, and have them ALL reach their destination - it's a limitation of the medium.
Also, the Physics ArXiv blog post for this paper includes this;
"Inevitably photons get lost and entanglement is destroyed in such a process. Imperfections in the optics and air turbulence account for some of these losses but the biggest problem is beam widening (they did the experiment at an altitude of about 4000 metres). Since the beam spreads out as it travels, many of the photons simply miss the target altogether. "
and
"That's interesting because it's the same channel attenuation that you'd have to cope with when beaming photons to a satellite with, say, 20 centimetre optics orbiting at about 500 kilometres. "The successful quantum teleportation over such channel losses in combination with our high-frequency and high-accuracy [aiming] technique show the feasibility of satellite-based ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation," say Juan and co."
So it looks to me as though even the paper's author is admitting some "channel losses". The question I still have is, how is it possible to distinguish channel losses from adversarial interception of photons?
I'm not sure I get why this method is thought to be any more secure than a conventional line-of-sight laser link.
It seems as though a line of sight laser that had conventionally encoded data in it would be pretty secure. Well, you'd have to get close to the laser light to observe it, and maybe use some super-fancy optics to couple to it and make a copy of the data. Highly unlikely but possible. But if the (assumed full-duplex) beams were obstructed, the link would be assumed compromised and sending could be halted.
In the case of the quantum version, it is said that the photons are entangled, so if an adversary inspected them, he'd "collapse the wave function" and it would be obvious to both the receiver and the sender, is that right? But, because its an optical beam, some amount of those entangled photons diverge, go astray, and are not ever received (at the receiver.) How does the sender distinguish between those that are legitimately received and those that go astray? Between those that are intercepted by an adversary and those that go astray? Could not then an adversary just choose to inspect those photons that weren't going to make it to the receiver anyway? And then, by 'collapsing the wavefunction' him or herself, be privy to (some portion of) the message?
I'd like to overlook all of the political arguments on this thread, but this statement "About the only thing NASA can do now is put a satellite in low orbit" is simply false, either intentionally so or misinformed. I don't know why such sentiment keeps appearing here at Slashdot of all places. Let's take a look at the recent record;
Kepler - increases by something like an order of magnitude the number of known exoplanets. Way into extended mission time now.
Spirit and Opportunity rovers - nominal thirty day mission, they've now been operating on Mars' service for over eight years.
New Horizons - on its way to be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and (potentially) other Kuiper Belt objects
MESSENGER - first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, been there for over a year now.
NEAR Shoemaker - orbits and lands on asteroid 433 Eros (a first?)
Cassini - discovers open liquid lakes and oceans on Titan, cryovolcanoes on Enceladus, new dynamics in Saturn's rings, and on and on. A freaking awesome mission.
Hubble - still working, still doing real science. 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (dark energy, expansion of the universe is accelerating) largely done using Hubble data.
STEREO - just captured incidental images of a new Nova. Returning new data on the Sun every day.
JUNO - on it's way to Jupiter, first solar powered mission to that planet.
Mars Science Laboratory - over budget, yes, but on its way to Mars, and by far the most sophisticated robot ever to be sent to another planet.
Keep in mind that space is hard. Let's take a look at what other space programs have been up to lately -
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to even escape Earth's orbit
- Russia's resupply mission to ISS exploded less than six minutes after takeoff (August 2011)
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed? nobody knows)
- Cassini's Huygens probe (ESA) had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing, rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)
For the record, other current NASA missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.
Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other functioning programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's not good for anything anymore" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.
This, a million times this. The authors here are not some group of crunchy, kumbayaa-strumming hemp-skirt wearing lefties; they are straight out of right-wing "think-tanks" so one would assume their opinions would have some degree of relevance to the workings of the Republican party.
The price of the bulb is, unsurprisingly, like just about everything else, related to the number of bulbs produced and sold. If you bought a one-off handmade automobile, it would cost a lot more, even if it performed exactly the same as a stock car that rolled off a manufacturing line.
Over time, as more of these bulbs are produced, the price per item is going to come down. Phillips doesn't want to subsidize the price of the early bulbs (to take the risk that they'll never sell enough of them to back out the cost of the subsidy), so they're pricing them to cost, apparently. I'm sure its dawned on Phillips that a $30 light bulb is not going to be an easy sell. I'd bet that the pricing also indicates that they don't expect a consumer with a house full of these would need to replace them very often.
It's not some kind of socialist plot. It's business.
I know it's a lot to ask, but RTFA. The actual heading of the FPP is "Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage". I think Malcom Gladwell is smart enough to consider the whole correlation-vs-causation question before he submits an article to a national publication, and, amazingly, the New Yorker still has an independent (and quite highly regarded) fact-checking department.
Pluto Closest Approach In:
1168 Days
20 Hours
07 Min
41 Sec
Then you'll have your answer.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
With such a tremendous amount of actually useful and interesting research work sitting around waiting to be done, I think pursuing this, largely because it reminds people of their favorite SF series, is kind of a misuse of resources. Just sayin'.
P.S. I absolutely CANNOT see this coming in handy for shipwreck recovery. What is really handy for shipwreck recovery is a ship with a winch and a really long cable.
I may not be so well informed on this, but I don't believe Mr. Lovelock took any of your tax money for climate or weather science. For starters, he lives in Great Britain, and is a British citizen. According to the Google.
But if you're paying taxes in Great Britain, he still hasn't taken any of your money. Mostly he just writes books. There's no public subsidy for what he does, and very little science involved. He's essentially a crank.
See, I seldom drive a car when I'm asleep.
Rather than fill a battery up in five minutes, I'd prefer to just plug it in when I drive it back into my garage at the end of the day. That covers almost every situation (except for those crazy road trips - but even then, it's unlikely we're driving non-stop for days on end.)
I'm sorry, but every little half-understood news blurb regarding particle or condensed matter physics, or spintronics or lasers or topological insulators or what-ever, "could also aid the quest to build a quantum computer". That's a total blarney. Could we just admit that we don't really know an practicable way to build a useful quantum computer yet, and leave it at that?
However, a missile defense system disables the opponents ability to retaliate our first strike, and is a crucial element to enabling us to first strike with impunity. That is a very VERY offensive element to missle defense systems.
Nobody wants to risk everything on a worldwide missle defense system that's never been operationally tested. Nobody wants to live in a world where several other continents have been nuked into radioactive ash. Believe me, the people planning and building missle defense systems sincerely hope that they never have to be used. Nobody's imagining it as an enabler for a first-strike capability.
This. Why, if you really needed actual random numbers, would you leave the generation of them to someone else?