The problem usually comes when someone wants to see the experiment replicated. For some reason the effect always seems to go away when other people are looking.
Well, in the real world, experiments are difficult and there is absolutely no guarantee that an experiment which works sometimes can be replicated with certainty on demand. An experiment may work once, then the researcher spends a month trying to get things working again, then it works, then the researcher spends another month trying to get things working again. This is particularly true in the case of novel experimental results for which we do not have a solid theoretical understanding.
Without a good theoretical understanding, it is extremely difficult to know which experimental parameter causes a setup to work or not work, which makes it difficult for other people to duplicate work, and difficult to guarantee it will work for a single demonstration. But neither of these things by themselves invalidate experimental results.
I think the tendency of many to cry "kook" everytime we see experimental results which contradict theory and are difficult to replicate some of the times we try is quite non-scientific.
When the NSA goes datamining, they divide the intercepted traffic into two piles: clear and encrypted. Both piles get processed. Except yours has a red flag next to it.
There's a solution to that. Start sending a lot of encrypted spam.:)
You're an idiot. You don't have to choose a party. There's nothing about parties in the constitution.
That's only partly true. The word "party" may not be in the constitution, but if the framers had been able to study modern game theory, then they would know that the electoral process described in the constitution enforces the establishment and persistence of a two-party system. If you REALLY want to get rid of the two-party system and install a real democratic spectrum of choice, then we need to change our election system and switch to something like Approval Voting.
This can start at a local and state level, and this would create substantial improvements, but ultimately it should be done with a constitutional amendment.
But you assume that the government is guilty of "corruption and crime," that the government offices have broken the law
Well... It is, and they have.
and that the leaker is well-motivated. What if the reverse is true? What if the leaker leaks names of undercover CIA operatives, who are subsequently killed? Or more mundane, leaks the existence of an overseas spy network that has to be withdrawn, and as a result the next 911 is not prevented?
This is precisely why the law should focus around protection for the revealing of law breaking. By the definition of a whistleblower, one is only a whistleblower when one is reporting wrongdoing. It is far more likely that such wrongdoing would induce the next 9/11 than that it would prevent it.
We already have laws that make it illegal to leak the names of undercover CIA operatives, we just haven't done much yet in the way of enforcing them or bringing responsible parties to justice. An appropriate whistleblower law would not diminish the ability to enforce these laws.
> Because leaker, like the bad guy who brought Nixon down, are always evil.
The question is whether they are ever evil.
How about a law to explicitly protect whistleblowers within the government, even in cases of national security. When government officials break the law, people who release this information should be protected and cherished. Corruption and crime are not patriotism.
There might be an inherent paradox here: encrypted data accessible anywhere. I'm not sure this is even possible without making connections that bypass Google (say, from an internet-cafe computer to your home machine for private key transfer, or even to a third-party server that stores your private key for you.)
This is why you wouldn't use a large private key, but simply use a key derived as a hash from the user's password and an algorithm such as AES.
Google COULD, if they want to, have a calendaring system in which the data is encrypted the entire time it is in transit, and the entire time it is stored on their systems, and only decrypted locally by a java applet within the browser of the user accessing the data. They could also still support this with advertising, and people would be more inclined to use it with the knowledge that their data would be safe.
Do you think businesses are going to want their employees scheduling confidential meetings on a calendaring system which Google has full access to? But if it were fully encrypted and only accessed by password locally, this would suddenly be a potent and secure tool which makes the PDA a lot less useful in a networked world.
I'll grant that particle ratios can correspond to thermal predictions for the freezeout "temperature", but I'm not convinced that this is sufficient to demonstrate thermodynamic equilibrium. I wouldn't consider two jets of water that strike each other and turbulently mix to be in thermodynamic equilibrium, and I haven't seen anything which convinces me that two colliding piles of quarks would be any less turbulent given the energies and time scales involved.
I would counter that by pointing out that a gold-gold ion collision on RHIC involves at least ~1200 particles
There could be a million particles, and it still wouldn't be in thermodynamic equilibrium. Without this, describing a "temperature" has little meaning. When they make references to a temperature in there, they are simply saying that gold particles at that temperature would collide with a similar energy. But since there is nothing even close to thermodynamic equilibrium, a formal temperature cannot really be defined.
You need at least $400 in hardware (If you're a true hardware bargin shopper) unless you have old computers lying around like most of the slashdot crowd probably has.
Yeah, but on that one set of $400 hardware, you can have a TV, DVR system, dvd player, cd player, mp3 player, web browser, file server, print server, web server, etc. (And all without the machine even breaking a sweat.) The total capability is easily cheaper than buying separate components for just a few of these.
If you're swapping while running normal applications, something is wrong with your system. If an increase in swap speed is immediately noticeable as better system performance, you need more memory.
And of course, memory is free, so we'll just all run out and solve that problem right away.:)
Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses. Even that's when they didn't get special dumbed-down "premed" versions of those classes. Somehow, this is not surprising. Not saying all doctors are dumb, just most of them.
Well the researchers performing this study may be aware of something you're not, which is that radiation affects biological systems without ionizing them. Drop your simplified billiard-ball model of physics for a moment, and first read how microwave radiation affects polar molecules, followed by a quick search for the word "polar" in this page. Note that the direct application of rotational forces to specific molecules can not always be modeled as a simple thermal model when it is being applied, because it is not being applied equally to all molecules, nor is it being applied equally in all degrees of freedom.
Then, with that background present for understanding a basic mechanism, read this.
the main place I have ever needed an extended battery is on a plane flight -- and this is a device that I don't expect will get past the TSA screeners.
He broke the law. Period. End of story. There was not a security threat in getting a warrant. It was a SECRET FUCKING COURT that he had to go to to get the warrant, but he didn't. Why?
The simplest explanation is that if he had, he might not have gotten the warrants. Considering that this secret court has authorized nearly every warrant ever brought before it, this concerns me that the Bush administration felt that their spying would not have justified a warrant. This should be a red flag to everyone who believes the targets were simply Americans talking to terorists.
We may end up filing the "Americans talking to terrorists" line with the pile of WMD lies, if accurate details are ever released about this domestic spying program.
The body is mostly homogenous and mostly consists of water. And I'm not sure what the hell your point is.
The body is homogeneous the same way a cow is spherical. That sort of approximation may work if you're trying to, say, estimate the density of the body, but it does not work if you are trying to assess the functioning of it within different environments.
Go to your kitchen, put some oil (representing lipids) in a glass bowl, and microwave it for 30 seconds. Note the temperature. Then contemplate what cell membranes are made of. And finally, contemplate the complex interaction of cell membranes with other compounds while they are trying to function as semipermeable membranes at the same time as they are being rotated and twisted in resonance with microwave radiation.
What's the end result? We don't fully know, but it clearly can't be modeled as a bucket of water, and it is not sufficient to simply consider heat.
So we read in the news lots of whining from all these companies complaining they can't find qualified engineers. Well of course they can't! For each of their positions, there's probably a handful of qualified people in the whole world (because their requirements are so narrow), and they're already employed at the competition and aren't looking on job sites for a new job.
If they were to search for relevant skills rather than ultra-precise experience, they might find what they were looking for. People worth those paycheck levels can adapt.
They are not the same wavelength as broadcast FM radio, but they are roughly the same wavelength as cellphones and cellphone towers (which are all over the place and have a hell of a lot more power than any wi-fi transmitter).
"Roughly" the same wavelength is not the same as being the same wavelength. A quad band GSM phone, for example, runs at 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, or 1900 MHz. Neither of these four will have the same absorption or interaction in the same parts of the body as 2450 MHz (wi-fi).
And as for power, it is incorrect to consider the broadcast power. A more reasonable value to calculate is the average power at the location of the person. Typically people sit right next to wireless cards and routers, while usually very few people have lunch right beside a cell phone tower. And even then, it's more biologically relevant to consider the power absorbed at that wavelength in a localized portion of the body, rather than trying to average over the entire body (which, if you'll note, is not a homogeneous substance).
And a quick examination would have revealed that 2.4 Ghz is in the UHF range.
It's ok if you're wrong, but make sure you're right before you start telling people their posts are "ridiculous".
Thank you for the link, but the post I was replying to was discussing "radio stations", which are not the same as the "radio frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum". The absorption spectra of the AM and FM bands in different portions of an organism are entirely different from the absorption spectrum of the 2.4 GHz band.
Of course, as the GP also did point out, the difference in transmission strength between a WiFi antenna and a microwave oven makes it a non-issue anyway, even ignoring the fact that just because it warms your body, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's cancerous.
You're also ignoring the fact that something doesn't have to warm your body to be cancerous. In fact, there's absolutely no reason to think that warming would be the primary mechanism for inducing cancer. The body is composed of countless polar molecules which can be affected non-thermally by radiation, and in particular, there is much that is unknown about the effects of radiation in those wavelengths on the selective passivity of membranes.
How's wifi different than any other radio signal? Sure, it's a different frequency and bandwidth, but radio waves are passing through us all the time. Are they gonna ban radio stations now cause it might be cancerous?
Seems a little far-fetched.
Your logic is identical to saying, "How can bullets hurt us? There are rocks all over the place, and they don't seem to be killing us."
There are three major properties which can determine the effect it will have on biological systems, and these are wavelength, power, and to a lesser extent, pulse patterns. Comparing wi-fi to radio waves is completely ridiculous, as they are different wavelengths with different cross-sections, and they are also at entirely different power levels.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem usually comes when someone wants to see the experiment replicated. For some reason the effect always seems to go away when other people are looking.
Well, in the real world, experiments are difficult and there is absolutely no guarantee that an experiment which works sometimes can be replicated with certainty on demand. An experiment may work once, then the researcher spends a month trying to get things working again, then it works, then the researcher spends another month trying to get things working again. This is particularly true in the case of novel experimental results for which we do not have a solid theoretical understanding.
Without a good theoretical understanding, it is extremely difficult to know which experimental parameter causes a setup to work or not work, which makes it difficult for other people to duplicate work, and difficult to guarantee it will work for a single demonstration. But neither of these things by themselves invalidate experimental results.
I think the tendency of many to cry "kook" everytime we see experimental results which contradict theory and are difficult to replicate some of the times we try is quite non-scientific.
It seems that the warez community could perform a DoS on a major publisher of proprietary software merely by linking to its website.
:)
They could start by linking to google.com.
When the NSA goes datamining, they divide the intercepted traffic into two piles: clear and encrypted. Both piles get processed. Except yours has a red flag next to it.
:)
There's a solution to that. Start sending a lot of encrypted spam.
You're an idiot. You don't have to choose a party. There's nothing about parties in the constitution.
That's only partly true. The word "party" may not be in the constitution, but if the framers had been able to study modern game theory, then they would know that the electoral process described in the constitution enforces the establishment and persistence of a two-party system. If you REALLY want to get rid of the two-party system and install a real democratic spectrum of choice, then we need to change our election system and switch to something like Approval Voting.
This can start at a local and state level, and this would create substantial improvements, but ultimately it should be done with a constitutional amendment.
But you assume that the government is guilty of "corruption and crime," that the government offices have broken the law
Well... It is, and they have.
and that the leaker is well-motivated. What if the reverse is true? What if the leaker leaks names of undercover CIA operatives, who are subsequently killed? Or more mundane, leaks the existence of an overseas spy network that has to be withdrawn, and as a result the next 911 is not prevented?
This is precisely why the law should focus around protection for the revealing of law breaking. By the definition of a whistleblower, one is only a whistleblower when one is reporting wrongdoing. It is far more likely that such wrongdoing would induce the next 9/11 than that it would prevent it.
We already have laws that make it illegal to leak the names of undercover CIA operatives, we just haven't done much yet in the way of enforcing them or bringing responsible parties to justice. An appropriate whistleblower law would not diminish the ability to enforce these laws.
echo "Why would anyone leave their root password hardcoded in a bash script?"
rm $0
> Because leaker, like the bad guy who brought Nixon down, are always evil.
The question is whether they are ever evil.
How about a law to explicitly protect whistleblowers within the government, even in cases of national security. When government officials break the law, people who release this information should be protected and cherished. Corruption and crime are not patriotism.
There might be an inherent paradox here: encrypted data accessible anywhere. I'm not sure this is even possible without making connections that bypass Google (say, from an internet-cafe computer to your home machine for private key transfer, or even to a third-party server that stores your private key for you.)
This is why you wouldn't use a large private key, but simply use a key derived as a hash from the user's password and an algorithm such as AES.
Google COULD, if they want to, have a calendaring system in which the data is encrypted the entire time it is in transit, and the entire time it is stored on their systems, and only decrypted locally by a java applet within the browser of the user accessing the data. They could also still support this with advertising, and people would be more inclined to use it with the knowledge that their data would be safe.
Do you think businesses are going to want their employees scheduling confidential meetings on a calendaring system which Google has full access to? But if it were fully encrypted and only accessed by password locally, this would suddenly be a potent and secure tool which makes the PDA a lot less useful in a networked world.
I'll grant that particle ratios can correspond to thermal predictions for the freezeout "temperature", but I'm not convinced that this is sufficient to demonstrate thermodynamic equilibrium. I wouldn't consider two jets of water that strike each other and turbulently mix to be in thermodynamic equilibrium, and I haven't seen anything which convinces me that two colliding piles of quarks would be any less turbulent given the energies and time scales involved.
I would counter that by pointing out that a gold-gold ion collision on RHIC involves at least ~1200 particles
There could be a million particles, and it still wouldn't be in thermodynamic equilibrium. Without this, describing a "temperature" has little meaning. When they make references to a temperature in there, they are simply saying that gold particles at that temperature would collide with a similar energy. But since there is nothing even close to thermodynamic equilibrium, a formal temperature cannot really be defined.
You need at least $400 in hardware (If you're a true hardware bargin shopper) unless you have old computers lying around like most of the slashdot crowd probably has.
Yeah, but on that one set of $400 hardware, you can have a TV, DVR system, dvd player, cd player, mp3 player, web browser, file server, print server, web server, etc. (And all without the machine even breaking a sweat.) The total capability is easily cheaper than buying separate components for just a few of these.
From the article:
Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up.
Propose a better system you say? Oh, I don't know, how about a little thing called "innocent until proven guilty"?
Yeah, I know, what a radical and outlandish suggestion...
They regularly have both democratic and republican guests on several of the shows. ... where you actually get two sides of an argument presented ...
That's what "liberal" means these days...
If you're swapping while running normal applications, something is wrong with your system. If an increase in swap speed is immediately noticeable as better system performance, you need more memory.
:)
And of course, memory is free, so we'll just all run out and solve that problem right away.
Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses. Even that's when they didn't get special dumbed-down "premed" versions of those classes. Somehow, this is not surprising. Not saying all doctors are dumb, just most of them.
Well the researchers performing this study may be aware of something you're not, which is that radiation affects biological systems without ionizing them. Drop your simplified billiard-ball model of physics for a moment, and first read how microwave radiation affects polar molecules, followed by a quick search for the word "polar" in this page. Note that the direct application of rotational forces to specific molecules can not always be modeled as a simple thermal model when it is being applied, because it is not being applied equally to all molecules, nor is it being applied equally in all degrees of freedom.
Then, with that background present for understanding a basic mechanism, read this.
the main place I have ever needed an extended battery is on a plane flight -- and this is a device that I don't expect will get past the TSA screeners.
Especially not if you're dressed like this guy.
He broke the law. Period. End of story. There was not a security threat in getting a warrant. It was a SECRET FUCKING COURT that he had to go to to get the warrant, but he didn't. Why?
The simplest explanation is that if he had, he might not have gotten the warrants. Considering that this secret court has authorized nearly every warrant ever brought before it, this concerns me that the Bush administration felt that their spying would not have justified a warrant. This should be a red flag to everyone who believes the targets were simply Americans talking to terorists.
We may end up filing the "Americans talking to terrorists" line with the pile of WMD lies, if accurate details are ever released about this domestic spying program.
The body is mostly homogenous and mostly consists of water. And I'm not sure what the hell your point is.
The body is homogeneous the same way a cow is spherical. That sort of approximation may work if you're trying to, say, estimate the density of the body, but it does not work if you are trying to assess the functioning of it within different environments.
Go to your kitchen, put some oil (representing lipids) in a glass bowl, and microwave it for 30 seconds. Note the temperature. Then contemplate what cell membranes are made of. And finally, contemplate the complex interaction of cell membranes with other compounds while they are trying to function as semipermeable membranes at the same time as they are being rotated and twisted in resonance with microwave radiation.
What's the end result? We don't fully know, but it clearly can't be modeled as a bucket of water, and it is not sufficient to simply consider heat.
So we read in the news lots of whining from all these companies complaining they can't find qualified engineers. Well of course they can't! For each of their positions, there's probably a handful of qualified people in the whole world (because their requirements are so narrow), and they're already employed at the competition and aren't looking on job sites for a new job.
If they were to search for relevant skills rather than ultra-precise experience, they might find what they were looking for. People worth those paycheck levels can adapt.
They are not the same wavelength as broadcast FM radio, but they are roughly the same wavelength as cellphones and cellphone towers (which are all over the place and have a hell of a lot more power than any wi-fi transmitter).
"Roughly" the same wavelength is not the same as being the same wavelength. A quad band GSM phone, for example, runs at 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, or 1900 MHz. Neither of these four will have the same absorption or interaction in the same parts of the body as 2450 MHz (wi-fi).
And as for power, it is incorrect to consider the broadcast power. A more reasonable value to calculate is the average power at the location of the person. Typically people sit right next to wireless cards and routers, while usually very few people have lunch right beside a cell phone tower. And even then, it's more biologically relevant to consider the power absorbed at that wavelength in a localized portion of the body, rather than trying to average over the entire body (which, if you'll note, is not a homogeneous substance).
When you're wrong? Why assume such a pompous attitude when a simple wikipedia check would have led you to this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_waves
And a quick examination would have revealed that 2.4 Ghz is in the UHF range.
It's ok if you're wrong, but make sure you're right before you start telling people their posts are "ridiculous".
Thank you for the link, but the post I was replying to was discussing "radio stations", which are not the same as the "radio frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum". The absorption spectra of the AM and FM bands in different portions of an organism are entirely different from the absorption spectrum of the 2.4 GHz band.
Please put a picture of this hero online.
;)
And its IP.
Of course, as the GP also did point out, the difference in transmission strength between a WiFi antenna and a microwave oven makes it a non-issue anyway, even ignoring the fact that just because it warms your body, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's cancerous.
You're also ignoring the fact that something doesn't have to warm your body to be cancerous. In fact, there's absolutely no reason to think that warming would be the primary mechanism for inducing cancer. The body is composed of countless polar molecules which can be affected non-thermally by radiation, and in particular, there is much that is unknown about the effects of radiation in those wavelengths on the selective passivity of membranes.
How's wifi different than any other radio signal? Sure, it's a different frequency and bandwidth, but radio waves are passing through us all the time. Are they gonna ban radio stations now cause it might be cancerous?
Seems a little far-fetched.
Your logic is identical to saying, "How can bullets hurt us? There are rocks all over the place, and they don't seem to be killing us."
There are three major properties which can determine the effect it will have on biological systems, and these are wavelength, power, and to a lesser extent, pulse patterns. Comparing wi-fi to radio waves is completely ridiculous, as they are different wavelengths with different cross-sections, and they are also at entirely different power levels.