I'm not arguing one way or the other here. Really about the only thing that we can rule out for near certain, based on the information available, is that it likely was not a surface to air missile.
And as far as the pressurization, perhaps I shouldn't have been generic, because there are ways to measure altitude other than via pressure - such as GPS. But again, you're also assuming the bomb was inside the pressurized area. If a bomb was placed by, let's say, an ISIS guy on the maintenance crew, then it very well could have been placed somewhere inside the fuselage that wasn't pressurized.
But this is all highly speculative, and we should certainly not rush to any final conclusions, because it should be very clear from an examination of the wreckage whether it was indeed caused by a bomb or some other sabotage, or was an accident caused by poor maintenance/stress/etc.
I certainly wouldn't rule it out, but the evidence released seems pretty fitting to the bomb scenario as well. It's not just the "satellite recorded a heat signature bit" because that could have been the plane itself exploding, though.
It's the fact that (according to what we've heard in the news) the plane broke up almost exactly when it reached a certain altitude. Why is this important? Because the single most effective way to trigger a bomb in an airliner is to tie it to an altimeter, so that the bomb will only go off once it's taken above the set height.
I remember once bringing a can of soda that was in my backpack, onto a plane to Atlanta around 2009ish, forgetting it was there, and only having the TSA notice when I went to fly home a few days later.
I also remember them missing a multitool several times, before noticing it, when I - a soldier in uniform - was flying back to Iraq, after having forgotten it was in my bag from when I flew home for leave.
Certainly we do want there to be some security screening, but the level the TSA goes to is ridiculous, and I'd speculate that the sheer volume of things they're supposed to look for makes it all that more likely that they miss the basic stuff like knives and guns.
This, and also the fact that they reinforced and lock the cockpit doors from now on.
The TSA has not stopped ANY attempts at bombing or hijacking airliners since 9/11. Various other methods have, but the TSA has been singularly useless.
That's what you do as a scientist when faced with evidence that does not fit with the rules as you know them. You try and postulate reasons for why you might be getting those results. Some of those might be as simple as "the conditions for the original experiment didn't eliminate all external interference."
You then go back and conduct more experiments to try and prove or disprove some or all of those postulates. Rinse, repeat, refine.
It's like what happens when you discover that in certain conditions, the movement of certain objects violates the known rules of Newtonian physics. Fast forward a bit, and we wind up with Relativity (General and Special).
It's certainly not a simple thing, and yes, if I had a perfect solution to campaign finance laws, I'd probably be taking them somewhere other than Slashdot.:)
That said, the core problem is what you outline in that first paragraph - the fact that you equate shouting on a soapbox in the town square, which anyone can conceivably do (especially since the modern town square is electronic), with spending money. It is this "Money = Speech" notion that is proving so toxic. Money is not speech, money is an amplifier for speech. It lets you shout a lot louder than the other guy, even to the point of drowning him out. Let's say I'm against MegaCorp fracking in my town. I get out there at the county fair and set up on the corner to tell people all about what a bad idea I think it is. Meanwhile, MegaCorp has hired 100 people with megaphones to drown me out, while handing out free food, beer, and t-shirts at the MegaCorp sponsored concert, and did I mention they're sponsoring the fair too and have their logo and pro-fracking slogans plastered everywhere?
Now, that's just an extreme example - but it's very easy to see the difference that money can make. It's one thing if you have people freely coming together to talk about stuff. It's another when you start injecting large amounts of money into that equation.
In layman's terms, they're still required to do the "wink wink, nudge nudge" part, and per Citizens United, that means that because there is no direct transfer of funds, or quid pro quo, then that makes everything alright.
The problem is that it's very easy to disguise certain levels of collusion that isn't supposed to happen, and given the ridiculous/ludicrous levels of money being tossed around, it strains credulity for everyone except the Supreme Court apparently to say there isn't something dirty going on.
Let me put it another way. If Billionaire Bob decides to donate $50 million to the "Fund Attack Ads Against Candidate Alice's Opponents" PAC, do we really think that means Alice won't notice, or that it's not really a donation to Alice because FAAACAO PAC is a theoretically independent organization that just happens to be run by Alice's longtime best friend, who she totally never talks to about anything election related? Unless Eve happens to overhear them talking and tells the press about them colluding, but by then the election is probably long over, and the FEC has been pretty toothless of late... but that's another complaint.
It helps to understand that the money in government IT isn't made by working for the government, or working as a contractor for the government. It's made being the guy who sells that contract to the government, or otherwise works as management/executive level in the contracting company (and does absolutely zero IT/etc work).
For the most part, the IT Fed and the IT Contractor are coming from the same pool of people. Many of them have bounced over at one point or another, and the overall salaries/benefits are roughly commensurate (i.e., you might get less pay as a Fed, but more vacation, while your contractor counterpart has less vacation, but higher base pay, etc). Some of them are pretty good, but others... less so. The best and brightest also tend to get lured away by the private sector.
This was why I stopped using Apple software on Windows in general. I got tired of having it download a bunch of superfluous, unwanted things (like Bonjour), never mind just how slow and awful iTunes for Windows was.
But it's definitely not worth leaving buggy, outdated software on your machine. If you care about it being secure, then either update it, with all the good and bad, or get rid of it.
The idea that we're facing a future of massive overpopulation, and that we have to take drastic measures to avert it, is pure bunk. Overpopulation is only a problem in grossly underdeveloped countries. In every moderately advanced country, the opposite problem is true - birth rates have fallen below replacement levels. Even countries that used to be considered underdeveloped show signs of this. What's causing it? Basically, it's a combination of not needing tons of kids to help with subsistence farming, having basic healthcare so you don't wind up with half your children dying before reaching adulthood, as well as having the ability to engage in family planning/using contraception/etc.
Don't believe me? Look at the birth rates in places like the US, Europe, East Asia, even South America. Consider places like Mexico or Brazil. In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 children per woman, and Brazil was at 5.02, compared to 2.48 in the U.S. In 2012, that has fallen to 2.22 for Mexico and 1.81 for Brazil, while the USA is 1.88. For comparison, the "replacement level" at which the number of births balances out the deaths from age/etc is around 2.1. China is at 1.66 as of 2012, which while not as bad as Japan (1.41) or South Korea (1.3), is still pretty bad. Even India has started slowing, down to 2.5 as of 2012.
Overpopulation is not going to be a problem, unless you're falling prey to an extrapolation fallacy (see https://xkcd.com/605/ ). Even if it is a problem in the shorter term, the answer is easy - improve living standards, access to health care, and provide access to voluntary family planning/contraception. You don't need to force it on people, they'll use it - and far more than most governments want them to. Lots of governments are starting to realize that their problem is how to convince their citizens to have kids, not stop having them.
I also wonder if they didn't perhaps learn something, however painfully, from it all, as when Microsoft started talking about all the ridiculous DRM they were going to put on XBox One games, Sony responded by saying "Yeah, we're not doing that, share your games with friends all you like as far as we're concerned", and Microsoft had to quickly backtrack.
(Alternate lesson: Only Microsoft could wind up turning Sony into the 'good guys' in a situation.)
According to the one article, he was already making $12 an hour, which is well above minimum wage in Virginia. I'm sure we could debate whether his benefits were adequate or not, but probably the biggest challenge he faced seems to have been making the cut to be a permanent rather than seasonal/temp worker.
Even that aside though, I don't think keeping the minimum wage down is going to do anything but delay the inevitable. As robots get cheaper, what are we supposed to do, keep lowering it even further to keep pace?
The bottom line is, no matter where the minimum wage lies, the day will come where we just don't have any work available for people like this guy - not because he's lazy, or doesn't want to work, but simply because he has no skills at tasks that a machine can't do better and cheaper. What do we do then? He still has to eat, as do his kids.How is he supposed to make a living, in a world where robots gather the raw materials, process them in factories, drive the delivery trucks, etc?
At some point we'll probably have to start talking about switching to a Guaranteed Basic Income, or something similar, because there just won't be enough demand for unskilled/low skilled human labor anymore.
The point isn't to translate the windspeed though - it's how much damage that windspeed does. Once you're at 155mph+, it's going to mess up any man-made structure to the point that the difference isn't really relevant.
To cite one of the designers of the scale that these categories come from (the Saffir-Simpson scale), there is no point in having anything higher than Category 5, because the idea is to measure how much damage the storm can do to man-made structures. He stated: "...when you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph (249 km/h) you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered."
It's interesting to note that while the 2015 hurricane season has been relatively quiet in the North Atlantic, when we expand to the entire world in our scope, it's been one of, if not the most, active years on record, with something like 22 storms that were Category 4 or higher, which is itself a record.
We were also pretty lucky that Joaquin steered out to sea rather than slamming into the east coast (and even then managed to dump catastrophic rainfall on South Carolina. It was within a day or two of really hammering some heavily populated areas that aren't really built to withstand regular hurricanes.
Funny, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would disagree with you:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Any sort of patent or term that basically boils down to "X with a computer/ X on the Internet" should not be valid. This is a concept that relates directly to a physical action (pinning something to a board). It's not in any way original or novel.
Now, certainly the code of HOW you go about implementing that is worthy of protection to some degree, but the entire concept? That's idiotic.
Sure there is - profit! The corporations involved in this have every reason to jack those rates as high as they can go, because the prisoners are quite literally a 'captive audience'. Privately run prisons are the worst about this, but even publicly operated prisons often contract out to private companies for things like telecommunication services.
What, you mean there are things like morals, ethics, and limits on what should be reasonable? What are you, some kind of Communist?
I'm not familiar with where that particular one in Virginia is specifically, but it looks like Prince William County. I used to live/work near several out in Loudoun County, though. To give some perspective for those not familiar with the area, that's roughly two counties out from the District of Columbia proper. The western side of Loudoun is still farms and horse country, and the southern and western parts of Prince William are likewise. So we're likely not talking about heavily urbanized areas. At most, this is suburbs/exurbs.
And I think that may be some of the problem. It's not just urbanites who object to stuff being built next to them. You can get the exact same thing from rural residents who don't like that their formerly rural area is having giant concrete buildings with lots of infrastructure built there. 50 years ago these counties were completely rural, but the DC suburbs have been expanding relentlessly westward, first to the edge of Fairfax County, and then on into Loudoun and Prince William. This has led to more than a few clashes between those who see this as a good thing, and those who don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing one way or the other here. Really about the only thing that we can rule out for near certain, based on the information available, is that it likely was not a surface to air missile.
And as far as the pressurization, perhaps I shouldn't have been generic, because there are ways to measure altitude other than via pressure - such as GPS. But again, you're also assuming the bomb was inside the pressurized area. If a bomb was placed by, let's say, an ISIS guy on the maintenance crew, then it very well could have been placed somewhere inside the fuselage that wasn't pressurized.
But this is all highly speculative, and we should certainly not rush to any final conclusions, because it should be very clear from an examination of the wreckage whether it was indeed caused by a bomb or some other sabotage, or was an accident caused by poor maintenance/stress/etc.
"Wheel of Invasions, turn, turn, turn. Tell us the country that we must burn."
I certainly wouldn't rule it out, but the evidence released seems pretty fitting to the bomb scenario as well. It's not just the "satellite recorded a heat signature bit" because that could have been the plane itself exploding, though.
It's the fact that (according to what we've heard in the news) the plane broke up almost exactly when it reached a certain altitude. Why is this important? Because the single most effective way to trigger a bomb in an airliner is to tie it to an altimeter, so that the bomb will only go off once it's taken above the set height.
I remember once bringing a can of soda that was in my backpack, onto a plane to Atlanta around 2009ish, forgetting it was there, and only having the TSA notice when I went to fly home a few days later.
I also remember them missing a multitool several times, before noticing it, when I - a soldier in uniform - was flying back to Iraq, after having forgotten it was in my bag from when I flew home for leave.
Certainly we do want there to be some security screening, but the level the TSA goes to is ridiculous, and I'd speculate that the sheer volume of things they're supposed to look for makes it all that more likely that they miss the basic stuff like knives and guns.
We've already had one example in Flight 93.
And if Flight 93 had the reinforced locked cockpit doors that are now standard, it likely wouldn't have crashed either.
This, and also the fact that they reinforced and lock the cockpit doors from now on.
The TSA has not stopped ANY attempts at bombing or hijacking airliners since 9/11. Various other methods have, but the TSA has been singularly useless.
I dunno, an indicator for which tab is playing that stupid audio is something I can definitely use.
That's what you do as a scientist when faced with evidence that does not fit with the rules as you know them. You try and postulate reasons for why you might be getting those results. Some of those might be as simple as "the conditions for the original experiment didn't eliminate all external interference."
You then go back and conduct more experiments to try and prove or disprove some or all of those postulates. Rinse, repeat, refine.
It's like what happens when you discover that in certain conditions, the movement of certain objects violates the known rules of Newtonian physics. Fast forward a bit, and we wind up with Relativity (General and Special).
It's certainly not a simple thing, and yes, if I had a perfect solution to campaign finance laws, I'd probably be taking them somewhere other than Slashdot. :)
That said, the core problem is what you outline in that first paragraph - the fact that you equate shouting on a soapbox in the town square, which anyone can conceivably do (especially since the modern town square is electronic), with spending money. It is this "Money = Speech" notion that is proving so toxic. Money is not speech, money is an amplifier for speech. It lets you shout a lot louder than the other guy, even to the point of drowning him out. Let's say I'm against MegaCorp fracking in my town. I get out there at the county fair and set up on the corner to tell people all about what a bad idea I think it is. Meanwhile, MegaCorp has hired 100 people with megaphones to drown me out, while handing out free food, beer, and t-shirts at the MegaCorp sponsored concert, and did I mention they're sponsoring the fair too and have their logo and pro-fracking slogans plastered everywhere?
Now, that's just an extreme example - but it's very easy to see the difference that money can make. It's one thing if you have people freely coming together to talk about stuff. It's another when you start injecting large amounts of money into that equation.
In layman's terms, they're still required to do the "wink wink, nudge nudge" part, and per Citizens United, that means that because there is no direct transfer of funds, or quid pro quo, then that makes everything alright.
The problem is that it's very easy to disguise certain levels of collusion that isn't supposed to happen, and given the ridiculous/ludicrous levels of money being tossed around, it strains credulity for everyone except the Supreme Court apparently to say there isn't something dirty going on.
Let me put it another way. If Billionaire Bob decides to donate $50 million to the "Fund Attack Ads Against Candidate Alice's Opponents" PAC, do we really think that means Alice won't notice, or that it's not really a donation to Alice because FAAACAO PAC is a theoretically independent organization that just happens to be run by Alice's longtime best friend, who she totally never talks to about anything election related? Unless Eve happens to overhear them talking and tells the press about them colluding, but by then the election is probably long over, and the FEC has been pretty toothless of late... but that's another complaint.
It helps to understand that the money in government IT isn't made by working for the government, or working as a contractor for the government. It's made being the guy who sells that contract to the government, or otherwise works as management/executive level in the contracting company (and does absolutely zero IT/etc work).
For the most part, the IT Fed and the IT Contractor are coming from the same pool of people. Many of them have bounced over at one point or another, and the overall salaries/benefits are roughly commensurate (i.e., you might get less pay as a Fed, but more vacation, while your contractor counterpart has less vacation, but higher base pay, etc). Some of them are pretty good, but others... less so. The best and brightest also tend to get lured away by the private sector.
Yep - as always, cui bono - follow the money.
This was why I stopped using Apple software on Windows in general. I got tired of having it download a bunch of superfluous, unwanted things (like Bonjour), never mind just how slow and awful iTunes for Windows was.
But it's definitely not worth leaving buggy, outdated software on your machine. If you care about it being secure, then either update it, with all the good and bad, or get rid of it.
The idea that we're facing a future of massive overpopulation, and that we have to take drastic measures to avert it, is pure bunk. Overpopulation is only a problem in grossly underdeveloped countries. In every moderately advanced country, the opposite problem is true - birth rates have fallen below replacement levels. Even countries that used to be considered underdeveloped show signs of this. What's causing it? Basically, it's a combination of not needing tons of kids to help with subsistence farming, having basic healthcare so you don't wind up with half your children dying before reaching adulthood, as well as having the ability to engage in family planning/using contraception/etc.
Don't believe me? Look at the birth rates in places like the US, Europe, East Asia, even South America. Consider places like Mexico or Brazil. In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 children per woman, and Brazil was at 5.02, compared to 2.48 in the U.S. In 2012, that has fallen to 2.22 for Mexico and 1.81 for Brazil, while the USA is 1.88. For comparison, the "replacement level" at which the number of births balances out the deaths from age/etc is around 2.1. China is at 1.66 as of 2012, which while not as bad as Japan (1.41) or South Korea (1.3), is still pretty bad. Even India has started slowing, down to 2.5 as of 2012.
Overpopulation is not going to be a problem, unless you're falling prey to an extrapolation fallacy (see https://xkcd.com/605/ ). Even if it is a problem in the shorter term, the answer is easy - improve living standards, access to health care, and provide access to voluntary family planning/contraception. You don't need to force it on people, they'll use it - and far more than most governments want them to. Lots of governments are starting to realize that their problem is how to convince their citizens to have kids, not stop having them.
They've fought at least 4 wars with Pakistan since 1947, when the two countries split, and still don't agree on the border.
That's arguably more than China has, although both are a lot less than the US has in the same time period.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I also wonder if they didn't perhaps learn something, however painfully, from it all, as when Microsoft started talking about all the ridiculous DRM they were going to put on XBox One games, Sony responded by saying "Yeah, we're not doing that, share your games with friends all you like as far as we're concerned", and Microsoft had to quickly backtrack.
(Alternate lesson: Only Microsoft could wind up turning Sony into the 'good guys' in a situation.)
Sonny Bono was a Republican.
Which is not to say this is a partisan issue, merely to point out that it's quite the opposite.
According to the one article, he was already making $12 an hour, which is well above minimum wage in Virginia. I'm sure we could debate whether his benefits were adequate or not, but probably the biggest challenge he faced seems to have been making the cut to be a permanent rather than seasonal/temp worker.
Even that aside though, I don't think keeping the minimum wage down is going to do anything but delay the inevitable. As robots get cheaper, what are we supposed to do, keep lowering it even further to keep pace?
The bottom line is, no matter where the minimum wage lies, the day will come where we just don't have any work available for people like this guy - not because he's lazy, or doesn't want to work, but simply because he has no skills at tasks that a machine can't do better and cheaper. What do we do then? He still has to eat, as do his kids.How is he supposed to make a living, in a world where robots gather the raw materials, process them in factories, drive the delivery trucks, etc?
At some point we'll probably have to start talking about switching to a Guaranteed Basic Income, or something similar, because there just won't be enough demand for unskilled/low skilled human labor anymore.
it's like telling people to prepare for a direct nuclear blast
So... hide in a refrigerator?
I mean, Lucas and Spielberg would never have steered me wrong on that, right?
The point isn't to translate the windspeed though - it's how much damage that windspeed does. Once you're at 155mph+, it's going to mess up any man-made structure to the point that the difference isn't really relevant. To cite one of the designers of the scale that these categories come from (the Saffir-Simpson scale), there is no point in having anything higher than Category 5, because the idea is to measure how much damage the storm can do to man-made structures. He stated: "...when you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph (249 km/h) you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered."
Source: http://novalynx.com/store/pc/S...
It's interesting to note that while the 2015 hurricane season has been relatively quiet in the North Atlantic, when we expand to the entire world in our scope, it's been one of, if not the most, active years on record, with something like 22 storms that were Category 4 or higher, which is itself a record.
We were also pretty lucky that Joaquin steered out to sea rather than slamming into the east coast (and even then managed to dump catastrophic rainfall on South Carolina. It was within a day or two of really hammering some heavily populated areas that aren't really built to withstand regular hurricanes.
Funny, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would disagree with you:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Any sort of patent or term that basically boils down to "X with a computer/ X on the Internet" should not be valid. This is a concept that relates directly to a physical action (pinning something to a board). It's not in any way original or novel.
Now, certainly the code of HOW you go about implementing that is worthy of protection to some degree, but the entire concept? That's idiotic.
Sure there is - profit! The corporations involved in this have every reason to jack those rates as high as they can go, because the prisoners are quite literally a 'captive audience'. Privately run prisons are the worst about this, but even publicly operated prisons often contract out to private companies for things like telecommunication services.
What, you mean there are things like morals, ethics, and limits on what should be reasonable? What are you, some kind of Communist?
I'm not familiar with where that particular one in Virginia is specifically, but it looks like Prince William County. I used to live/work near several out in Loudoun County, though. To give some perspective for those not familiar with the area, that's roughly two counties out from the District of Columbia proper. The western side of Loudoun is still farms and horse country, and the southern and western parts of Prince William are likewise. So we're likely not talking about heavily urbanized areas. At most, this is suburbs/exurbs.
And I think that may be some of the problem. It's not just urbanites who object to stuff being built next to them. You can get the exact same thing from rural residents who don't like that their formerly rural area is having giant concrete buildings with lots of infrastructure built there. 50 years ago these counties were completely rural, but the DC suburbs have been expanding relentlessly westward, first to the edge of Fairfax County, and then on into Loudoun and Prince William. This has led to more than a few clashes between those who see this as a good thing, and those who don't.