While true, please remember that the Republican party has been solidly in control of Congress for quite awhile now. BOTH parties have conspired to foist this off on us.
While true, you ignore the fact that they started skyrocketing long before Obamacare was passed.
OTOH, if you mean that the insurance companies should be cut out of the healthcare system, I agree completely. I'm in favor of free coverage for everyone without all the god-damn middlemen that have tripled the price. (And I mean that as in "God damned the sheep and they died.". Those insurance parasites should just drop dead...or at least be rapidly put on unemployment.)
"Dark matter" is certainly nothing magical, though I do consider it weird.
The main problem with it is that it's defined only in terms of indirect effects. This is typical of subatomic resonances, i.e. extremely transient subatomic particles. It's not what one expects of something stable. Even the neutrino has been detected. (And I have my doubts about the graviton...either it's unstable, or we don't understand gravity, because we *should* have already detected it.)
So. I think the term "dark matter" is wrong because it oversimplifies things. I expect there is an entire particle zoo of dark matter particles, and that they don't interact electro-magnetically, but they do interact with gravitons in a way that disrupts them. This means that there need to be several non-electromagnetic forces that they interact with...so clearly this explanation violates Occam's razor, but I believe it anyway, partially because it explains why we haven't yet detected gravitons.
So I agree with the earlier poster that "dark matter" is handwavium. Unfortunately, I can't see how we could detect any "dark matter" particles directly...and that's what would be needed to make my hypothesis anything more than hot air.
The problem with calling "dark matter" handwavium is that as no alternative is proposed, people extrapolate unreasonable meanings. (If "dark matter" is ill-defined, there's no word for how ill-defined "handwavium" is.)
Sorry, but conspiracies are not necessarily illegal. Most aren't. Even the ones that are legal tend to be quite secretive, because the motivation for conspiracy is generally to benefit the members by use of hidden information. But not all conspiracies are even secretive, as some benefit merely be conjoined actions.
Con-spiracy: To breathe together. As in people gathered around a table.
I do agree with you that working on a job that requires a security clearance is no more than any other legally enforceable NDA, where the company demanding the NDA won't share information. In fact it's exactly the same thing.
So yes, you are right, I am suspicious of candidates from any NDA job. But most companies don't operate large spy agencies, so you can know that the NDA isn't covering for them. I don't suspect companies of hiring people secretly to do things that the companies don't do. But if there's a hidden area, they one must consider that they might have done anything that the companies do within that hidden area. So if a company runs a secret police force, then I may suspect that the NDA covered work in or for that secret police force with reason, though the term here is "suspect", and it doesn't speak to how one judges probabilities. Generally the probability is rather low. Sometimes, however, a rather low probability is sufficient to justify a passive decision (i.e., a decision not to take a particular action).
Or at least that's what the public officials tell us. I haven't heard very many people supporting that "most people want" from either the left OR the right. (Of course I don't listen much to the right, so I could have missed it, but it's certainly not the libertarian wing. And tech discussion groups don't exactly exclude right wingers...certainly not the free marketeers.)
It's worse than that, not only do we not reflect radiation very well, but they're trying to detect radiation reflected from within a metallic enclosure. So they need to be LOTS more powerful.
That would be justifiable, but barely fits with the publicly revealed information. (I.e., if it's just used by the bomb squad, someone is being intentionally misleading.)
I would still expect it to be dangerous to the people around it in operation, but probably less so that trying to defuse an unexamined bomb.
If, as asserted, these are "backscatter machines" that "see through metal", then you can expect that there is considerably more radiation than your mother experienced. Of course, X-Rays are highly directional, so *PERHAPS* the exposure near the machine is less. That, however, is not the way I'd bet.
My thought was that they should use case shot rather than rods. I can't imagine that at that velocity you need that much mass to take down your target. The velocity is probably required to get it there soon enough. Since case shoot bullets would "fly in formation" they should benefit from the leading edge and not loose velocity as rapidly as "grape shot" would, not to mention spreading a lot less.
The US isn't all that much larger in area, but the population is a bit more than proportionally larger. That's probably what you meant, but it wasn't clear from your post.
OTOH, gun control in the US dates back to the 1870's (or perhaps earlier). And there are arguments that it's reasonable in dense population centers. Like Dodge City in the 1870's.
You are, of course, correct about it not being a treaty. In fact I suspect that it was entirely a PR move, and no change in action is contemplated by either side. This is the more likely as there's no accurate way of telling where a cyberattack is coming from.
It *could* be extremely valuable. Unfortunately, it would need to be reprocessed into elements (and occasional compounds) first. Mixed up like this it isn't useful for much but heating.
(Actually, some parts would need to be separated into pure isotopes to be maximally useful. The process wouldn't be cheap, and has been actively discouraged by the government.)
While true, that ignores the fact that "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." You can't tell *where* the attacks you notice are coming from, unless they are so incompetent that you can presume they didn't forge headers, use indirection, etc.
While true, there's a lot more to it than that. Just because a treaty is signed the laws aren't automatically changed, neither is the behavior of bureaucrats.
And the preceding paragraph assumed that the attacks were coming from Chinese government agents. This has hardly been proven.
Only at this point do we come to the question of "Has the US stopped attacking China?". *PERHAPS* the government has. It's opaque enough so all I can say is "I don't believe it has.". But it's quite clear that no real action has been taken to control either commercial interests or individuals.
Did anyone really expect anything different? This treaty looked like a piece of PR work from the beginning.
I believe that there's also a learning effect, where is someone learns that they will usually get their way if the threaten violence, they will be both more likely to threaten and more likely to engage in violence. And when you practice at something you usually get better at it, and so find it more rewarding than those that do not so practice.
Lots and lots of feedback loops, also feedforward loops.
There are correlations with the time of year someone was born and later actions or reactions. Frequently this is attributed to the prevalence of the flu at certain times of year, or how old the child was relative to the other kids in their class. The evidence for causation, however, is usually as weak as that of astrology, even though the explanations do make currently acceptable sense.
Don't be too quick to deny patterns noticed by our ancestors, even if you doubt the reasons that they attributed to them. (OTOH, astrology was mainly about when to plant crops. Personal astrology never seems to have been very accurate, even if the Babylonians did use it to tell the king when to change is clothes.)
The Planck scale is out of experimental reach, but there's no reason to expect anything interesting before we get there.
Yeah, there is a lot of reason to do so. The Hierarchy Problem is kind of a big deal, and the particular mass of the Higgs being as small as it is suggests there might be new physics well below the Planck scale, along with a lot of proposed post-SM theories.
Let me rephrase that: The Planck scale is out of experimental reach, but there's no reason to expect anything interesting at any particular point before we get there.
I'd like to be wrong, and there be some experimentally reachable point that should be interesting (for an important theoretical reason), but if that's so I haven't heard of it.
There is a very large bureaucracy involved, and everyone involved in it needs to be paid. Also, paperwork expands to fill the people required to get the supervisor to the next pay grade.
There may be other reasons. The very *idea* of using insurance companies to manage payments of heath costs implies that most of the money isn't going to medical treatments.
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While true, please remember that the Republican party has been solidly in control of Congress for quite awhile now. BOTH parties have conspired to foist this off on us.
While true, you ignore the fact that they started skyrocketing long before Obamacare was passed.
OTOH, if you mean that the insurance companies should be cut out of the healthcare system, I agree completely. I'm in favor of free coverage for everyone without all the god-damn middlemen that have tripled the price. (And I mean that as in "God damned the sheep and they died.". Those insurance parasites should just drop dead...or at least be rapidly put on unemployment.)
"Dark matter" is certainly nothing magical, though I do consider it weird.
The main problem with it is that it's defined only in terms of indirect effects. This is typical of subatomic resonances, i.e. extremely transient subatomic particles. It's not what one expects of something stable. Even the neutrino has been detected. (And I have my doubts about the graviton...either it's unstable, or we don't understand gravity, because we *should* have already detected it.)
So. I think the term "dark matter" is wrong because it oversimplifies things. I expect there is an entire particle zoo of dark matter particles, and that they don't interact electro-magnetically, but they do interact with gravitons in a way that disrupts them. This means that there need to be several non-electromagnetic forces that they interact with...so clearly this explanation violates Occam's razor, but I believe it anyway, partially because it explains why we haven't yet detected gravitons.
So I agree with the earlier poster that "dark matter" is handwavium. Unfortunately, I can't see how we could detect any "dark matter" particles directly...and that's what would be needed to make my hypothesis anything more than hot air.
The problem with calling "dark matter" handwavium is that as no alternative is proposed, people extrapolate unreasonable meanings. (If "dark matter" is ill-defined, there's no word for how ill-defined "handwavium" is.)
Sorry, but conspiracies are not necessarily illegal. Most aren't. Even the ones that are legal tend to be quite secretive, because the motivation for conspiracy is generally to benefit the members by use of hidden information. But not all conspiracies are even secretive, as some benefit merely be conjoined actions.
Con-spiracy: To breathe together. As in people gathered around a table.
If that were so, it wouldn't produce gravitational lensing. And it does, because that's the main argument that it exists.
I do agree with you that working on a job that requires a security clearance is no more than any other legally enforceable NDA, where the company demanding the NDA won't share information. In fact it's exactly the same thing.
So yes, you are right, I am suspicious of candidates from any NDA job. But most companies don't operate large spy agencies, so you can know that the NDA isn't covering for them. I don't suspect companies of hiring people secretly to do things that the companies don't do. But if there's a hidden area, they one must consider that they might have done anything that the companies do within that hidden area. So if a company runs a secret police force, then I may suspect that the NDA covered work in or for that secret police force with reason, though the term here is "suspect", and it doesn't speak to how one judges probabilities. Generally the probability is rather low. Sometimes, however, a rather low probability is sufficient to justify a passive decision (i.e., a decision not to take a particular action).
You say you were working on a guidance system, but if it's a classified project, I can't ascertain that you're telling the truth.
So, yes, it has an effect on the ability to trust you by anyone who don't both have the proper clearance and a government approved "need to know".
That's not necessarily true, but one can't be certain, and there are areas one can't investigate.
Or at least that's what the public officials tell us. I haven't heard very many people supporting that "most people want" from either the left OR the right. (Of course I don't listen much to the right, so I could have missed it, but it's certainly not the libertarian wing. And tech discussion groups don't exactly exclude right wingers...certainly not the free marketeers.)
It's worse than that, not only do we not reflect radiation very well, but they're trying to detect radiation reflected from within a metallic enclosure. So they need to be LOTS more powerful.
That would be justifiable, but barely fits with the publicly revealed information. (I.e., if it's just used by the bomb squad, someone is being intentionally misleading.)
I would still expect it to be dangerous to the people around it in operation, but probably less so that trying to defuse an unexamined bomb.
If, as asserted, these are "backscatter machines" that "see through metal", then you can expect that there is considerably more radiation than your mother experienced. Of course, X-Rays are highly directional, so *PERHAPS* the exposure near the machine is less. That, however, is not the way I'd bet.
My thought was that they should use case shot rather than rods. I can't imagine that at that velocity you need that much mass to take down your target. The velocity is probably required to get it there soon enough. Since case shoot bullets would "fly in formation" they should benefit from the leading edge and not loose velocity as rapidly as "grape shot" would, not to mention spreading a lot less.
The US isn't all that much larger in area, but the population is a bit more than proportionally larger. That's probably what you meant, but it wasn't clear from your post.
OTOH, gun control in the US dates back to the 1870's (or perhaps earlier). And there are arguments that it's reasonable in dense population centers. Like Dodge City in the 1870's.
MACs can also be changed, though admittedly it's uncommon.
When they start shutting down botnets quickly, then I'll believe that there are reasonably accurate ways to trace an attack.
You are, of course, correct about it not being a treaty. In fact I suspect that it was entirely a PR move, and no change in action is contemplated by either side. This is the more likely as there's no accurate way of telling where a cyberattack is coming from.
It *could* be extremely valuable. Unfortunately, it would need to be reprocessed into elements (and occasional compounds) first. Mixed up like this it isn't useful for much but heating.
(Actually, some parts would need to be separated into pure isotopes to be maximally useful. The process wouldn't be cheap, and has been actively discouraged by the government.)
I read the GP post as sarcasm. Look at it again.
Nah...that was a reasonable first step...they just left out the third step, which needed to immediately follow: "don't care".
While true, that ignores the fact that "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." You can't tell *where* the attacks you notice are coming from, unless they are so incompetent that you can presume they didn't forge headers, use indirection, etc.
While true, there's a lot more to it than that. Just because a treaty is signed the laws aren't automatically changed, neither is the behavior of bureaucrats.
And the preceding paragraph assumed that the attacks were coming from Chinese government agents. This has hardly been proven.
Only at this point do we come to the question of "Has the US stopped attacking China?". *PERHAPS* the government has. It's opaque enough so all I can say is "I don't believe it has.". But it's quite clear that no real action has been taken to control either commercial interests or individuals.
Did anyone really expect anything different? This treaty looked like a piece of PR work from the beginning.
I believe that there's also a learning effect, where is someone learns that they will usually get their way if the threaten violence, they will be both more likely to threaten and more likely to engage in violence. And when you practice at something you usually get better at it, and so find it more rewarding than those that do not so practice.
Lots and lots of feedback loops, also feedforward loops.
There are correlations with the time of year someone was born and later actions or reactions. Frequently this is attributed to the prevalence of the flu at certain times of year, or how old the child was relative to the other kids in their class. The evidence for causation, however, is usually as weak as that of astrology, even though the explanations do make currently acceptable sense.
Don't be too quick to deny patterns noticed by our ancestors, even if you doubt the reasons that they attributed to them. (OTOH, astrology was mainly about when to plant crops. Personal astrology never seems to have been very accurate, even if the Babylonians did use it to tell the king when to change is clothes.)
Let me rephrase that:
The Planck scale is out of experimental reach, but there's no reason to expect anything interesting at any particular point before we get there.
I'd like to be wrong, and there be some experimentally reachable point that should be interesting (for an important theoretical reason), but if that's so I haven't heard of it.
There is a very large bureaucracy involved, and everyone involved in it needs to be paid. Also, paperwork expands to fill the people required to get the supervisor to the next pay grade.
There may be other reasons. The very *idea* of using insurance companies to manage payments of heath costs implies that most of the money isn't going to medical treatments.