Well, if you switched to using Linux as your primary OS, you started to interact with MS less frequently. So I would expect the intensity of your feelings to abate.
That mine didn't I attribute to my being more interested in licensing requirements, and that as I will therefore no longer use MS software at all, whenever I can't do something because it requires a piece of MS (or Apple) software, I am again angered at them. As you haven't entirely switched, you are spared this source of irritation.
Extended isolation also works, though without someone else providing programming it's difficult to predict what kind of change you'll get. Marooned sailors who were rescued often had dramatic changes in personality that were permanent. Six months alone will usually do it, longer if there's more than one. Historical contexts also involved continued survival stresses, often, but not always, severe. These may, however, not be necessary. It's the extreme isolation that appears to be the key.
A good example. Notice that you didn't use a quantification. E.g., you didn't say "I believe all Catholic priests are child-raping Nazis." This makes the belief non-falsifiable. Even if someone convinced you that a particular Catholic priest was a liberal celibate, this wouldn't invalidate your belief. You wouldn't even alter the way that you said it, though if backed into a corner you would then admit that "Well, I do know of an exception". And if this happened several times it would just change to "Well, I do know of a few exceptions".
The basic statement of faith wouldn't be altered. Not until you had an "Aha!" moment, and realized "I've been stupid". I won't guess how you'd alter your beliefs at that point, but Bayesian theory suggests that it might be impossible to pile up enough evidence to override your initial priors. (People, though, can be more complex than current probability theory, and you might just decide to disbelieve all of your initial evidence. There are recorded instances of people making that kind of a change...though Saul into Paul isn't an example of such. He's a much more moderate case of conversion into a belief without any initial strong belief against it. His original actions were those of a civil servant, not of a fanatic.)
I think you're wrong. I'll admit that some "cures" or "effective treatments" of schizophrenia have happened, but this isn't at all the same as saying we know how to cure it. Spontaneous remission is even more common.
FWIW I believe Schizophrenia to be a syndrome rather than a disease. I.e., it's a definition by description of a collection of symptoms that go together, but which may have several different causative factors. What will cure one, won't cure the other, and may even make it worse. The first step to real cures is finding out how to disentangle the various diseases masking under the similar symptoms. Then each one will need a separate treatment. (Well, OK, some of the treatments may be the same.)
Then, after you've done all that, you need to correct the "improper habits of thought" that have formed. Cognitive psychology can probably handle that once the physical causes are removed (though this needs to be proven). You seem to be assuming that there isn't any physical cause, but this seems to me quite unlikely in the majority of cases, and perhaps in all cases.
And then, after all that, there will be some patients whose brains were just wired incorrectly. I expect this to be a small percentage, as the brain is, in most areas, quite flexible about it's precise wiring. (It tends to "route around damage".)
People have all sorts of different models of the universe. In some of them the break-in is close to hardware hacking. In others it's quite distant. People with different models will react differently. And there are a LOT of people who noticed SONYs abusive behavior recently.
So I wouldn't rule out the Grandparent's theory. It's not one that would have occurred to me, and I don't believe it, but it's not unreasonable. Remember, we're dealing with a large number of separate people with separate models.
OTOH, commercial gain is probably the primary motivator
I won't weep any tears for SONY, and while I'm sorry for their customers, I hope they learned a lesson about trusting abusive companies. (OTOH, I'm suspicious of even non-abusive companies. Anyone can get hacked, and many companies are a bit [i.e., very] lax on security.)
FWIW, I tend to avoid financial transactions on the internet...but I don't avoid them completely, so I know I'm vulnerable. And so are you. Until pre-paid credit cards are available, that don't have any ties to other accounts, this danger will always be present. But both governments and companies have interests that are contrary to the anonymous use of credit. So I expect things to just get worse.
I don't know if MSWind is still insecure by design, but it certainly was a decade ago. (Well, a bit over that now.)
OTOH, Linux has adopted some features which decrease it's security. The main one that I'm aware of is allowing extracted files from tarballs to be automatically marked executable at the time of extraction. Just think for a bit about the can of worms that opens up. It's true that in a secure system the files would only be able to infect the user unpacking the tarball, but for most users it's their own data that they are worried about, and most users only use one user.
Add to this the problems inherent in the installation of software. And I think nearly everyone installs some software that isn't from a repository. That's an intractably hard problem in and of itself.
Linux, Unix, etc., however, do act to limit the spread of viruses. But this isn't any real security when the viruses are being spread by e-mail.
MSWind is (was?) a soft target, but it's sure not the only possible target.
WRT "innocent til proven guilty": That only applies to criminal offenses, not to civil suits. Civil suits are decided on "the preponderance of the evidence". There is not supposed to be any presumption of either innocence or guilt.
P.S.: Effectively this usually means that the rich person will win, but it may cost him. And that statement is only true if there's a large discrepency in their wealth. Otherwise it's likely to be a crap-shoot.
That's important if you go for the "isolated hot spots" approach. I'd, personally, prefer a small wildlife sanctuary. That way if there's a future problem, you don't have as many people in the "most threatened" area. (And I think that we can count on these reactors being a continual problem into the foreseeable future. It's going to be awhile before we can sheathe them in cement and pave them over. And as for decontaminating them...I think you can just forget that.)
The think is, the more dangerous the consequences of a failure mode are, the more extensive the preparations need to be to avoid it. This world has seen quakes up to Richter 12. (Before there were people living there, I think. Certainly before they kept written records.) The location was Missouri. So if something is really dangerous, you need to plan for Richter 13. OTOH, those only happen every 200 thousand years. (Or possibly every 20 thousand. I don't remember my source.) So maybe it's not dangerous enough to justify the expense of the work? I'm sure that before this recent problem everyone thought that planning for a Richter 9 was unreasonably cautious. But though they are rare, they do occasionally happen. I guess the question is "Are they rare enough that it's better to just accept the damage when they do hit than to plan to survive them, with all the extra expense that is entailed?"
Unfortunately, this is not something that is subject to rational analysis and decision making. How much do you value a human life? What if you know it won't be your own? What if you suspect it might be your own? If those two questions didn't have different answers, then coal mining would be a lot different.
I think that you are seriously unfair to both the engineers who designed it and the operators. Yes, it should have been done differently, but at the time it was build the mistakes which are obvious in hindsight were not so obvious. There were, indeed, serious mistakes made during the safety test, but are you claiming that you have never made a stupid mistake? Or just that you have never been caught?
That said, every old nuclear plant is full of known design mistakes. The operators don't have the option to say "We know how to do this better now, so this plant should be retired and a different one built." Sometimes the problems can be retrofitted. Sometimes the problem is management. And, admittedly, sometimes it's the operators.
But it can often be quite difficult to handle a design problem. Consider just one: How do you limit the number of alarms that go off at once, so that one need only consider the most urgent problems? (And note that urgent is not the same as serious, but if it doesn't have the potential to become serious you don't want to even consider it in an emergency.) One of the design problems at many plants is (was?) the number of alarms and alerts that go off in a disaster. At three-mile island the operators were nearly paralyzed by the number of different alerts and problems that were screaming for their attention. (Both audibly and visibly.) I think that by one count over 50 alarms went off at the same time. (Presumably this has been addressed by now, but I couldn't say for certain, and I've no idea how successfully.)
I *think* the current exclusion zone is reasonable. It's a compromise, of course.
However, just becasue that's what's reasonable today doesn't at all mean that it will be reasonable in 5-10 years. When the situation stabilized, unless there is some new problem, then the exclusion zone will probably be resized to 5 miles, or perhaps just isolated "hot spots". It may, however, be a "no agriculture" zone for considerably longer. (The cesium is only a problem if it gets in your body. It's heavy, so it tends to settle out of the air and seep down into the soil where it either forms compounds that tie it up or keeps sinking. Eventually it gets tied up. But plants that are grown there can absorb it, and animals that eat those plants can absorb it and... But it's not dangerous to breathe the air, as long as you stay away from dust-storms. Not at the reported levels.)
Personally I'd take a 10-mile (radius) circle and make it a wild-life preserve. (The reported cesium levels aren't *that* dangerous, and animals with shorter lives would have less to fear.) And I'd make it a circle, not a half-circle. Wild-life preserve in the ocean as well as on land. Then I'd probably build a new set of plants on the same site. With better safety designs. And much more stringent inspections, with no advance notifications, and inspectors reporting to a management that was totally separate from the management of the reactor. And inspectors having the right to appear at any time. I'd also want a bunch of real-time monitoring cameras that would be continually observing and recording to an off-site location. With the inspectors also doing inspection via the remote monitors, so people working there wouldn't know when they were being observed as well as recorded.
It's a pity this kind of thing appears necessary, but nuclear plant management (US as well as Japan) appears to have a strong bias for deferring needed maintenance, so that the expenses won't show up in the current quarter. Perhaps it should even be illegal for anyone involved in plant management to have any contacts with any of the inspectorate (management as well as staff) that is not officially recorded.
Evacuated doesn't mean exposed, it means in danger of being exposed. If it weren't for that persistent "white smoke" I'd think you were being totally unreasonable. But "white smoke" should have been better identified by now. Steam? Something burning? Metal burning? Books burning? It makes a lot of difference, and hasn't been explained, but just left as "white smoke". (Could be a translation problem? Does it mean something specific rather than descriptive in Japanese? I doubt it.)
OTOH, Tokyo Electric has a long history of cover-ups for even minor problems, so you can't assume that the problem is major just because they're covering it up. They get embarrassed about talking about admitting making mistakes, even reasonable ones. For all we can tell, they might be blanking out descriptions because they mentioned something stupid rather than something dangerous. Their historical pattern would cause them to act the same in either case.
Still, if I lived near there, I'd be assuming the worst just because I had to be prepared for it, and couldn't find out that it wasn't true. But not because it was, objectively, the most likely. (OTOH, they've also got a history of deferred or neglected maintenance, so I wouldn't call a worst case scenario exactly unlikely. But guess what? US plants frequently have exactly the same history WRT maintenance.)
When something is widespread then you need to suspect a systematic cause. There is something about the design of how the plants are managed that is both widespread and dangerous. It has deferred and neglected maintenance as one of it's symptoms. It also has attempting to keep plants running beyond their designed lifespan as a symptom. I suspect that it has to do with minimization of current costs, and lowering the value attributed to future costs. A probable answer is that nuclear plants should not be run by corporations, but that doesn't say who could effectively run them. It would need to be an organization that gave high priority to expected future costs. I'm just having trouble coming up with such an organization.
Well, that is definitely covered in Knuth, Volume 3. I assumed that it was some kind of garbage collection on hash table entries, which Knuth alludes to but doesn't as obviously cover. (In other words, he considered what I thought this was, but considered it too complex an idea to present in one chunk, so he covered different parts of it under different headings, and only mentioned that they could be combined, rather that working out the entire algorithm in MIX.)
This puts the date back around 1973, except that Knuth was documenting and analyzing current practice rather than innovating. So he was mentioning that the practice was current BEFORE 1973. (Probably by 1970 at the very latest.) Which was well before any software was considered patentable.
So what these people are doing is patenting current practices which had been in current practice for over 20 years.
I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973. And he talks about ways of refining, and how the keys need to be adapted when the contents of the table changes if you want to retain uniqueness (which he doesn't consider worth the effort), He goes on for a number of pages. But please remember that this was not original research on his part. He was merely reporting on commonly used techniques and analyzing them. And he often didn't go into details. He only had so much space. (And he was recoding everything to work in MIX, which made I/O especially problematic.) But Corman was FAR from being the first word on Hash Table implementations. (In college, sometime in the 1970's, we talked about chaining hash tables and various implementations. Given the limitations on storage [RAM & punch cards...not disk or tape] you can bet we spent a lot of time making sure dead data didn't continue taking up space...though we didn't always properly clear it, merely deallocated it.)
So the "patent", by this "Doctrine of Equivalents" and "After-invented technology" would be considered a mere refinement of standard approaches. If the judge and jury are idiots, or possibly just not interested in justice, one can hope that some appeals court will notice this. (And hope that Google already has it in the court records, because otherwise the appeals courts won't be allowed to notice it.)
But the existence of that patent is further evidence that the patent system needs to be totally scrapped, and all extant patents be considered invalid, because of the malfeasance of the USPTO. I don't think it possible that mere misfeasance could lead to the current mess, though I suppose that there are some other felonies that would also be applicable. Fraud comes to mind. Possibly accepting bribes, though that would need to be proven, as it's not directly shown by the evidence to hand. But "improperly performing their duties in a way calculated to unjustly benefit some parties and unjustly injure others" seems like a good characterization. It might, however, be difficult to prove that they intended the injustice.
All in all, I don't think filing appropriate criminal charges against the offfice-holders at the USPTO would be very successful, however justified it might be. Much better would be to just declare the entire mess corrupt and revoke all existing patents and patent rulings (on, e.g., what can be patented). And then re-write the law into something that can actually be honestly applied.
At that, patent law probably isn't as bad as copyright law. Patents still expire. They may not reveal anything useful, but after they've expired they form a valid basis for claiming that some new patent is invalid. So they do have some good features. Copyrights, however, essentially never expire. And they are allowed to be used to cover items which are protected by a DRM that will definitely render that material "protected" unreadable before the copyright even comes up for renewal. (OTOH, copyrights are granted freely, and without formally filing. But someone else having produced essentially the same work previously isn't protection against a modified idea being copyrighted. In fact, even being in public domain now appears to no longer be protection.)
Have I given the impression that I consider the legal system corrupt? Compared the the legislators it's pure as the driven snow. Then there's the president...
Even without global warming, we can expect more severe climate variations than we have had in remembered history, because we have (recently) left the little climatic optimum. Global warming can only be asserted to be involved when there is a systematic distortion in one direction, e.g., more years of torrential rains or droughts, and not the other. Then you need to look carefully at the chain of causation and try to figure out why. (E.g., the warming ocean currents have redirected the monsoon is something to look at. And I believe that this is one predicted effect.) Note that this same event will cause new torrential rains in one area and droughts in another. Which makes figuring things out tricky.
But, because we have left the little climatic optimum, we can expect more unusual weather than we are accustomed to. Which means that, as the "noise level" has increased, we need more data before reliable conclusions can be reached. (Predictions are fairly easy, reliable predictions are insanely difficult. And if you can't make a reliable conclusion, you are often forced to offer your "best guess", which administrators will almost always dress up as a certainty.)
P.S.: I am not a climatologist. But I have had a job where I had to make predictions of traffic flows when changes were made. You just can't do even something that simple reliably. You can just make your best effort and then say something like "Well, most of our models say that a bridge there will slow down the traffic.". This conclusion is generally not welcome, and most people find it difficult to believe that an additional link will increase traffic congestion, but it often happens anyway.
If it's warm AND MOIST, then the planet will indeed support more diversity. But that diversity takes time to evolve (not just centuries) and I don't think people would give it an opportunity.
For that matter, life over most of the globe was a lot more diverse before people invented archery and nets. This is true whether it was warm, cool, or cold. The only exception is the tropical rain forests, where the climate was so intense that most tools were quickly destroyed by it. Then diversity tended to hang on until stainless steel was invented.
But I do agree that cutting pollution is the most important step, and that global warming is only ONE of the reasons that it should be done.
P.S.: Global warming is not intrinsically a bad thing. It *is*, however, bad for fixed species, individuals, and objects. Fertile areas have a tendency to turn into deserts more readily than deserts turn into fertile areas. Fences, highways, canyons, etc. tend to put obstacles in the way of species trying to migrate into a more hospitable location. And when they get there they're likely to find that it's outside the wildlife sanctuary that climate change has rendered inhospitable. And that some person has claimed the ownership of everything non-human on that turf. Which means THEM, if they try to live there.
In other words, expect climate change, whether warming or not, to decimate the existing species, which are already disappearing faster than at any time since the last Giant Meteor impact. (The dinosaur killer.) P.S.: I don't think it's a coincidence that a bunch of volcanoes went off on the other side of the world at about the time of impact. I think the shock waves set them off. It's not an either/or kind of causation, but rather a both/and.
Those who bothered to track down the original paper claim this it was, indeed, a completely valid prediction, and that it wasn't prevented. It just didn't predict was it is being claimed that it predicted. It predicted "environmental refugees" and included people being forced off of farm land because it would no longer sustain them, etc. It also gave only a rough figure of "about twice what it was in" 1995(? don't remember the precise year. Whenever the study it was based on was made.) Now the study gave the number for that year for 25 million, so that's where the 50 million comes from. And considering the number of conflicts going on in areas where most people are subsistence farmers, that may be a very low projection.
P.S. I refuse to take anything that Barak Obama says as evidence of anything except that he's a politician. But he's *probably* better than his opponent (John McCsomething) would have been. Probably. This is known as damning with extremely faint praise.
OTOH, while the alarmist reporting is just that, the weather has been increasingly unusual for the last decade or so. I'd just put it down to leaving the "little climatic optimum", but the average seems to tend towards warmer. E.g., when I got married 21 years ago we thought the middle of March a very safe date to pick for an outside ceremony. Fortunately my wife didn't like sun, so we didn't actually plan that, but we did plan lots of outside processions, etc. Around dusk it started to rain and hail, quite surprising us. But by an large things went off well. This year, however, it's the middle of April and it's still occasionally raining. Nothing catastrophic, so it's not making the news...except that the drought warning has been canceled. Note that if it were just one day there'd be nothing unusual about it. Even 30+ years ago it would occasionally rain lightly one day as late as June. And, as I said, if it was only this one year I'd just blame it on "freak weather". And if one year was hot, and the next cold I'd blame it on leaving the little climatic optimum (which we *have* done). But the changes are generally in the same direction...hotter...with only an occasional swing to colder.
Now leaving the little climatic optimum means that we can expect wilder weather swings than previously. (We entered it around the 1930's I think. So it's not reasonable for people to remember what it was like before we entered it, but you get both fewer floods AND fewer droughts in the little climatic optimum, and the weather is just stabler.)
Unfortunately, many of our systems for handling weather problems evolved during the little climatic optimum, so they are unsuited to weather outside of it, where wild swings in weather are more common. Additionally the increase in the number of people has meant that even those systems were already strained. (We've been getting drought warnings with normal rainfalls, because more people use more water.) (Also, around here rains after the weather has warmed means more growth in brush and grasses, which will dry out over the summer, making the fall fire season much more dangerous. That's when we can expect the disaster, but when it happens the news won't bother to blame it on the late spring rains. So you won't hear about it as an effect of global warming. This kind of indirect causation of disaster is actually the most common mode of action.)
So, yeah, the news is not to be believed. And you should just expect wilder swings in the weather. But that's not what we're seeing. It's averaging hotter, where the average should stay the same.
It's clear you don't live in a city. Probably in the suburbs.
OTOH, you are definitely right about it being a cause of overweight. But "outside" makes assumptions about what outside is like. On the street that I live on, ball is impossible, because it's mainly up and down, but at least the traffic is low. Other areas nearby have other problems...traffic being a common one, and everybody has a small yard. (Ours is larger than most, mainly because it's largely up and down. There's a park down the street and around the corner, and it's actually pretty good. But occasionally there are gangs there. It's been around a decade since there was a shooting. But parents might want to think a few times before letting there kids go there unescorted. (Depending on their age, of course. Most 12 year olds would have enough sense to leave if things started to get unpleasant...but can you say the same about either 8 year olds or 14 year olds?)
Suburbia is really a very different country. Or at least it was a few decades ago. The parks are fewer, but the yards are a lot bigger, and it's generally safer. (Even there, though, it seems to me that the average speeds at which cars are driven have increased, the traffic has gotten denser, and it's become more dangerous to ride a bicycle.) Suburbs seem to be in the process of turning into rather unpleasant cities. New dwellings either have no yards or have much smaller ones, and parks aren't getting any closer together. However the one's I'm familiar with are still nicer places than cities. Also lots more expensive...and not just in the initial purchase, but in the upkeep. Once you buy there, you probably need to resign yourself to a long commute in dense traffic. And gas prices aren't likely to get any cheaper. So it's going to cost you a couple of hours every work day and the fuel for your vehicle while you sit in traffic. Still, if you can get an older house, it's worth a lot to be able to say to your kids "Go play in the yard!". But don't presume that everyone lives in that same situation, as most people don't.
Performance need not suffer, though compilation speed certainly would. Perhaps you could have a compiler flag that switched between fast execution and fast compilation.
Also, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to extend from the primitive types, but you would definitely lose all the speed benefits if you did.
"Classes if necessary, but not necessarily classes" would be exactly the kind of tripe I would absolutely never expect an experienced C++ programmer to say.
This particular argument can be bolstered by looking at either Python or D. It can improve many programs.
Also, "garbage collection" shouldn't be purely a run-time feature. In a proper language you design the language differently when garbage collection is present than when it isn't. Clearly, however, one should be ABLE to request that an object be garbage collected at a particular point. But it should be a request, not an order, in case there are still references to it dangling around somewhere. (Actually, that would really be a request that garbage collection be initiated immediately, since you need to check all pointers anyway.)
Also, pointers should be separate from arithmetic values. It should be impossible to convert from an arithmetic value to a pointer (though not necessarily conversely). This greatly simplifies garbage collection.
The compiler should be smart enough to handle basic classes (int, etc. should be classes, with normal class syntax except that literals exist) with special consideration an convert them into things that the CPU can directly handle. But in the language they should be classes (except for the special literal syntax). Thus a string is a class although a literal string might be written "a string". And literals can use standard class notation, thus 1.add(3) which is what 1 + 3 would be sugar for.
The major flaw *I* find with Java is the incredible mess it makes of I/O (but some people seem to like it). A less basic flaw is the mess it made of generics. I understand that this was to maintain compatibility with older code, but it's not worth it. A different answer should have been found. I guess it's a matter of taste, but I really dislike the classes wrapped around classes wrapped around classes kind of syntax that Java promotes. (It's not inherent in the language, but in the esthetics of the library designers.) I can see the utility, but it's really ugly, and a different approach should have been found. But that might have required either multiple inheritance or mixins.
As others have said, this kind of reactor is past it's intended use date and should be decommissioned.
After the disaster has happened the things you can do to mitigate the problem are quite limited, and, to the extent that I understand things, they seem to be doing as well as possible. This doesn't mean they are doing a good job, just that there doesn't seem to be any way to do a better one. The time to fix this problem is before the disaster.
Disasters aren't predictable. Accidents may be, but if you could predict it and didn't deal with it, then it's not a disaster, it's corruption or fraud or something. (Possibly mis- or malfeasance.)
What this means is that you can't predict what disaster is most likely. It could be a tsunami, a meteor strike, a union strike, a presidential decree, the collapse of the government, a psychotic employee, or something else. And you need to be prepared to deal with all of them. Sometimes the only way to deal with things is to die (e.g., giant meteor strike), but that's an answer, i.e., "I rate the likelihood of this disaster as low enough that I'm willing to deal with it by dying." This is fine when you are the only person is affected, but in circumstances where a large number of people are going to be affected when you adopt a "way of dealing with" a disaster, you are asserting the right to choose how all those people will deal with it (or at least constraining what options they have). And when you do it without informing them... well, it's immoral to not have a very large margin of safety.
The only intractable problem about a Mars colony is a closed ecosystem. And if we can solve that, I'm not sure that a planet is the right place to aim for. Asteroids look a lot more promising. (Though you'd want 3...a carbonaceous chondrite, a metallic one, and a head of frozen gases. If you're far enough out (the outer asteroid belt?) you might be able to find all three blended in one body. Otherwise you'll need to catch at least the frozen gasses item and fetch it.)
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Well, if you switched to using Linux as your primary OS, you started to interact with MS less frequently. So I would expect the intensity of your feelings to abate.
That mine didn't I attribute to my being more interested in licensing requirements, and that as I will therefore no longer use MS software at all, whenever I can't do something because it requires a piece of MS (or Apple) software, I am again angered at them. As you haven't entirely switched, you are spared this source of irritation.
Extended isolation also works, though without someone else providing programming it's difficult to predict what kind of change you'll get. Marooned sailors who were rescued often had dramatic changes in personality that were permanent. Six months alone will usually do it, longer if there's more than one. Historical contexts also involved continued survival stresses, often, but not always, severe. These may, however, not be necessary. It's the extreme isolation that appears to be the key.
A good example. Notice that you didn't use a quantification. E.g., you didn't say "I believe all Catholic priests are child-raping Nazis." This makes the belief non-falsifiable. Even if someone convinced you that a particular Catholic priest was a liberal celibate, this wouldn't invalidate your belief. You wouldn't even alter the way that you said it, though if backed into a corner you would then admit that "Well, I do know of an exception". And if this happened several times it would just change to "Well, I do know of a few exceptions".
The basic statement of faith wouldn't be altered. Not until you had an "Aha!" moment, and realized "I've been stupid". I won't guess how you'd alter your beliefs at that point, but Bayesian theory suggests that it might be impossible to pile up enough evidence to override your initial priors. (People, though, can be more complex than current probability theory, and you might just decide to disbelieve all of your initial evidence. There are recorded instances of people making that kind of a change...though Saul into Paul isn't an example of such. He's a much more moderate case of conversion into a belief without any initial strong belief against it. His original actions were those of a civil servant, not of a fanatic.)
I think you're wrong. I'll admit that some "cures" or "effective treatments" of schizophrenia have happened, but this isn't at all the same as saying we know how to cure it. Spontaneous remission is even more common.
FWIW I believe Schizophrenia to be a syndrome rather than a disease. I.e., it's a definition by description of a collection of symptoms that go together, but which may have several different causative factors. What will cure one, won't cure the other, and may even make it worse. The first step to real cures is finding out how to disentangle the various diseases masking under the similar symptoms. Then each one will need a separate treatment. (Well, OK, some of the treatments may be the same.)
Then, after you've done all that, you need to correct the "improper habits of thought" that have formed. Cognitive psychology can probably handle that once the physical causes are removed (though this needs to be proven). You seem to be assuming that there isn't any physical cause, but this seems to me quite unlikely in the majority of cases, and perhaps in all cases.
And then, after all that, there will be some patients whose brains were just wired incorrectly. I expect this to be a small percentage, as the brain is, in most areas, quite flexible about it's precise wiring. (It tends to "route around damage".)
IANAMD
People have all sorts of different models of the universe. In some of them the break-in is close to hardware hacking. In others it's quite distant. People with different models will react differently. And there are a LOT of people who noticed SONYs abusive behavior recently.
So I wouldn't rule out the Grandparent's theory. It's not one that would have occurred to me, and I don't believe it, but it's not unreasonable. Remember, we're dealing with a large number of separate people with separate models.
OTOH, commercial gain is probably the primary motivator
I won't weep any tears for SONY, and while I'm sorry for their customers, I hope they learned a lesson about trusting abusive companies. (OTOH, I'm suspicious of even non-abusive companies. Anyone can get hacked, and many companies are a bit [i.e., very] lax on security.)
FWIW, I tend to avoid financial transactions on the internet...but I don't avoid them completely, so I know I'm vulnerable. And so are you. Until pre-paid credit cards are available, that don't have any ties to other accounts, this danger will always be present. But both governments and companies have interests that are contrary to the anonymous use of credit. So I expect things to just get worse.
I don't know if MSWind is still insecure by design, but it certainly was a decade ago. (Well, a bit over that now.)
OTOH, Linux has adopted some features which decrease it's security. The main one that I'm aware of is allowing extracted files from tarballs to be automatically marked executable at the time of extraction. Just think for a bit about the can of worms that opens up. It's true that in a secure system the files would only be able to infect the user unpacking the tarball, but for most users it's their own data that they are worried about, and most users only use one user.
Add to this the problems inherent in the installation of software. And I think nearly everyone installs some software that isn't from a repository. That's an intractably hard problem in and of itself.
Linux, Unix, etc., however, do act to limit the spread of viruses. But this isn't any real security when the viruses are being spread by e-mail.
MSWind is (was?) a soft target, but it's sure not the only possible target.
WRT "innocent til proven guilty":
That only applies to criminal offenses, not to civil suits. Civil suits are decided on "the preponderance of the evidence". There is not supposed to be any presumption of either innocence or guilt.
P.S.: Effectively this usually means that the rich person will win, but it may cost him. And that statement is only true if there's a large discrepency in their wealth. Otherwise it's likely to be a crap-shoot.
That's important if you go for the "isolated hot spots" approach. I'd, personally, prefer a small wildlife sanctuary. That way if there's a future problem, you don't have as many people in the "most threatened" area. (And I think that we can count on these reactors being a continual problem into the foreseeable future. It's going to be awhile before we can sheathe them in cement and pave them over. And as for decontaminating them...I think you can just forget that.)
To be fair, Jesse Ventura is far better than the average politician.
The think is, the more dangerous the consequences of a failure mode are, the more extensive the preparations need to be to avoid it. This world has seen quakes up to Richter 12. (Before there were people living there, I think. Certainly before they kept written records.) The location was Missouri. So if something is really dangerous, you need to plan for Richter 13. OTOH, those only happen every 200 thousand years. (Or possibly every 20 thousand. I don't remember my source.) So maybe it's not dangerous enough to justify the expense of the work? I'm sure that before this recent problem everyone thought that planning for a Richter 9 was unreasonably cautious. But though they are rare, they do occasionally happen. I guess the question is "Are they rare enough that it's better to just accept the damage when they do hit than to plan to survive them, with all the extra expense that is entailed?"
Unfortunately, this is not something that is subject to rational analysis and decision making. How much do you value a human life? What if you know it won't be your own? What if you suspect it might be your own? If those two questions didn't have different answers, then coal mining would be a lot different.
I think that you are seriously unfair to both the engineers who designed it and the operators. Yes, it should have been done differently, but at the time it was build the mistakes which are obvious in hindsight were not so obvious. There were, indeed, serious mistakes made during the safety test, but are you claiming that you have never made a stupid mistake? Or just that you have never been caught?
That said, every old nuclear plant is full of known design mistakes. The operators don't have the option to say "We know how to do this better now, so this plant should be retired and a different one built." Sometimes the problems can be retrofitted. Sometimes the problem is management. And, admittedly, sometimes it's the operators.
But it can often be quite difficult to handle a design problem. Consider just one: How do you limit the number of alarms that go off at once, so that one need only consider the most urgent problems? (And note that urgent is not the same as serious, but if it doesn't have the potential to become serious you don't want to even consider it in an emergency.) One of the design problems at many plants is (was?) the number of alarms and alerts that go off in a disaster. At three-mile island the operators were nearly paralyzed by the number of different alerts and problems that were screaming for their attention. (Both audibly and visibly.) I think that by one count over 50 alarms went off at the same time. (Presumably this has been addressed by now, but I couldn't say for certain, and I've no idea how successfully.)
I *think* the current exclusion zone is reasonable. It's a compromise, of course.
However, just becasue that's what's reasonable today doesn't at all mean that it will be reasonable in 5-10 years. When the situation stabilized, unless there is some new problem, then the exclusion zone will probably be resized to 5 miles, or perhaps just isolated "hot spots". It may, however, be a "no agriculture" zone for considerably longer. (The cesium is only a problem if it gets in your body. It's heavy, so it tends to settle out of the air and seep down into the soil where it either forms compounds that tie it up or keeps sinking. Eventually it gets tied up. But plants that are grown there can absorb it, and animals that eat those plants can absorb it and ... But it's not dangerous to breathe the air, as long as you stay away from dust-storms. Not at the reported levels.)
Personally I'd take a 10-mile (radius) circle and make it a wild-life preserve. (The reported cesium levels aren't *that* dangerous, and animals with shorter lives would have less to fear.) And I'd make it a circle, not a half-circle. Wild-life preserve in the ocean as well as on land. Then I'd probably build a new set of plants on the same site. With better safety designs. And much more stringent inspections, with no advance notifications, and inspectors reporting to a management that was totally separate from the management of the reactor. And inspectors having the right to appear at any time. I'd also want a bunch of real-time monitoring cameras that would be continually observing and recording to an off-site location. With the inspectors also doing inspection via the remote monitors, so people working there wouldn't know when they were being observed as well as recorded.
It's a pity this kind of thing appears necessary, but nuclear plant management (US as well as Japan) appears to have a strong bias for deferring needed maintenance, so that the expenses won't show up in the current quarter. Perhaps it should even be illegal for anyone involved in plant management to have any contacts with any of the inspectorate (management as well as staff) that is not officially recorded.
Evacuated doesn't mean exposed, it means in danger of being exposed. If it weren't for that persistent "white smoke" I'd think you were being totally unreasonable. But "white smoke" should have been better identified by now. Steam? Something burning? Metal burning? Books burning? It makes a lot of difference, and hasn't been explained, but just left as "white smoke". (Could be a translation problem? Does it mean something specific rather than descriptive in Japanese? I doubt it.)
OTOH, Tokyo Electric has a long history of cover-ups for even minor problems, so you can't assume that the problem is major just because they're covering it up. They get embarrassed about talking about admitting making mistakes, even reasonable ones. For all we can tell, they might be blanking out descriptions because they mentioned something stupid rather than something dangerous. Their historical pattern would cause them to act the same in either case.
Still, if I lived near there, I'd be assuming the worst just because I had to be prepared for it, and couldn't find out that it wasn't true. But not because it was, objectively, the most likely. (OTOH, they've also got a history of deferred or neglected maintenance, so I wouldn't call a worst case scenario exactly unlikely. But guess what? US plants frequently have exactly the same history WRT maintenance.)
When something is widespread then you need to suspect a systematic cause. There is something about the design of how the plants are managed that is both widespread and dangerous. It has deferred and neglected maintenance as one of it's symptoms. It also has attempting to keep plants running beyond their designed lifespan as a symptom. I suspect that it has to do with minimization of current costs, and lowering the value attributed to future costs. A probable answer is that nuclear plants should not be run by corporations, but that doesn't say who could effectively run them. It would need to be an organization that gave high priority to expected future costs. I'm just having trouble coming up with such an organization.
Well, that is definitely covered in Knuth, Volume 3. I assumed that it was some kind of garbage collection on hash table entries, which Knuth alludes to but doesn't as obviously cover. (In other words, he considered what I thought this was, but considered it too complex an idea to present in one chunk, so he covered different parts of it under different headings, and only mentioned that they could be combined, rather that working out the entire algorithm in MIX.)
This puts the date back around 1973, except that Knuth was documenting and analyzing current practice rather than innovating. So he was mentioning that the practice was current BEFORE 1973. (Probably by 1970 at the very latest.) Which was well before any software was considered patentable.
So what these people are doing is patenting current practices which had been in current practice for over 20 years.
I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973. And he talks about ways of refining, and how the keys need to be adapted when the contents of the table changes if you want to retain uniqueness (which he doesn't consider worth the effort), He goes on for a number of pages. But please remember that this was not original research on his part. He was merely reporting on commonly used techniques and analyzing them. And he often didn't go into details. He only had so much space. (And he was recoding everything to work in MIX, which made I/O especially problematic.) But Corman was FAR from being the first word on Hash Table implementations. (In college, sometime in the 1970's, we talked about chaining hash tables and various implementations. Given the limitations on storage [RAM & punch cards...not disk or tape] you can bet we spent a lot of time making sure dead data didn't continue taking up space...though we didn't always properly clear it, merely deallocated it.)
So the "patent", by this "Doctrine of Equivalents" and "After-invented technology" would be considered a mere refinement of standard approaches. If the judge and jury are idiots, or possibly just not interested in justice, one can hope that some appeals court will notice this. (And hope that Google already has it in the court records, because otherwise the appeals courts won't be allowed to notice it.)
But the existence of that patent is further evidence that the patent system needs to be totally scrapped, and all extant patents be considered invalid, because of the malfeasance of the USPTO. I don't think it possible that mere misfeasance could lead to the current mess, though I suppose that there are some other felonies that would also be applicable. Fraud comes to mind. Possibly accepting bribes, though that would need to be proven, as it's not directly shown by the evidence to hand. But "improperly performing their duties in a way calculated to unjustly benefit some parties and unjustly injure others" seems like a good characterization. It might, however, be difficult to prove that they intended the injustice.
All in all, I don't think filing appropriate criminal charges against the offfice-holders at the USPTO would be very successful, however justified it might be. Much better would be to just declare the entire mess corrupt and revoke all existing patents and patent rulings (on, e.g., what can be patented). And then re-write the law into something that can actually be honestly applied.
At that, patent law probably isn't as bad as copyright law. Patents still expire. They may not reveal anything useful, but after they've expired they form a valid basis for claiming that some new patent is invalid. So they do have some good features. Copyrights, however, essentially never expire. And they are allowed to be used to cover items which are protected by a DRM that will definitely render that material "protected" unreadable before the copyright even comes up for renewal. (OTOH, copyrights are granted freely, and without formally filing. But someone else having produced essentially the same work previously isn't protection against a modified idea being copyrighted. In fact, even being in public domain now appears to no longer be protection.)
Have I given the impression that I consider the legal system corrupt? Compared the the legislators it's pure as the driven snow. Then there's the president...
Even without global warming, we can expect more severe climate variations than we have had in remembered history, because we have (recently) left the little climatic optimum. Global warming can only be asserted to be involved when there is a systematic distortion in one direction, e.g., more years of torrential rains or droughts, and not the other. Then you need to look carefully at the chain of causation and try to figure out why. (E.g., the warming ocean currents have redirected the monsoon is something to look at. And I believe that this is one predicted effect.) Note that this same event will cause new torrential rains in one area and droughts in another. Which makes figuring things out tricky.
But, because we have left the little climatic optimum, we can expect more unusual weather than we are accustomed to. Which means that, as the "noise level" has increased, we need more data before reliable conclusions can be reached. (Predictions are fairly easy, reliable predictions are insanely difficult. And if you can't make a reliable conclusion, you are often forced to offer your "best guess", which administrators will almost always dress up as a certainty.)
P.S.: I am not a climatologist. But I have had a job where I had to make predictions of traffic flows when changes were made. You just can't do even something that simple reliably. You can just make your best effort and then say something like "Well, most of our models say that a bridge there will slow down the traffic.". This conclusion is generally not welcome, and most people find it difficult to believe that an additional link will increase traffic congestion, but it often happens anyway.
Rule 17: Anyone citing Rule 7 as justification for anything has lost the argument.
If you can make up rules, so can I.
Now an actual rule 7 [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule7.htm ] goes:
Rule 7. Pleadings Allowed; Form of Motions and Other Papers
(a) Pleadings.
Only these pleadings are allowed:
(1) a complaint;
(2) an answer to a complaint;
(3) an answer to a counterclaim designated as a counterclaim;
(4) an answer to a crossclaim;
(5) a third-party complaint;
(6) an answer to a third-party complaint; and
(7) if the court orders one, a reply to an answer.
(b) Motions and Other Papers
(1) In General.
A request for a court order must be made by motion. The motion must:
(A) be in writing unless made during a hearing or trial;
(B) state with particularity the grounds for seeking the order; and
(C) state the relief sought.
(2) Form.
The rules governing captions and other matters of form in pleadings apply to motions and other papers.
If it's warm AND MOIST, then the planet will indeed support more diversity. But that diversity takes time to evolve (not just centuries) and I don't think people would give it an opportunity.
For that matter, life over most of the globe was a lot more diverse before people invented archery and nets. This is true whether it was warm, cool, or cold. The only exception is the tropical rain forests, where the climate was so intense that most tools were quickly destroyed by it. Then diversity tended to hang on until stainless steel was invented.
But I do agree that cutting pollution is the most important step, and that global warming is only ONE of the reasons that it should be done.
P.S.: Global warming is not intrinsically a bad thing. It *is*, however, bad for fixed species, individuals, and objects. Fertile areas have a tendency to turn into deserts more readily than deserts turn into fertile areas. Fences, highways, canyons, etc. tend to put obstacles in the way of species trying to migrate into a more hospitable location. And when they get there they're likely to find that it's outside the wildlife sanctuary that climate change has rendered inhospitable. And that some person has claimed the ownership of everything non-human on that turf. Which means THEM, if they try to live there.
In other words, expect climate change, whether warming or not, to decimate the existing species, which are already disappearing faster than at any time since the last Giant Meteor impact. (The dinosaur killer.)
P.S.: I don't think it's a coincidence that a bunch of volcanoes went off on the other side of the world at about the time of impact. I think the shock waves set them off. It's not an either/or kind of causation, but rather a both/and.
Those who bothered to track down the original paper claim this it was, indeed, a completely valid prediction, and that it wasn't prevented. It just didn't predict was it is being claimed that it predicted. It predicted "environmental refugees" and included people being forced off of farm land because it would no longer sustain them, etc. It also gave only a rough figure of "about twice what it was in" 1995(? don't remember the precise year. Whenever the study it was based on was made.) Now the study gave the number for that year for 25 million, so that's where the 50 million comes from. And considering the number of conflicts going on in areas where most people are subsistence farmers, that may be a very low projection.
P.S. I refuse to take anything that Barak Obama says as evidence of anything except that he's a politician. But he's *probably* better than his opponent (John McCsomething) would have been. Probably. This is known as damning with extremely faint praise.
An excellent point.
OTOH, while the alarmist reporting is just that, the weather has been increasingly unusual for the last decade or so. I'd just put it down to leaving the "little climatic optimum", but the average seems to tend towards warmer. E.g., when I got married 21 years ago we thought the middle of March a very safe date to pick for an outside ceremony. Fortunately my wife didn't like sun, so we didn't actually plan that, but we did plan lots of outside processions, etc. Around dusk it started to rain and hail, quite surprising us. But by an large things went off well. This year, however, it's the middle of April and it's still occasionally raining. Nothing catastrophic, so it's not making the news...except that the drought warning has been canceled. Note that if it were just one day there'd be nothing unusual about it. Even 30+ years ago it would occasionally rain lightly one day as late as June. And, as I said, if it was only this one year I'd just blame it on "freak weather". And if one year was hot, and the next cold I'd blame it on leaving the little climatic optimum (which we *have* done). But the changes are generally in the same direction...hotter...with only an occasional swing to colder.
Now leaving the little climatic optimum means that we can expect wilder weather swings than previously. (We entered it around the 1930's I think. So it's not reasonable for people to remember what it was like before we entered it, but you get both fewer floods AND fewer droughts in the little climatic optimum, and the weather is just stabler.)
Unfortunately, many of our systems for handling weather problems evolved during the little climatic optimum, so they are unsuited to weather outside of it, where wild swings in weather are more common. Additionally the increase in the number of people has meant that even those systems were already strained. (We've been getting drought warnings with normal rainfalls, because more people use more water.) (Also, around here rains after the weather has warmed means more growth in brush and grasses, which will dry out over the summer, making the fall fire season much more dangerous. That's when we can expect the disaster, but when it happens the news won't bother to blame it on the late spring rains. So you won't hear about it as an effect of global warming. This kind of indirect causation of disaster is actually the most common mode of action.)
So, yeah, the news is not to be believed. And you should just expect wilder swings in the weather. But that's not what we're seeing. It's averaging hotter, where the average should stay the same.
It's clear you don't live in a city. Probably in the suburbs.
OTOH, you are definitely right about it being a cause of overweight. But "outside" makes assumptions about what outside is like. On the street that I live on, ball is impossible, because it's mainly up and down, but at least the traffic is low. Other areas nearby have other problems...traffic being a common one, and everybody has a small yard. (Ours is larger than most, mainly because it's largely up and down. There's a park down the street and around the corner, and it's actually pretty good. But occasionally there are gangs there. It's been around a decade since there was a shooting. But parents might want to think a few times before letting there kids go there unescorted. (Depending on their age, of course. Most 12 year olds would have enough sense to leave if things started to get unpleasant...but can you say the same about either 8 year olds or 14 year olds?)
Suburbia is really a very different country. Or at least it was a few decades ago. The parks are fewer, but the yards are a lot bigger, and it's generally safer. (Even there, though, it seems to me that the average speeds at which cars are driven have increased, the traffic has gotten denser, and it's become more dangerous to ride a bicycle.) Suburbs seem to be in the process of turning into rather unpleasant cities. New dwellings either have no yards or have much smaller ones, and parks aren't getting any closer together. However the one's I'm familiar with are still nicer places than cities. Also lots more expensive...and not just in the initial purchase, but in the upkeep. Once you buy there, you probably need to resign yourself to a long commute in dense traffic. And gas prices aren't likely to get any cheaper. So it's going to cost you a couple of hours every work day and the fuel for your vehicle while you sit in traffic. Still, if you can get an older house, it's worth a lot to be able to say to your kids "Go play in the yard!". But don't presume that everyone lives in that same situation, as most people don't.
Performance need not suffer, though compilation speed certainly would. Perhaps you could have a compiler flag that switched between fast execution and fast compilation.
Also, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to extend from the primitive types, but you would definitely lose all the speed benefits if you did.
"Classes if necessary, but not necessarily classes" would be exactly the kind of tripe I would absolutely never expect an experienced C++ programmer to say.
This particular argument can be bolstered by looking at either Python or D. It can improve many programs.
Also, "garbage collection" shouldn't be purely a run-time feature. In a proper language you design the language differently when garbage collection is present than when it isn't. Clearly, however, one should be ABLE to request that an object be garbage collected at a particular point. But it should be a request, not an order, in case there are still references to it dangling around somewhere. (Actually, that would really be a request that garbage collection be initiated immediately, since you need to check all pointers anyway.)
Also, pointers should be separate from arithmetic values. It should be impossible to convert from an arithmetic value to a pointer (though not necessarily conversely). This greatly simplifies garbage collection.
The compiler should be smart enough to handle basic classes (int, etc. should be classes, with normal class syntax except that literals exist) with special consideration an convert them into things that the CPU can directly handle. But in the language they should be classes (except for the special literal syntax). Thus a string is a class although a literal string might be written "a string". And literals can use standard class notation, thus 1.add(3) which is what 1 + 3 would be sugar for.
The major flaw *I* find with Java is the incredible mess it makes of I/O (but some people seem to like it). A less basic flaw is the mess it made of generics. I understand that this was to maintain compatibility with older code, but it's not worth it. A different answer should have been found. I guess it's a matter of taste, but I really dislike the classes wrapped around classes wrapped around classes kind of syntax that Java promotes. (It's not inherent in the language, but in the esthetics of the library designers.) I can see the utility, but it's really ugly, and a different approach should have been found. But that might have required either multiple inheritance or mixins.
As others have said, this kind of reactor is past it's intended use date and should be decommissioned.
After the disaster has happened the things you can do to mitigate the problem are quite limited, and, to the extent that I understand things, they seem to be doing as well as possible. This doesn't mean they are doing a good job, just that there doesn't seem to be any way to do a better one. The time to fix this problem is before the disaster.
Disasters aren't predictable. Accidents may be, but if you could predict it and didn't deal with it, then it's not a disaster, it's corruption or fraud or something. (Possibly mis- or malfeasance.)
What this means is that you can't predict what disaster is most likely. It could be a tsunami, a meteor strike, a union strike, a presidential decree, the collapse of the government, a psychotic employee, or something else. And you need to be prepared to deal with all of them. Sometimes the only way to deal with things is to die (e.g., giant meteor strike), but that's an answer, i.e., "I rate the likelihood of this disaster as low enough that I'm willing to deal with it by dying." This is fine when you are the only person is affected, but in circumstances where a large number of people are going to be affected when you adopt a "way of dealing with" a disaster, you are asserting the right to choose how all those people will deal with it (or at least constraining what options they have). And when you do it without informing them ... well, it's immoral to not have a very large margin of safety.
The only intractable problem about a Mars colony is a closed ecosystem. And if we can solve that, I'm not sure that a planet is the right place to aim for. Asteroids look a lot more promising. (Though you'd want 3...a carbonaceous chondrite, a metallic one, and a head of frozen gases. If you're far enough out (the outer asteroid belt?) you might be able to find all three blended in one body. Otherwise you'll need to catch at least the frozen gasses item and fetch it.)