Finland is ridiculously accommodating of habitual offenders. In fact you'll have to kill about three times before they take it seriously. There's no criminal-law mechanism to give a murderer an actual life sentence, so most are released at 12 years. Furthermore, the court system rejects a lot of cases based on "lack of evidence" and considers many premeditated killings "manslaughters", which means that the sentence is formally 9 years and in practice it is only half of that. If mental incapacity is found, then the sentence is even shorter. So, we have cases like the drive-in lane shooter who have already killed several people and are still roaming free on the streets and shooting people at random. Consequently, the only legal way to actually keep a dangerous killer in jail is involuntary commitment. Since funding for psychiatry is short, this method is rarely used. There was even one case where a psychotic neckbearded guy killed a random teenage girl on the street just to get committed to a psychiatric hospital; he had been previously made an outpatient to save funds.
The court was wise in here. It's never OK to underestimate the ingenuity of the inmates. At the now-closed Katajanokka prison in Helsinki, inmates made a tattoo machine out of a vibration motor extracted from a PS2 DualShock controller. In this case, a USB wireless modem is small enough for "internal mail", and any components broken by the guards can be potentially replaced. And whenever you ask "what's the harm", the problem is similar to Pablo Escobar's case. He was officially in jail but in practice in house arrest, and could meet criminal associates and order hits at will. An Internet connection would be a virtual license to continue criminal activities.
Only Czar's Russia got it right: first you were deported to a jail in Siberia, and then all correspondence is disallowed - you're prevented even from reading newspapers. And if you want to step up from this, which would be appropriate for drug lords and the like, the method is called Nacht und Nebel.
Infrared-dark clothing and camouflage net is already regular military standard. Hyperspectral imaging is already used; the government claimed that it was used to help find Osama bin Laden.
Biofuel means that per each pound of carbon burned, an equal amount is absorbed by plants. It closes the cycle. No carbon (petroleum) is removed from the ground and turned into carbon dioxide. Even if it was a fossil fuel, still contribution of aviation into the total greenhouse gas emissions of the world is only 2%. Second, it's a pure myth that biofuels would be worse than petroleum derivatives. With modern technology, they're better. In fact, Neste Oil is producing isomerized alkane fuel from vegetable oil that, if blended with petrodiesel, makes it better. The cetane number and cloud points are better, and there are no heteroatoms (oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, what have you). The chemical composition is defined exactly by the plant source and the processing steps, whereas oil refining is all about separating all that extra crap contained in natural petroleum and carefully reformulating the rest of the partially decomposed plant waste into something only slightly less objectionable. I'd imagine that the military would be delighted to switch to a better diesel fuel (compared to JP-8) even if it cost a few cents per gallon more.
Redefining the kilogram with the Planck constant doesn't help with accuracy, since the Planck constant itself is known to the precision of 5e-8 only. So, in effect, the determination to the accuracy of 1e-8 isn't a major improvement. Just think of 1e-8 in terms of the prototype kilogram. 1e-8 means that the mass of the prototype (1000 g) can be fixed to within 0.01 mg, which is really a lot. This is an amount that can be measured by hand, without using any fancy and expensive machine. Our university department has a regular, everyone-and-their-dog-has-one, off-the-shelf, scientific garden variety, scale, which measures to this precision, five decimals to the gram. To put this in context, I use a four-decimal scale for everyday weighing in small-scale work; I usually avoid the five-decimal scale because it's prone to annoying hunting behavior (it "dances around" the correct value) more than the more robust four-decimal scale. In effect, it's just passing the buck if you define the kilogram based on the Planck constant.
I object to using Wikimedia Foundation funds to develop and implement what should be a commercial operation. Sure, no one would object to choice, but also no one should feel entitled to be handed the entire Web nicely categorized into "naughty" and "nice" without compensation. Please feel free to host abridged or censored mirrors of Wikipedia - as long as you don't demand Wikimedia Foundation to fund it.
The brain isn't the retina - it can't distinguish colors with a single protein. The only concern is the convolution integral of the energy spectrum of the light filtering through the bone in the ear canal and the response spectrum of the photosensitive pigment in the brain cells. If the wavelength absorption/detection maximum is different from the spectrum of the delivered light, only the tails of the wavelength distribution will actually affect the brain cells.
I have no doubt that some light will reach the brain, my only doubt if it has a clinical benefit. For many of the things that are marketed for a measurable effect on physiology, the marketers fail to mention that although the effect is statistically significant, it's not very large. Patients affected with a serious illness such as SAD could easily expect a 100% cure, even though a drug or other treatment could provide a 20% improvement only.
For the record, I coined that word on the fly, since "korvavalo" would be mispronounced anyway. Phone = sound, lume = light. Didn't check that with my Greek colleague, though - any volunteers?
"Valkee" is also nice, it's not just Finnish, but Oulu dialect: "bright".
Just to clarify as the original poster, my only connection to Valkee is living in the same country. The idea is just so Frankenstein I had to post it. Also, it was mentioned in a nationally circulated tabloid. Their poster did show by fMRI that something is happening. The bone in the ear canal is very thin, and easily lets light through. The clinical trials are not yet ready, but that hasn't stopped them selling the device. That's good, I would say - the perennial complaint about Finnish research is that it's commercialized late and seldom.
Can someone knowledgeable in setting up uranium enrichment plant systems explain us why do the machines have to be connected to not just a network, but the public Internet of all networks?
As you can see from the cut-n-paste, the Wikipedia article explicitly gives sources. There is almost no original text from the Wikipedia writer. I kind of see where you're coming from, but you fail at it.
These are actually in Lissajous orbits around L2. Just like a massive body, L2 is an energy minimum. You can put satellites in orbit around it, even in several different orientations even though it's empty space.
ALPHA/CERN claims an energy of "few eV" per particle. 1 eV corresponds to 11605 K, so it's still pretty hot, and would shine in bright blue, although mostly in ultraviolet. At this energy, the average speed is still about 13 km/s. Without containment, it would live some ~10 microseconds (72 micros/m). Even if the particles could be somehow collimated, this is still extremely fast to detect a drop due to gravity, since the drop would be about 25 nanometers per meter. That's not even a wavelength of visible light, but extreme UV; the width of a bacterial cell wall or flagellum, in other terms. Perhaps a method analogous to that used at Institut Laue-Langevin by Abele, Jenke et al. to measure the drop in neutrons could be used. Not as is, though, since it depends on hitting the neutron with a resonator - made of ordinary matter. I am nevertheless confident that some sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption will be made that does the same without matter contact.
Strictly speaking this would apply only if the Earth was a single particle. You can calculate a de Broglie wavelength for everything, but everything is not a single wave, but a composite object.
Except that this wasn't at the just at the pole, but at the extreme northern end of the Scandinavian peninsula. It's a populated, relatively "southern" region in the sense that these regions still experience normal days and nights for most of the year.
That isn't needed since we're in the center of the universe. Or, more accurately, nothing is; any place you select has equal claim to that title. The picture isn't a 2D map, it's a projection of the sphere what we would see if we were in floating in empty space somewhere nearby, and could see redshift only instead of light. (Visual is actually not a good spectrum to see the sky, since most of what you see are particularly bright/hot stars relatively nearby. This doesn't give a very good picture of the structure of the universe.)
Try searching "cellulose". You'll see that Christmas is also a nadir, extending up to New Year. In fact, most of the correlations Google gives you have the same exact pattern: the major peak is every September - it that falls to the baseline around November. A second peak is found in January. I think what we're seeing is students searching for homework answers from the Internet. The correlated words are all those that students are likely to search, most of them being unrelated to cellulose. In effect, we're not seeing ethereal "trends" or "Zeitgeist emerging", but in 20/20 hindsight obviously, only what normal random people do daily. So, congcratulations, based on this correlation, you've developed a theory called college semesters!
What they did is in fact rather easy to explain. First, the background. The early universe, right after its birth, was so small that sound waves could propagate thru it in so-called baryon acoustic oscillations. Concentrations of matter caused gravitational collapses that rebounded in radiation-forced implosions, creating bubbles - roughly spherical voids surrounded by matter. Since everything happened at once, the bubbles were of the approximately same size (think opening a soda can - you don't get inch-diameter bubbles, do you?). After the universe had expanded, the surfaces of the bubbles formed the cosmic filamentary structures we see today; galaxies formed at the densest intersections of these bubbles and filaments.
Second, the work. It's hard to figure out what's the distance or speed of a galaxy by just looking at it. Redshift is the most obvious, giving you speed and consequently distance, and that was used here first. Supernovas are one solution, functioning as standard candles. Their trick was to use the filamentary structure of the universe itself as the measuring stick. Equally sized bubbles meant that while most galaxy-galaxy distances are random, you still get an overdensity of 150 megaparsec separations. These are between two galaxies on opposite sides of the same bubble. Exploitation of this fact allowed the extend the redshift survey more reliably to larger distances. This gave them the world's farthest-reaching "radar gun". The result was that smooth accelerating expansion was confirmed for half of the age of the universe.
Everyone's talking theoretical, when there is practical precedent: waste collection. In Finland, waste collection was privatized, but in most municipalities, with a catch: the market leader is a municipal corporation. In itself there's nothing wrong with this, except when municipalities interpret this so that the municipal corporation has the right to tell where to place different trashcans, and to force each household to pay their rate. In fact, there is a case where a municipality forced a private corporation to remove their sorted waste collection points (i.e. collecting glass, metal, and paper separately) since it was competing with the municipal corporation. The municipal corp's corresponding point was kilometers away. So, the effect was that the municipality forced people to walk miles and miles to dispose of their sorted waste. This is harmful to both the environment - since people won't care about waste sorting if the gov't is hostile to that - and market fairness.
The really *wrong* thing about this is that the legistlature and the courts think they have the democratic right to regulate this in this manner. I think that a municipality should have the right to provide a broadband service, but not with special legal protection.
I think $33 million was the cost of the prototype AMS-01, not the full-scale AMS-02. Wikipedia is NOT helpful this time, there's just a dead link to a secondary source. Second, AMS-02 had to be redesigned and was also postponed.
It's obviously commendable to remove the "feature", but doing it after the fact is worse than not implementing it in the first place. The wider problem is the "autopsy" approach used here: when something goes wrong, only then analysis and corrections are done. As a consequence, you always need a catastrophic failure in order to drive developments in security. This is the worst possible way to do it. Furthermore, as often in security issues, you'll end up with a whack-a-mole game - which no one necessarily wants to even play - when trying to curb security failures by different companies - of different moral integrities, of course. The only way to solve this is to have legistlation that requires a certain level of security, particularly the security of personal information.
A crucial difference between a bank-consumer and a state-citizen transaction is that the bank usually pays if something goes wrong. In this case, the bank or credit card company definitely does not want credit card fraud to happen on its system, and has a vested interest in keeping it secure. It's a good and obvious idea to piggyback government authentication on bank authentication.
The administration is merely trying to reinvent what has been used successfully in other countries already. Here in Finland, for example, I can log in to many government services using my online bank credentials, which have been verified by a personal visit to the bank. This is not exactly rocket science, if you think about it. All it needs is political will.
Slashdot Mirror
Finland is ridiculously accommodating of habitual offenders. In fact you'll have to kill about three times before they take it seriously. There's no criminal-law mechanism to give a murderer an actual life sentence, so most are released at 12 years. Furthermore, the court system rejects a lot of cases based on "lack of evidence" and considers many premeditated killings "manslaughters", which means that the sentence is formally 9 years and in practice it is only half of that. If mental incapacity is found, then the sentence is even shorter. So, we have cases like the drive-in lane shooter who have already killed several people and are still roaming free on the streets and shooting people at random. Consequently, the only legal way to actually keep a dangerous killer in jail is involuntary commitment. Since funding for psychiatry is short, this method is rarely used. There was even one case where a psychotic neckbearded guy killed a random teenage girl on the street just to get committed to a psychiatric hospital; he had been previously made an outpatient to save funds.
The court was wise in here. It's never OK to underestimate the ingenuity of the inmates. At the now-closed Katajanokka prison in Helsinki, inmates made a tattoo machine out of a vibration motor extracted from a PS2 DualShock controller. In this case, a USB wireless modem is small enough for "internal mail", and any components broken by the guards can be potentially replaced. And whenever you ask "what's the harm", the problem is similar to Pablo Escobar's case. He was officially in jail but in practice in house arrest, and could meet criminal associates and order hits at will. An Internet connection would be a virtual license to continue criminal activities.
Only Czar's Russia got it right: first you were deported to a jail in Siberia, and then all correspondence is disallowed - you're prevented even from reading newspapers. And if you want to step up from this, which would be appropriate for drug lords and the like, the method is called Nacht und Nebel.
Bacterial contamination of cooling towers is possible. Bacteria can grow in cooling water, viruses cannot. There was one Legionella outbreak in France.
Infrared-dark clothing and camouflage net is already regular military standard. Hyperspectral imaging is already used; the government claimed that it was used to help find Osama bin Laden.
Biofuel means that per each pound of carbon burned, an equal amount is absorbed by plants. It closes the cycle. No carbon (petroleum) is removed from the ground and turned into carbon dioxide. Even if it was a fossil fuel, still contribution of aviation into the total greenhouse gas emissions of the world is only 2%. Second, it's a pure myth that biofuels would be worse than petroleum derivatives. With modern technology, they're better. In fact, Neste Oil is producing isomerized alkane fuel from vegetable oil that, if blended with petrodiesel, makes it better. The cetane number and cloud points are better, and there are no heteroatoms (oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, what have you). The chemical composition is defined exactly by the plant source and the processing steps, whereas oil refining is all about separating all that extra crap contained in natural petroleum and carefully reformulating the rest of the partially decomposed plant waste into something only slightly less objectionable. I'd imagine that the military would be delighted to switch to a better diesel fuel (compared to JP-8) even if it cost a few cents per gallon more.
Redefining the kilogram with the Planck constant doesn't help with accuracy, since the Planck constant itself is known to the precision of 5e-8 only. So, in effect, the determination to the accuracy of 1e-8 isn't a major improvement. Just think of 1e-8 in terms of the prototype kilogram. 1e-8 means that the mass of the prototype (1000 g) can be fixed to within 0.01 mg, which is really a lot. This is an amount that can be measured by hand, without using any fancy and expensive machine. Our university department has a regular, everyone-and-their-dog-has-one, off-the-shelf, scientific garden variety, scale, which measures to this precision, five decimals to the gram. To put this in context, I use a four-decimal scale for everyday weighing in small-scale work; I usually avoid the five-decimal scale because it's prone to annoying hunting behavior (it "dances around" the correct value) more than the more robust four-decimal scale. In effect, it's just passing the buck if you define the kilogram based on the Planck constant.
Thinking of gait analysis, I couldn't not imagine future spy training being like this, except in a burqa.
Perry is a card-carrying creation scientist. Your argument is invalid.
I object to using Wikimedia Foundation funds to develop and implement what should be a commercial operation. Sure, no one would object to choice, but also no one should feel entitled to be handed the entire Web nicely categorized into "naughty" and "nice" without compensation. Please feel free to host abridged or censored mirrors of Wikipedia - as long as you don't demand Wikimedia Foundation to fund it.
I have no doubt that some light will reach the brain, my only doubt if it has a clinical benefit. For many of the things that are marketed for a measurable effect on physiology, the marketers fail to mention that although the effect is statistically significant, it's not very large. Patients affected with a serious illness such as SAD could easily expect a 100% cure, even though a drug or other treatment could provide a 20% improvement only.
For the record, I coined that word on the fly, since "korvavalo" would be mispronounced anyway. Phone = sound, lume = light. Didn't check that with my Greek colleague, though - any volunteers? "Valkee" is also nice, it's not just Finnish, but Oulu dialect: "bright".
Just to clarify as the original poster, my only connection to Valkee is living in the same country. The idea is just so Frankenstein I had to post it. Also, it was mentioned in a nationally circulated tabloid. Their poster did show by fMRI that something is happening. The bone in the ear canal is very thin, and easily lets light through. The clinical trials are not yet ready, but that hasn't stopped them selling the device. That's good, I would say - the perennial complaint about Finnish research is that it's commercialized late and seldom.
Can someone knowledgeable in setting up uranium enrichment plant systems explain us why do the machines have to be connected to not just a network, but the public Internet of all networks?
As you can see from the cut-n-paste, the Wikipedia article explicitly gives sources. There is almost no original text from the Wikipedia writer. I kind of see where you're coming from, but you fail at it.
These are actually in Lissajous orbits around L2. Just like a massive body, L2 is an energy minimum. You can put satellites in orbit around it, even in several different orientations even though it's empty space.
ALPHA/CERN claims an energy of "few eV" per particle. 1 eV corresponds to 11605 K, so it's still pretty hot, and would shine in bright blue, although mostly in ultraviolet. At this energy, the average speed is still about 13 km/s. Without containment, it would live some ~10 microseconds (72 micros/m). Even if the particles could be somehow collimated, this is still extremely fast to detect a drop due to gravity, since the drop would be about 25 nanometers per meter. That's not even a wavelength of visible light, but extreme UV; the width of a bacterial cell wall or flagellum, in other terms. Perhaps a method analogous to that used at Institut Laue-Langevin by Abele, Jenke et al. to measure the drop in neutrons could be used. Not as is, though, since it depends on hitting the neutron with a resonator - made of ordinary matter. I am nevertheless confident that some sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption will be made that does the same without matter contact.
Strictly speaking this would apply only if the Earth was a single particle. You can calculate a de Broglie wavelength for everything, but everything is not a single wave, but a composite object.
Except that this wasn't at the just at the pole, but at the extreme northern end of the Scandinavian peninsula. It's a populated, relatively "southern" region in the sense that these regions still experience normal days and nights for most of the year.
That isn't needed since we're in the center of the universe. Or, more accurately, nothing is; any place you select has equal claim to that title. The picture isn't a 2D map, it's a projection of the sphere what we would see if we were in floating in empty space somewhere nearby, and could see redshift only instead of light. (Visual is actually not a good spectrum to see the sky, since most of what you see are particularly bright/hot stars relatively nearby. This doesn't give a very good picture of the structure of the universe.)
Try searching "cellulose". You'll see that Christmas is also a nadir, extending up to New Year. In fact, most of the correlations Google gives you have the same exact pattern: the major peak is every September - it that falls to the baseline around November. A second peak is found in January. I think what we're seeing is students searching for homework answers from the Internet. The correlated words are all those that students are likely to search, most of them being unrelated to cellulose. In effect, we're not seeing ethereal "trends" or "Zeitgeist emerging", but in 20/20 hindsight obviously, only what normal random people do daily. So, congcratulations, based on this correlation, you've developed a theory called college semesters!
What they did is in fact rather easy to explain. First, the background. The early universe, right after its birth, was so small that sound waves could propagate thru it in so-called baryon acoustic oscillations. Concentrations of matter caused gravitational collapses that rebounded in radiation-forced implosions, creating bubbles - roughly spherical voids surrounded by matter. Since everything happened at once, the bubbles were of the approximately same size (think opening a soda can - you don't get inch-diameter bubbles, do you?). After the universe had expanded, the surfaces of the bubbles formed the cosmic filamentary structures we see today; galaxies formed at the densest intersections of these bubbles and filaments.
Second, the work. It's hard to figure out what's the distance or speed of a galaxy by just looking at it. Redshift is the most obvious, giving you speed and consequently distance, and that was used here first. Supernovas are one solution, functioning as standard candles. Their trick was to use the filamentary structure of the universe itself as the measuring stick. Equally sized bubbles meant that while most galaxy-galaxy distances are random, you still get an overdensity of 150 megaparsec separations. These are between two galaxies on opposite sides of the same bubble. Exploitation of this fact allowed the extend the redshift survey more reliably to larger distances. This gave them the world's farthest-reaching "radar gun". The result was that smooth accelerating expansion was confirmed for half of the age of the universe.
Everyone's talking theoretical, when there is practical precedent: waste collection. In Finland, waste collection was privatized, but in most municipalities, with a catch: the market leader is a municipal corporation. In itself there's nothing wrong with this, except when municipalities interpret this so that the municipal corporation has the right to tell where to place different trashcans, and to force each household to pay their rate. In fact, there is a case where a municipality forced a private corporation to remove their sorted waste collection points (i.e. collecting glass, metal, and paper separately) since it was competing with the municipal corporation. The municipal corp's corresponding point was kilometers away. So, the effect was that the municipality forced people to walk miles and miles to dispose of their sorted waste. This is harmful to both the environment - since people won't care about waste sorting if the gov't is hostile to that - and market fairness. The really *wrong* thing about this is that the legistlature and the courts think they have the democratic right to regulate this in this manner. I think that a municipality should have the right to provide a broadband service, but not with special legal protection.
I think $33 million was the cost of the prototype AMS-01, not the full-scale AMS-02. Wikipedia is NOT helpful this time, there's just a dead link to a secondary source. Second, AMS-02 had to be redesigned and was also postponed.
It's obviously commendable to remove the "feature", but doing it after the fact is worse than not implementing it in the first place. The wider problem is the "autopsy" approach used here: when something goes wrong, only then analysis and corrections are done. As a consequence, you always need a catastrophic failure in order to drive developments in security. This is the worst possible way to do it. Furthermore, as often in security issues, you'll end up with a whack-a-mole game - which no one necessarily wants to even play - when trying to curb security failures by different companies - of different moral integrities, of course. The only way to solve this is to have legistlation that requires a certain level of security, particularly the security of personal information.
A crucial difference between a bank-consumer and a state-citizen transaction is that the bank usually pays if something goes wrong. In this case, the bank or credit card company definitely does not want credit card fraud to happen on its system, and has a vested interest in keeping it secure. It's a good and obvious idea to piggyback government authentication on bank authentication. The administration is merely trying to reinvent what has been used successfully in other countries already. Here in Finland, for example, I can log in to many government services using my online bank credentials, which have been verified by a personal visit to the bank. This is not exactly rocket science, if you think about it. All it needs is political will.