It's a really bad idea to have encryption at such a high level, especially when it's optional and inefficient. Encryption is one of those things that, if it is to work at all, it has to be absolutely right. Mistakes aren't optional.
It also complicates certification. Encrypting at a single point means only that one point needs to be FIPS-certified for US Govt work, for example. Other certification programs are going to be similar - the more potential points of failure, the more that has to be checked, the more expensive it'll be and the more likely it'll be slipped under the radar rather than scrutinized properly. That's Bad.
XML has all kinds of extras - XML-RPC, for example. A list of XML markup languages at Wikipedia suggests there are waaaaaaay too many. There are even two different competing standards for marking up web pages for search engines (besides the archaic metatags) - Schema, a Google/Microsoft invention, and DublinCore, invented by everyone else and a kitchen sink. Of course, XML isn't the only meta-language these days. RDF is the basis for SparQL - the W3C's answer to Cold Fusion.
The entire point of HTML was that it was simple. A billion custom standards, many of which require some sort of library or other handler specifically for them, isn't simple. I'm not clear that any of them provide anything that cannot be provided more efficiently, more effectively and in a more distributed/cloud-friendly manner using servers and utilities that have been around longer, been tested more thoroughly and are genuinely "enterprise-ready" (which I'll take to mean Mr Spock wouldn't object to installing it).
My guess is that the questioner would pick an answer from someone who knew bugger all 99.999% of the time. Given the odds of this occurring by chance alone are virtually nil, it's safe to assume the questioner can indeed distinguish the two even if they're absolutely guaranteed to get the categorization totally wrong.
My guess is that 20-25% of the readership of Slashdot has studied enough physics or radiochemistry to have all the answers as pertains anyone in Tokyo. Possibly more, as it was a good portion of the A-level physics syllabus when I was in school and if you wanted to go to University you typically took one of the traditional hard sciences (at least) regardless of what you were applying for.
I have the minor added advantage that my A-level computing project was a radioisotope identification expert system (you fed in the energies, it determined what combination of isotopes was the most likely to produce that combination) but anyone with a radiochemistry reference book and sample data from geological surveys and nuclear spills could provide as good (or better) conclusions than what was ultimately a very trivial bit of code.
In other words, there should be 100,000+ people on Slashdot who could write a University-grade paper on everything the original poster asked.
Well, what the best device is depends on what it is you want to measure. Alpha particles are not harmful if on the outside - they can't penetrate the skin - but can be exceptionally nasty if ingested. Beta particles can travel further and through more, but still aren't exceptionally dangerous at the kinds of doses you're likely talking about. Even radioactive particles that emit gamma aren't dangerous in low quantities.
The limestone caves in the Peak District are considered dangerous enough that guides can't go down them on consecutive tours and sections are off-limits to potholers. You should probably wait 10-15 mins after going on a tour before getting into a car if there's a group of you. The source of the radioactivity is a mix of uranium-containing ores and radon-bearing igneous rocks. If you were to encounter anything comparable in Tokyo, you'd be in serious trouble,
In reality, the biggest hot-spot reported to date was due to antiques. In all probability, uranium ore (a very popular mineral for adding a yellow tint to glazes and glass in the 1800s and early 1900s) would be what was found, although depending on the instruments used, radon-based paints (very popular for its glow-in-the-dark properties) is another strong possibility. Neither could be considered remotely a health hazard to your average citizen. In fact, given the volcanic nature of Japan, radon-bearing rocks are almost certainly your number 1 health hazard. For that, you'd want a Geiger counter (only if paranoid) and a decent extraction fan (radon is a gas).
If you're worried about fallout, then put a small plastic tray on the roof to collect rain and borrow a Geiger counter. If the rainfall contains nothing of significance now, then it won't do in the future. It takes a LOT to put something as heavy as dust as high up as the cloud layer.
If you are absolutely paranoid, take a roll of 35mm film into a pitch-black room and unroll it. Cut it into squares. Put each square between two pieces of cardboard that are just thick enough that absolutely no light will get through. Use duct tape round the edges to seal the sandwich up. Radioactive dust is the biggest problem and dust is worst in the corners of rooms, since they're hard to clean. Put a film sandwich in all the corners in your house. Leave them there for, say, about a week. Gather them up and take them to anyone with a darkroom to develop. If the squares are completely fogged over, THEN you can worry. And buy a better vaccuum cleaner. If the film shows little or nothing, then you can be absolutely certain that the only thing that you're in danger of is a heart attack from self-induced stress.
I certainly see where you're coming from and it is an exceptionally difficult problem. I've been busting my brains out trying to figure out what sort of dynamic would be needed in order to have protection for individual rights with little or no risk of that same structure destroying those rights. Asymmetrical functions exist, but absent Asimov's Psychohistory it is extremely hard to see how these can be applied in a social or political context.
I've the skeleton of a theory, but I haven't the skills to know if that skeleton holds up to inspection or - even if it did - whether there is any way to flesh it out into something practical. The odds are definitely against me, since if it were that easy to come up with a stable system, people would have done so years ago.
If the database of interest contained any personally-identifying information, then the Data Protection Registrar would be an obvious choice. In all other cases, The Guardian newspaper seems to be the agency of choice for dealing with abuse of power.
As I mentioned above, the first problem is that there's no good definition of Libertarianism.
I'd also argue a point I've made a few times, which is that society is better off with a functional balance between factions. In this case, the faction known as the Federal Government has a mandate to operate a pan-US currency. In order for this to be functional, no other faction can be permitted to conflict with that mandate. Add to it, perhaps - essentially credit cards go beyond physical currency - but not block it.
In this particular case, I don't see this as being an attempt to usurp power, I see it as an attempt to usurp voters. Louisiana gets to complain about the "big bad awful" Federal Government suppressing its laws -- unless it backfires, in which case those backing the politicians can complain about the "big bad awful" State Government suppressing its laws.
Any organized body that exists for the sole purpose of organizing something else is a "governmental institution" in the loosest sense of the term. As such, there's amazingly little that Libertarians should not be objecting to if it were truly "governmental institutions" they objected to. The reality is that the definition of "governmental" is shaped to include everything the defining Libertarian is opposed to and exclude anything they are not opposed to.
I have absolutely no objection to people being selective (although I would prefer it if people used objective criteria and were open to those criteria being falsified - and that's true of people of all political persuasions). I do object to using personally-defined vocabulary as if it were universal and I certainly object to people rejecting methods because their personal definitions tell them to - although to be fair to Libertarians, they don't do that any more than anyone else.
...a thinking man's action hero, but surely the role of The Doctor is already taken.:)
Seriously, that would be a wonderful blend of traits for Hollywood to experiment with. They've not done anything like that, leaving it mostly to the Brits - and even then the UK has produced exceedingly few such characters overall. I've never really thought much about how such characters would work in the US because there haven't been any, but if Shatner thinks that it would work well for actors and audience alike, then maybe it's time for someone to write a script for it.
I agree it's a paradigm shift. I refer you to a point I've made many, many times - if you want to beat Microsoft Office, you can't succeed by merely chasing them - especially on their own turf. The only way to succeed is to define the turf, define the finishing posts, and have others be the ones chasing. Copying Microsoft is doomed to failure - not only are you too focused on what someone else is doing (try that with a hammer if you want to know why it's a bad move), but when you finally do get round to changing the game, you've reduced your advantage.
It actually comes with standard satellite link parameters. For non-standard orbits, you'd need to write a scriptlet, sure. But if you're designing the network, wouldn't you want to write your OWN scriptlet and not use an assumed set of values?
Yeah, the difference is I've been reading a lot of the articles on the subject and they all say something slightly different. There was no historically discernible difference between the fatalities in rich and poor, so malnutrition is unlikely to have been a significant influence. That doesn't mean environmental factors weren't a greater influence, it just means that particular factor can be ruled out.
(Actually, the North of England has oral traditions to the effect that well-water protected villages from the Plague. Most likely, the use of properly-dug and properly-maintained wells would have reduced contact between people of different areas, reducing the spread of the disease. With the frequent contamination of wells by villagers, wells weren't any better than rivers.)
Not necessarily. Genes can become "fossilized" (ie: never get activated, just lie totally dormant) according to the state of junk DNA and the epigenome. As such, it would not require a significant change to have a significant effect. And if the change was indeed in the epigenome, then genetic decoding won't detect it at all.
You are correct in your reference. Random mutations can - and will - occur all the time. Eventually, such a mutation will be deadly to humans. In the case of this particular pathogen, it may find other ways to be deadly or the reverse mutations (which have an equal probability of happening) could arise.
However, I'm less concerned with Plague as far as random mutations are concerned. ANY bacterium can evolve to become deadly and the soil has a lot of bacteria. We haven't sequenced more than a tiny fraction and so can't possibly get a solid grasp on what bacterium poses the greatest risk. We rely heavily on past behaviour as a guide but evolution doesn't pay much attention to the past. What survives and multiplies is what does well today.
I wouldn't say you were panic-mongering - most virologists and bacteriologists study mutations for precisely the reason you give.
Probably. Which is why, as I mentioned above, I'd regard Network Simulator and the Click module that lets you route actual traffic to/from it to be a far more productive use of time.
Just download NS-3 (which does work under Linux), install NASA's Delay-Tolerant Protocol and use that to simulate networks of satellites and ground stations. For added fun, install the module that lets you use Network Simulator as a NIC under Linux and tunnel actual traffic across your simulated network to see how it would perform in practice.
Not only will this be more reliable than this Unity game, it'll be more accurate, more customizable and more productive (since you get network stats rather than a score). Further, since you can design your own protocols and circuits under NS-3, you can also factor in the effects of Turbo codes, various Reed-Solomon options, alternative communications protocols, etc.
Best of all, that kind of experience might actually give you some credibility amongst network engineers and protocol engineers. "Some" meaning "more than a high score on the game will ever do".
What's interesting is that the Black Death is a mutation of a perfectly harmless bacterium that is common in the soil and that modern versions of the Plague are very mild variants of the Black Death - suggesting that further mutations seriously reduced its potency. A good thing.
It's actually not that convenient to write documents in LaTeX, because there are no WYSIWYG DTP editors for it. There aren't that many decent WYSIWYM editors, LEd is discontinued and that was one of the best after you fixed the crappy default directory structure for the templates.
A good DTP solution would let you rubber-band windows, a-la early Ventura Publisher and similar software, and reveal/conceal all the tags (they're not useful for writing the content, they're only useful for designing the layout) a-la WordPerfect.
Since you can draw boxes with Impress, there's no reason why you can't do the first of those. Provided Writer can do anything LaTeX can do, there is no reason why Writer shouldn't let you modify markup directly when it's more convenient to edit that way. If it can't do something that LaTeX can, it needs extending with that functionality anyway. The argument that you should then be able to edit as LaTeX then applies.
Calc should be capable of calling R and thus embedding anything R can do within it.
"Using the right tool" is the wrong maxim for integrated software, since you are ALWAYS using a shell on top of a more complete environment and shells can always call other shells. It's no different from your web browser using a plugin to call a distinct application, or your OS calling a module that accesses a userspace-supplied service. (Think Linux' userspace filesystem support.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a really bad idea to have encryption at such a high level, especially when it's optional and inefficient. Encryption is one of those things that, if it is to work at all, it has to be absolutely right. Mistakes aren't optional.
It also complicates certification. Encrypting at a single point means only that one point needs to be FIPS-certified for US Govt work, for example. Other certification programs are going to be similar - the more potential points of failure, the more that has to be checked, the more expensive it'll be and the more likely it'll be slipped under the radar rather than scrutinized properly. That's Bad.
XML has all kinds of extras - XML-RPC, for example. A list of XML markup languages at Wikipedia suggests there are waaaaaaay too many. There are even two different competing standards for marking up web pages for search engines (besides the archaic metatags) - Schema, a Google/Microsoft invention, and DublinCore, invented by everyone else and a kitchen sink. Of course, XML isn't the only meta-language these days. RDF is the basis for SparQL - the W3C's answer to Cold Fusion.
The entire point of HTML was that it was simple. A billion custom standards, many of which require some sort of library or other handler specifically for them, isn't simple. I'm not clear that any of them provide anything that cannot be provided more efficiently, more effectively and in a more distributed/cloud-friendly manner using servers and utilities that have been around longer, been tested more thoroughly and are genuinely "enterprise-ready" (which I'll take to mean Mr Spock wouldn't object to installing it).
My guess is that the questioner would pick an answer from someone who knew bugger all 99.999% of the time. Given the odds of this occurring by chance alone are virtually nil, it's safe to assume the questioner can indeed distinguish the two even if they're absolutely guaranteed to get the categorization totally wrong.
My guess is that 20-25% of the readership of Slashdot has studied enough physics or radiochemistry to have all the answers as pertains anyone in Tokyo. Possibly more, as it was a good portion of the A-level physics syllabus when I was in school and if you wanted to go to University you typically took one of the traditional hard sciences (at least) regardless of what you were applying for.
I have the minor added advantage that my A-level computing project was a radioisotope identification expert system (you fed in the energies, it determined what combination of isotopes was the most likely to produce that combination) but anyone with a radiochemistry reference book and sample data from geological surveys and nuclear spills could provide as good (or better) conclusions than what was ultimately a very trivial bit of code.
In other words, there should be 100,000+ people on Slashdot who could write a University-grade paper on everything the original poster asked.
What's the capillary action like for nanotubes?
Well, what the best device is depends on what it is you want to measure. Alpha particles are not harmful if on the outside - they can't penetrate the skin - but can be exceptionally nasty if ingested. Beta particles can travel further and through more, but still aren't exceptionally dangerous at the kinds of doses you're likely talking about. Even radioactive particles that emit gamma aren't dangerous in low quantities.
The limestone caves in the Peak District are considered dangerous enough that guides can't go down them on consecutive tours and sections are off-limits to potholers. You should probably wait 10-15 mins after going on a tour before getting into a car if there's a group of you. The source of the radioactivity is a mix of uranium-containing ores and radon-bearing igneous rocks. If you were to encounter anything comparable in Tokyo, you'd be in serious trouble,
In reality, the biggest hot-spot reported to date was due to antiques. In all probability, uranium ore (a very popular mineral for adding a yellow tint to glazes and glass in the 1800s and early 1900s) would be what was found, although depending on the instruments used, radon-based paints (very popular for its glow-in-the-dark properties) is another strong possibility. Neither could be considered remotely a health hazard to your average citizen. In fact, given the volcanic nature of Japan, radon-bearing rocks are almost certainly your number 1 health hazard. For that, you'd want a Geiger counter (only if paranoid) and a decent extraction fan (radon is a gas).
If you're worried about fallout, then put a small plastic tray on the roof to collect rain and borrow a Geiger counter. If the rainfall contains nothing of significance now, then it won't do in the future. It takes a LOT to put something as heavy as dust as high up as the cloud layer.
If you are absolutely paranoid, take a roll of 35mm film into a pitch-black room and unroll it. Cut it into squares. Put each square between two pieces of cardboard that are just thick enough that absolutely no light will get through. Use duct tape round the edges to seal the sandwich up. Radioactive dust is the biggest problem and dust is worst in the corners of rooms, since they're hard to clean. Put a film sandwich in all the corners in your house. Leave them there for, say, about a week. Gather them up and take them to anyone with a darkroom to develop. If the squares are completely fogged over, THEN you can worry. And buy a better vaccuum cleaner. If the film shows little or nothing, then you can be absolutely certain that the only thing that you're in danger of is a heart attack from self-induced stress.
It's the meteors that are getting a shower. Though how they'll get the water hooked up at that altitude is beyond me.
I certainly see where you're coming from and it is an exceptionally difficult problem. I've been busting my brains out trying to figure out what sort of dynamic would be needed in order to have protection for individual rights with little or no risk of that same structure destroying those rights. Asymmetrical functions exist, but absent Asimov's Psychohistory it is extremely hard to see how these can be applied in a social or political context.
I've the skeleton of a theory, but I haven't the skills to know if that skeleton holds up to inspection or - even if it did - whether there is any way to flesh it out into something practical. The odds are definitely against me, since if it were that easy to come up with a stable system, people would have done so years ago.
Torture?
If the database of interest contained any personally-identifying information, then the Data Protection Registrar would be an obvious choice. In all other cases, The Guardian newspaper seems to be the agency of choice for dealing with abuse of power.
Which demonstrates that no matter how bad things get in the UK, some countries that should know better actually manage to do things worse.
As I mentioned above, the first problem is that there's no good definition of Libertarianism.
I'd also argue a point I've made a few times, which is that society is better off with a functional balance between factions. In this case, the faction known as the Federal Government has a mandate to operate a pan-US currency. In order for this to be functional, no other faction can be permitted to conflict with that mandate. Add to it, perhaps - essentially credit cards go beyond physical currency - but not block it.
In this particular case, I don't see this as being an attempt to usurp power, I see it as an attempt to usurp voters. Louisiana gets to complain about the "big bad awful" Federal Government suppressing its laws -- unless it backfires, in which case those backing the politicians can complain about the "big bad awful" State Government suppressing its laws.
Any organized body that exists for the sole purpose of organizing something else is a "governmental institution" in the loosest sense of the term. As such, there's amazingly little that Libertarians should not be objecting to if it were truly "governmental institutions" they objected to. The reality is that the definition of "governmental" is shaped to include everything the defining Libertarian is opposed to and exclude anything they are not opposed to.
I have absolutely no objection to people being selective (although I would prefer it if people used objective criteria and were open to those criteria being falsified - and that's true of people of all political persuasions). I do object to using personally-defined vocabulary as if it were universal and I certainly object to people rejecting methods because their personal definitions tell them to - although to be fair to Libertarians, they don't do that any more than anyone else.
They mean they're going to copy the Johnny Test story of three Snooze Tube success stories being put into a movie. It will end just as badly.
...a thinking man's action hero, but surely the role of The Doctor is already taken. :)
Seriously, that would be a wonderful blend of traits for Hollywood to experiment with. They've not done anything like that, leaving it mostly to the Brits - and even then the UK has produced exceedingly few such characters overall. I've never really thought much about how such characters would work in the US because there haven't been any, but if Shatner thinks that it would work well for actors and audience alike, then maybe it's time for someone to write a script for it.
I agree it's a paradigm shift. I refer you to a point I've made many, many times - if you want to beat Microsoft Office, you can't succeed by merely chasing them - especially on their own turf. The only way to succeed is to define the turf, define the finishing posts, and have others be the ones chasing. Copying Microsoft is doomed to failure - not only are you too focused on what someone else is doing (try that with a hammer if you want to know why it's a bad move), but when you finally do get round to changing the game, you've reduced your advantage.
It actually comes with standard satellite link parameters. For non-standard orbits, you'd need to write a scriptlet, sure. But if you're designing the network, wouldn't you want to write your OWN scriptlet and not use an assumed set of values?
Yeah, the difference is I've been reading a lot of the articles on the subject and they all say something slightly different. There was no historically discernible difference between the fatalities in rich and poor, so malnutrition is unlikely to have been a significant influence. That doesn't mean environmental factors weren't a greater influence, it just means that particular factor can be ruled out.
(Actually, the North of England has oral traditions to the effect that well-water protected villages from the Plague. Most likely, the use of properly-dug and properly-maintained wells would have reduced contact between people of different areas, reducing the spread of the disease. With the frequent contamination of wells by villagers, wells weren't any better than rivers.)
Not necessarily. Genes can become "fossilized" (ie: never get activated, just lie totally dormant) according to the state of junk DNA and the epigenome. As such, it would not require a significant change to have a significant effect. And if the change was indeed in the epigenome, then genetic decoding won't detect it at all.
They were planning on using biological and chemical weapons as part of their invasion of Britain, so it would have been long before they'd won.
You are correct in your reference. Random mutations can - and will - occur all the time. Eventually, such a mutation will be deadly to humans. In the case of this particular pathogen, it may find other ways to be deadly or the reverse mutations (which have an equal probability of happening) could arise.
However, I'm less concerned with Plague as far as random mutations are concerned. ANY bacterium can evolve to become deadly and the soil has a lot of bacteria. We haven't sequenced more than a tiny fraction and so can't possibly get a solid grasp on what bacterium poses the greatest risk. We rely heavily on past behaviour as a guide but evolution doesn't pay much attention to the past. What survives and multiplies is what does well today.
I wouldn't say you were panic-mongering - most virologists and bacteriologists study mutations for precisely the reason you give.
Probably. Which is why, as I mentioned above, I'd regard Network Simulator and the Click module that lets you route actual traffic to/from it to be a far more productive use of time.
Just download NS-3 (which does work under Linux), install NASA's Delay-Tolerant Protocol and use that to simulate networks of satellites and ground stations. For added fun, install the module that lets you use Network Simulator as a NIC under Linux and tunnel actual traffic across your simulated network to see how it would perform in practice.
Not only will this be more reliable than this Unity game, it'll be more accurate, more customizable and more productive (since you get network stats rather than a score). Further, since you can design your own protocols and circuits under NS-3, you can also factor in the effects of Turbo codes, various Reed-Solomon options, alternative communications protocols, etc.
Best of all, that kind of experience might actually give you some credibility amongst network engineers and protocol engineers. "Some" meaning "more than a high score on the game will ever do".
You mean they didn't? *duck*
What's interesting is that the Black Death is a mutation of a perfectly harmless bacterium that is common in the soil and that modern versions of the Plague are very mild variants of the Black Death - suggesting that further mutations seriously reduced its potency. A good thing.
It's actually not that convenient to write documents in LaTeX, because there are no WYSIWYG DTP editors for it. There aren't that many decent WYSIWYM editors, LEd is discontinued and that was one of the best after you fixed the crappy default directory structure for the templates.
A good DTP solution would let you rubber-band windows, a-la early Ventura Publisher and similar software, and reveal/conceal all the tags (they're not useful for writing the content, they're only useful for designing the layout) a-la WordPerfect.
Since you can draw boxes with Impress, there's no reason why you can't do the first of those. Provided Writer can do anything LaTeX can do, there is no reason why Writer shouldn't let you modify markup directly when it's more convenient to edit that way. If it can't do something that LaTeX can, it needs extending with that functionality anyway. The argument that you should then be able to edit as LaTeX then applies.
Calc should be capable of calling R and thus embedding anything R can do within it.
"Using the right tool" is the wrong maxim for integrated software, since you are ALWAYS using a shell on top of a more complete environment and shells can always call other shells. It's no different from your web browser using a plugin to call a distinct application, or your OS calling a module that accesses a userspace-supplied service. (Think Linux' userspace filesystem support.)
Layering isn't restricted to 1.