It does, however, assume no significant transfer of momentum from the galactic winds to the probe, even over a 40,000 year period. I've a real hard time with that, but sadly I can't find any cryogenics facility with a 40,000 year warranty. Even then, posting the results on Slashdot might be difficult.
The end of the heliopause is sometimes considered the end of the solar system. Any Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud objects further out are blasted by the galactic winds at that point, they experience nothing from the solar system bar gravity and even Alpha Centauri experiences that.
The problem is that the contract prohibits private lawsuits. So, if AT&T "forces" you to go the individual route, they are then entitled to have the case thrown out as a contract violation. The supreme court only ruled that AT&T could force individual arbitration, it said nothing about AT&T then having to allow said arbitration to proceed.
I could have sworn I'd typed in that the Eschede disaster was in Germany, though that's obviously not what was typed. I'll plead insanity.
Yeah, Potter's Bar and many other disasters in Britain were also entirely preventable. Everything needed to be known was known, it merely had to be given attention. Everything needed to avoid tragedy was already in place, it merely had to be used.
There was a rail disaster caused by someone trying to kill themselves by parking their car on a train track. Killed the suicider, yes, but derailed the train and killed many others besides. That's an example of something where it might have been preventable if a whole bunch of things had been different. Those are not in the same category, because they can't be prevented with what is in place right now, though certainly if that continues to be possible 50 years from now, people would have much more reason to complain.
The problems where known defective track or a known defective train causes a crash when the defective part fails - those are preventable. In rolfwind's post, on serious track defects, a disaster is pretty much guaranteed to happen yet we are subject to officials who will do NOTHING until after the disaster.
The subcategory I'm most concerned with, though, are the problems where the defect doesn't instantly fail but gives several minutes of warning immediately prior to total failure, where those warnings are simply ignored. In other words, these are cases where you've gone from the hypothetical situation (however inevitable in the long-term) to the immediate here and now. You can no longer say "well, it might not happen in my watch, so I might not get the blame". Nor can you say "well, I'm not there, so I won't be someone who suffers". The choice made will have immediate consequences, including the choice of doing nothing, and those consequences most certainly determine what happens to you, right there, right then.
A manager in the US who will never ride the train and probably only has a dim recollection of what a train looks like should not be permitted to be so detatched from the dangers that they brush it off. That they can is a serious - and inevitably dangerous - path to be on. However, their distance from reality will mean that they think only in terms of how many disasters they can afford to have and how to make sure that those disasters don't affect their pay. A cultural issue, in other words. When all the cards are down and you can see exactly what you're faced with but yet deny it to your last breath --- those, to me, are the scariest situations of all.
MBA people are probably the people I would trust least to optimize a system. And any kind of incentive system is just that - an attempt to optimize by mucking about with priorities. It's a branch of queue theory (which computer scientists are also extremely aware of) and business analysts never get it right. That business analysts can't tell the difference between a noun and an adjective doesn't inspire me with confidence either. Jargon is great, we all use it, but optimization problems rely on good classification skills and a jargon that reveals an inability to classify will raise huge red flags.
Like I said, they already have the capacity to scan your computer and install whatever the hell they want on it. Of the millions of computers out there with undetected malware on them, you cannot possibly know what percentage of that malware is NSA- or DoD-sponsored. Even Congress can't get the Government agencies to say what they are doing. (Last time Congress tried, after Australia admitted Echelon existed and was in use, the NSA told them to bugger off.)
Therefore, putting the Feds in charge of virus removal won't change the chances of them spying on you. If they wanted to, they would have done. Telling them to go clean up the US isn't going to make any difference there.
What it will do is keep them busy. Idle hands make mischief, as the saying goes. Never, ever allow people with significant power to be idle. That is stupid, dangerous and absolutely guaranteed to lead to abuse. The TSA inspectors are an example of that. They abuse power because they're bored witless. The incidence rate, at least as far as it's reported, is about one threat of any significance every 2-3 years for the nation as a whole. Combine overwhelming power and absolutely no outlet for it, what do you expect? Of course they'll be "creative".
Hard work and no play makes Jack a trustworthy holder of power. Dull, too, perhaps, but trusted. Besides, dull is a good thing in such cases.
Sadly, that doesn't shock me. There are way too many accidents in the US rail system that have no business being possible. Of course, there's been a fair few in other countries - Britain has an unenviable record for avoidable fatal rail accidents. One of the worst disasters of all times, the Eschede train disaster, was perhaps the most extreme example of politics and rulebooks causing fatalities when prudence would have been the wiser choice. I have noticed, however, that prudence is unpopular in any environment where results are what matter. It would be good if caution were rewarded, but it's usually seen as cheaper to sweep up the bodies afterwards.
Yeeeees, but you've got to be careful with that. You will get EXACTLY what you actually ask for, no more and no less, which is almost never what you really meant or want.
If you reward students for high grades in exams, you'll get just that. High grades. Not understanding of the subject, just high grades. If you reward bankers for making profits, you'll get just that. High profits. Not financial stability, just high profits.
The problem with incentives is that exceedingly few people are capable of setting them correctly. And not a single one of them will use "incentivize" as a word.
But they trust completely anonymous massive numbers of third parties (that include spammers and ID thieves) not to do whatever the h**** they want, using any open vulnerabilities they find?
As far as I can tell, the answer to that is "yes". At some point, psychiatric care will be available to deal with this, but for now - and for reasons I will never understand - said third parties are trusted completely and the government is mistrusted utterly, despite them having roughly the same capacity to abuse whatever is on your computer and the third-party arguably having far more incentive to do so. I seriously, seriously doubt there are many Dick Turpin types writing malware, though.
How about the agency outsources it to private industry; and requires all exploits and payloads utilized to be open source, fully documented, and subject to review by any member of the public....
I already assume that if some party wants to abuse a system they'll already be trying to break in, that if they don't then allowing them to try to break in won't change how they think or how they act, and if they do and they have broken in, they're not going to ask my permission before installing rootkits anyway. Others aren't so charitable, which is fair, so the question is whether this meets their objections.
Stop and think. If they've already scanned these machines, any keylogger will already be installed. Besides, there's a Firefox extension for jamming keyloggers.
Besides, what would they need a keylogger for? We already know (because the Australian Government has said so) that Echelon is real and does exist. The total lack of use of cryptography means that there's nothing you can type that they can't read already.
The government is doing this at the taxpayer's expense because the taxpayer voted in a government that likes the rich having the money and you not. Vote into power someone who doesn't give a damn about the rich next time. Of course, that requires finding one - and then finding one willing to run for office. In general, those with the best ethics are the least-suited to politics and the ones best-suited to politics are the ones with no ethics.
As much as I would love the Feds to just run a complete vulnerability scan of the US (not unlike the Internet Auditing Project) and then remotely uninstall every instance without telling a damn person (if the virus doesn't de-install cleanly, that's a bug in the virus so go sue the authors), I get the impression there'd be a few complaints. In part, because the Feds have shown themselves to be ethically-challenged from time to time.
If you want - really, truly want - bots and spyware to be gone forever, it's going to take a Federal agency vulnerability scanning your machine and installing nagware when your machine is shown as both infected and insecure. (Insecure alone might just be a honeypot, it doesn't prove there's a real vulnerability present.)
Nobody is going to trust an agency to do this. Doesn't matter if that's just or unjust, the only just that matters is that it's just not going to happen. In consequence, corporations will fail to secure products, users will fail to secure their machines and the problem will miraculously fail to vanish all on its own. Things won't change without pressure and the only sources of pressure big enough won't and/or can't.
If violating network neutrality (which is a key requirement for common carrier status) is not only not enough to exclude them from protection but is corrupt enough to get illicit protection by Congress prohibiting the removal of that status, don't expect any other form of service violation to be sufficient.
HOT fusion requires high energy collisions. Cold fusion does not. HOT fusion is thermonuclear, COLD fusion is not. Cold fusion is NOT, therefore, thermonuclear. Until you've updated yourself on the past, oh, 30-40 years of nuclear physics, further debate is a waste of my time. Actually, whilst you're learning about nuclear science, you may want to try getting medication for your offensive and abusive tone.
No, in standard usage thermonuclear meas a process in which a sizable amount of energy (usually heat) is released as a byproduct of the reaction and includes ALL hot fission reactions. This is why thermonuclear weapons are uranium or plutonium. Any fission nuclear reactor that runs a "hot" core (not all do, certain designs are intended to run at low temperatures) is thermonuclear. A "cold fusion" reactor, however, would not be thermonuclear (despite your claim that fusion and thermonuclear mean the same thing).
Fukushima is currently not thermonuclear, since it is progressing towards a cold state and has long-since passed the point of running hot. It's debatable, since Fukushima was a design that ran relatively cold compared to other reactor designs, as to whether it would be considered a truly hot reactor. When it went into meltdown, the process certainly ran very hot indeed.
If you have a PhD, please see the section on why Americans now think PhDs are worthless. You have demonstrated their point so much better than I.
First, as others have noticed, the only skills that matter in a PhD are the transferrable ones (such as the ability to perform advanced research, study pre-existing research and understand it, and clearly document - both in thesis and presentation - what the research established, how it established it, and why that matters in that subject).
What you actually WANT in A PhD is as little connection to the "real world" as possible. Connections will muddle the distinction between the knowledge that can be moved to a different area with the knowledge that is highly subject-specific.
I agree that extreme specialization is a problem, though - I strongly support the concept in NeoClassical Education that all sciences are tightly-coupled and cannot be separated safely. It also assists in learning transferrable skills when you can transfer not just between ultra-specialized groupings but between entire fields of thought, as the degree of mobility of those skills will be increasingly obvious.
To be honest, I firmly believe that the core transferrable skills should be the core subjects of all schools of all levels, with subjets merely treated as examples of what happens when those skills live in that specific subject.
Slashdot Mirror
It does, however, assume no significant transfer of momentum from the galactic winds to the probe, even over a 40,000 year period. I've a real hard time with that, but sadly I can't find any cryogenics facility with a 40,000 year warranty. Even then, posting the results on Slashdot might be difficult.
I don't know about "nothing" - we have zero knowledge of the galactic winds. We can't even be sure that the probes won't hit a glass dome.
The end of the heliopause is sometimes considered the end of the solar system. Any Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud objects further out are blasted by the galactic winds at that point, they experience nothing from the solar system bar gravity and even Alpha Centauri experiences that.
Business as usual, then. Ok.
So that's what killed The Clash. Mystery solved.
The problem is that the contract prohibits private lawsuits. So, if AT&T "forces" you to go the individual route, they are then entitled to have the case thrown out as a contract violation. The supreme court only ruled that AT&T could force individual arbitration, it said nothing about AT&T then having to allow said arbitration to proceed.
I could have sworn I'd typed in that the Eschede disaster was in Germany, though that's obviously not what was typed. I'll plead insanity.
Yeah, Potter's Bar and many other disasters in Britain were also entirely preventable. Everything needed to be known was known, it merely had to be given attention. Everything needed to avoid tragedy was already in place, it merely had to be used.
There was a rail disaster caused by someone trying to kill themselves by parking their car on a train track. Killed the suicider, yes, but derailed the train and killed many others besides. That's an example of something where it might have been preventable if a whole bunch of things had been different. Those are not in the same category, because they can't be prevented with what is in place right now, though certainly if that continues to be possible 50 years from now, people would have much more reason to complain.
The problems where known defective track or a known defective train causes a crash when the defective part fails - those are preventable. In rolfwind's post, on serious track defects, a disaster is pretty much guaranteed to happen yet we are subject to officials who will do NOTHING until after the disaster.
The subcategory I'm most concerned with, though, are the problems where the defect doesn't instantly fail but gives several minutes of warning immediately prior to total failure, where those warnings are simply ignored. In other words, these are cases where you've gone from the hypothetical situation (however inevitable in the long-term) to the immediate here and now. You can no longer say "well, it might not happen in my watch, so I might not get the blame". Nor can you say "well, I'm not there, so I won't be someone who suffers". The choice made will have immediate consequences, including the choice of doing nothing, and those consequences most certainly determine what happens to you, right there, right then.
A manager in the US who will never ride the train and probably only has a dim recollection of what a train looks like should not be permitted to be so detatched from the dangers that they brush it off. That they can is a serious - and inevitably dangerous - path to be on. However, their distance from reality will mean that they think only in terms of how many disasters they can afford to have and how to make sure that those disasters don't affect their pay. A cultural issue, in other words. When all the cards are down and you can see exactly what you're faced with but yet deny it to your last breath --- those, to me, are the scariest situations of all.
MBA people are probably the people I would trust least to optimize a system. And any kind of incentive system is just that - an attempt to optimize by mucking about with priorities. It's a branch of queue theory (which computer scientists are also extremely aware of) and business analysts never get it right. That business analysts can't tell the difference between a noun and an adjective doesn't inspire me with confidence either. Jargon is great, we all use it, but optimization problems rely on good classification skills and a jargon that reveals an inability to classify will raise huge red flags.
If America used the Alternative Voting System, you'd have half my vote.
Like I said, they already have the capacity to scan your computer and install whatever the hell they want on it. Of the millions of computers out there with undetected malware on them, you cannot possibly know what percentage of that malware is NSA- or DoD-sponsored. Even Congress can't get the Government agencies to say what they are doing. (Last time Congress tried, after Australia admitted Echelon existed and was in use, the NSA told them to bugger off.)
Therefore, putting the Feds in charge of virus removal won't change the chances of them spying on you. If they wanted to, they would have done. Telling them to go clean up the US isn't going to make any difference there.
What it will do is keep them busy. Idle hands make mischief, as the saying goes. Never, ever allow people with significant power to be idle. That is stupid, dangerous and absolutely guaranteed to lead to abuse. The TSA inspectors are an example of that. They abuse power because they're bored witless. The incidence rate, at least as far as it's reported, is about one threat of any significance every 2-3 years for the nation as a whole. Combine overwhelming power and absolutely no outlet for it, what do you expect? Of course they'll be "creative".
Hard work and no play makes Jack a trustworthy holder of power. Dull, too, perhaps, but trusted. Besides, dull is a good thing in such cases.
Sadly, that doesn't shock me. There are way too many accidents in the US rail system that have no business being possible. Of course, there's been a fair few in other countries - Britain has an unenviable record for avoidable fatal rail accidents. One of the worst disasters of all times, the Eschede train disaster, was perhaps the most extreme example of politics and rulebooks causing fatalities when prudence would have been the wiser choice. I have noticed, however, that prudence is unpopular in any environment where results are what matter. It would be good if caution were rewarded, but it's usually seen as cheaper to sweep up the bodies afterwards.
Yeeeees, but you've got to be careful with that. You will get EXACTLY what you actually ask for, no more and no less, which is almost never what you really meant or want.
If you reward students for high grades in exams, you'll get just that. High grades. Not understanding of the subject, just high grades. If you reward bankers for making profits, you'll get just that. High profits. Not financial stability, just high profits.
The problem with incentives is that exceedingly few people are capable of setting them correctly. And not a single one of them will use "incentivize" as a word.
Well, that would depend. A maglev train that didn't fly off the rails would be kinda useless.
As far as I can tell, the answer to that is "yes". At some point, psychiatric care will be available to deal with this, but for now - and for reasons I will never understand - said third parties are trusted completely and the government is mistrusted utterly, despite them having roughly the same capacity to abuse whatever is on your computer and the third-party arguably having far more incentive to do so. I seriously, seriously doubt there are many Dick Turpin types writing malware, though.
I already assume that if some party wants to abuse a system they'll already be trying to break in, that if they don't then allowing them to try to break in won't change how they think or how they act, and if they do and they have broken in, they're not going to ask my permission before installing rootkits anyway. Others aren't so charitable, which is fair, so the question is whether this meets their objections.
Stop and think. If they've already scanned these machines, any keylogger will already be installed. Besides, there's a Firefox extension for jamming keyloggers.
Besides, what would they need a keylogger for? We already know (because the Australian Government has said so) that Echelon is real and does exist. The total lack of use of cryptography means that there's nothing you can type that they can't read already.
The government is doing this at the taxpayer's expense because the taxpayer voted in a government that likes the rich having the money and you not. Vote into power someone who doesn't give a damn about the rich next time. Of course, that requires finding one - and then finding one willing to run for office. In general, those with the best ethics are the least-suited to politics and the ones best-suited to politics are the ones with no ethics.
As much as I would love the Feds to just run a complete vulnerability scan of the US (not unlike the Internet Auditing Project) and then remotely uninstall every instance without telling a damn person (if the virus doesn't de-install cleanly, that's a bug in the virus so go sue the authors), I get the impression there'd be a few complaints. In part, because the Feds have shown themselves to be ethically-challenged from time to time.
If you want - really, truly want - bots and spyware to be gone forever, it's going to take a Federal agency vulnerability scanning your machine and installing nagware when your machine is shown as both infected and insecure. (Insecure alone might just be a honeypot, it doesn't prove there's a real vulnerability present.)
Nobody is going to trust an agency to do this. Doesn't matter if that's just or unjust, the only just that matters is that it's just not going to happen. In consequence, corporations will fail to secure products, users will fail to secure their machines and the problem will miraculously fail to vanish all on its own. Things won't change without pressure and the only sources of pressure big enough won't and/or can't.
It's a papermate line of pens with added superglue.
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)
ad perpetuam memoriam, Novell, cor aut mors
If they continue to launder money at that rate, there'll be a world shortage of washing powder.
If violating network neutrality (which is a key requirement for common carrier status) is not only not enough to exclude them from protection but is corrupt enough to get illicit protection by Congress prohibiting the removal of that status, don't expect any other form of service violation to be sufficient.
HOT fusion requires high energy collisions. Cold fusion does not. HOT fusion is thermonuclear, COLD fusion is not. Cold fusion is NOT, therefore, thermonuclear. Until you've updated yourself on the past, oh, 30-40 years of nuclear physics, further debate is a waste of my time. Actually, whilst you're learning about nuclear science, you may want to try getting medication for your offensive and abusive tone.
No, in standard usage thermonuclear meas a process in which a sizable amount of energy (usually heat) is released as a byproduct of the reaction and includes ALL hot fission reactions. This is why thermonuclear weapons are uranium or plutonium. Any fission nuclear reactor that runs a "hot" core (not all do, certain designs are intended to run at low temperatures) is thermonuclear. A "cold fusion" reactor, however, would not be thermonuclear (despite your claim that fusion and thermonuclear mean the same thing).
Fukushima is currently not thermonuclear, since it is progressing towards a cold state and has long-since passed the point of running hot. It's debatable, since Fukushima was a design that ran relatively cold compared to other reactor designs, as to whether it would be considered a truly hot reactor. When it went into meltdown, the process certainly ran very hot indeed.
If you have a PhD, please see the section on why Americans now think PhDs are worthless. You have demonstrated their point so much better than I.
First, as others have noticed, the only skills that matter in a PhD are the transferrable ones (such as the ability to perform advanced research, study pre-existing research and understand it, and clearly document - both in thesis and presentation - what the research established, how it established it, and why that matters in that subject).
What you actually WANT in A PhD is as little connection to the "real world" as possible. Connections will muddle the distinction between the knowledge that can be moved to a different area with the knowledge that is highly subject-specific.
I agree that extreme specialization is a problem, though - I strongly support the concept in NeoClassical Education that all sciences are tightly-coupled and cannot be separated safely. It also assists in learning transferrable skills when you can transfer not just between ultra-specialized groupings but between entire fields of thought, as the degree of mobility of those skills will be increasingly obvious.
To be honest, I firmly believe that the core transferrable skills should be the core subjects of all schools of all levels, with subjets merely treated as examples of what happens when those skills live in that specific subject.