It would be extremely difficult to find a stable orbit for a planet in such a system. It would require not only that but that the goldilocks zone always overlap the entire planet at all times within the system's cycle. The evidence from our own solar system also suggests that the necessary criteria for life rarely arise from what could be called "simple" planet formation. Venus and Mars formed by simple accretion, both are in the goldilocks zone but neither has the necessary composition to sustain life. Earth is an amalgam of two planetoids, such that the density of the planet is abnormally high and the composition abnormally mixed. A lot of lighter elements got blasted off, some congealing into the moon.
Early versions of Office couldn't hold a candle to Smartware's integrated office suite (which, as far as I'm concerned, defined the minimal feature set for something to be a useful office application). Somewhere in the middle, it did great. Office today has too many hidden menus and non-obvious relationships between menu options. It's hard to find anything.
The addition law of vectors, as stated by Gallileo, is that the relative vector of two bodies is given by the sum of the vectors for each body. In other words, take the components in the X, Y and Z directions for the velocity of each of the two, then the relative velocity vector is (X1+X2, Y1+Y2, Z1+Z2).
The planets are a very different mass than the sun and there's no suggestion in his model of planetary motion that he considered the sun plus planets to be orbiting a shared center of gravity. Rather, he was quite clear that the sun should be regarded as static with the planets moving round it. The n-body problem is so bloody difficult to solve for similar masses because this breaks down. You can't do that approximation. This means that the center of gravity moves with each instant in time, which in turn means that unless you have a special case in which the center of gravity moves along a mathematically well-defined path, you HAVE to calculate the motion iteratively and you WILL accumulate error because you can't perform infinitely small steps. The solar system is sufficiently close to a special case (the mass of the planets is insignificant to the mass of the sun, so even when all lined up won't displace the center of gravity significantly) that numerical methods are just fine.
Applying Newton's laws as they stand and applying a transform to space instead actually works really well. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this was, in fact, the early thinking Einstein used. It is also how some schools teach relativity today, since it's easier to teach Newton's laws and merely alter the shape of the space it is applied to than it is to substitute models as though they were urelated in any way and duck inevitable questions from students. The former fits with the standard concept of science as an evolutionary progression of ideas with very few real discontinuities and it allows students to feel as though they're progressing rather than treading water with ideas being replaced without explanation.
It doesn't get done a lot because schools prefer to teach to a syllabus and traditional syllabuses are based on what can be taught en-masse using cheap, throw-away textbooks and disposable teachers who teach a very narrow range of grades. The object for the teacher is to get the students to score highly (especially after the No Child Left Behind act), not to convey any level of understanding of the reasoning, methodology, history or even physics behind the models. With superior consequences for leaving students embittered about science but successfully passing the exams with a high score versus enthusiastic, knowledgable students who merely scrape by, naturally it is considered better to have students feel like nothing they learn is meaningful, useful or applicable - or even correct.
The idea of physical theories being bounded was actually quite popular in Newton's time - hence the phrasing of Hooke's Law, the approximation of the motion of pendulums, etc. The laws were all quite specifically written in the form "provided these preconditions are true, this result WILL apply". Newton didn't change this in the slightest.
Indeed, that should be obvious from the description of gravitational attraction. Object X is pulled towards object Y because of the mass of object Y alone. However, it is equally true, by the same law, that object Y is pulled towards object X because of object X's mass. They are both pulled towards a common point. Newton was quite aware of this. If you jump up, you do not fall to the Earth, both you and the Earth move towards a common point. Because your mass is insignificant compared to that of the Earth (well, depending on how addicted you are to fast food), you can treat the Earth as in effect a stationary object.
Thus, although Newton's laws require you to apply the laws in both directions to get the "exact" result of his theory, you won't ever find that done in practice. By the time you get to objects of comparable size that can orbit each other you have to start factoring in relativity anyway. Even Newton never really considered the common center of gravity - he expressly confined himself to objects of significantly different mass such that the common center of mass is approximately the same as the center of mass of the larger object. There was never any attempt by Newton to extrapolate outside of that boundary.
There was an unwritten limitation also imposed on it. The addition law of vectors had to apply. This was a geometric property and there were certainly geometries known at the time in which the addition law did NOT hold. Thus, Newtonian Mechanics has the implicit precondition that you are working in a valid geometry. All QM and GR/SR geometries are invalid EXCEPT for special cases when both these theories reduce quite nicely to classical Newtonian Mechanics.
I'm not sure that you can say that it replaces the theory. You can use Newtonian mechanics exactly as Newton wrote them, without changing them one iota, but merely pass in the relativistic values rather than the classical ones. That doesn't sound like a replacement, that's a pre-processing routine at best. Gallilean addition of velocities is then modified by dividing the original result with a new result. A post-processing module.
In relativity, light still travels along straight lines but along a warped topology. The result is the appearance of light being bent by gravity, when it is space that is bent. Light is unaffected.
I think it's fair to consider the relativistic velocity* of the particles as being the key part of the experiment for ATLAS (much as it was for EUROGAM, the one I worked on). However, even if you consider the relativistic velocity of the detectors, it would be relative to the byproducts of the collision and not to the observing scientist. Thus, the velocity of the experiment is still not zero -- except in summation. (Although the relativistic velocity is very high, the resultant velocity is nearly zero.)
*In relativity, it is prohibited for any particle to observe another particle moving faster than C. In order for this to be true when a central observer sees two particles each closing in at near-C from opposite directions, you have to assume that you cannot simply sum up the velocities. You have to divide by 1 + vu/(c^2).
To be fair to the concept, it is certainly true that the rate of cell death increases with the energy being metabolized, which is why eating close to starvation point will increase your life expectancy. (There are toxic byproducts of metabolism, such as free radicals.) Thus, sugars could certainly increase cell damage and increase the risk of cancers. However, excess eating will certainly cause far more damage. Barbecued food is also far worse for you, it's covered in carcinogens. I'd still eat barbecued food and not consider it significantly hazardous, where a significant hazard is one that increases the risk above the variation expected by the noise in the system.
In this case, "noise" includes air pollution (eg: cars generate oxides of nitrogen, which produce nitric acis and nitrous acid when water is added - these acids then do interesting things to your lungs), natural and exploited sources of radiation, stress from excessive work and abusive societies, toxic chemicals used in household stuff, food poisoning, lack of exercise, lack of exposure to sunlight, poor diet (lacking vitamins, lacking the right types of protein, lacking the right minerals, etc).
You also have to consider what is meant by sugar. Fructose? Sucrose? Dextrose? Maltose? Lactose? The last is only really digestable by those with a mutation for processing milk (which evolved somewhere in northern Europe 11,000 years ago - no time at all in human history - and a couple of other places, but is nonetheless an extremely rare mutation to have). We also have consider the context. Sugar beet sugar is chemically identical to cane sugar sugar (both are sucrose) but the minerals and organics that go with them are very different. The context alters not only how the body processes the sugar but also how much sugar is even present (since context alters taste).
Finally, we have to consider what is meant by "toxic". Suget is hydroscopic. It will absorb water. This makes it good for treating certain poisons, as you can draw them out. The best natural sugar for wounds is medical-grade honey. Ideally, medical grade manuka honey. It has the sugars, but it also has antibiotics for which natural resistance by bacteria is still exceedingly low.
This means that honey (which is essentially sugar) is toxic......to MRSA and a range of other really nasty bugs.
I disagree with the claim that it is falsified. All theories in physics come with two sets of conditions: the bounds in magnitude and the bounds in resolution. Newton's theory came with well-defined bounds - those of classical phenomena. You cannot extrapolate beyond those bounds and claim you are still working with the theory because the theory isn't defined beyond those bounds. Nor can you interpolate to the quantum level for the same reason - the theory isn't defined there.
Relativity didn't replace Newton's theory, it supplemented it. In computing terms, it's a third-party module you can add on. When you install the Relativity dynamic library, the combined theory applies to a much larger range of phenomena.
The only time a theory will actually be falsified is if QM's gravity or relativity can be patched to work within the other's range. They are contradictory and you cannot load both modules into Newtonian physics at the same time. Only one of these two will stand the test of time, the other will die. Whichever one wins will then merge with Newtonian mechanics to produce a universal law of gravity.
Never tried cutting steak with a toothbrush. I rather suspect that unless you tenderize the hell out of it before cooking, a toothbrush cannot cut it. You can certainly cut steak with a spoon, and I could even see you being able to cut it with paper. In 500 years time, these posts will be used to program the android Data.
Analogies are usually fairly pointless. Instead of creating an artificial construct that doesn't really relate at all, try explaining better. Use clarity, not brevity. Use depth, not shortcuts. In short, do what works, not what is easiest on you.
Any sources you can point me to would be appreciated. (QiMen Black tea from Tea-of-Chinese costs $80 for 250g. That's twice your upper estimate, so either it's the greatest tea ever made or they're ripping people sideways.)
I now almost exclusively drink high-end teas. I used to like Tetley but it now tastes thoo rough for me. PG Tips is good. Yorkshire Gold Blend is also great. If you've not tried it, do so. Of the high end, my preference is for Hao Ya A but I'm not earning enough to keep up. What importers do you use? Upton is ok but some of the high-end tea shops in Portland are getting higher-grade imports than them so I know there's better.
Ok, I can buy your argument on greed and artificial constructs. As for your.sig, the Brits used espionage to steal tea secrets from the Chinese. As I said, all nations have used theft to get ahead. (For those interested in the history of tea, the Brits used to drink coffee. They switched to tea to protest government efforts to shut down the trade unions and other "unapproved" organizations. America switching to coffee as a protest against essentially the same government for essentially the same practices is one of history's greatest ironies.)
It's not enough to focus on skilled tasks. They need to be skilled tasks that the mindset is well-adapted for. Britain's penchant for risk-taking is why it is a key R&D center for not only Formula 1 but Indycar as well. America is risk-averse, which is why it has outsourced a lot of the low-profit, high-investment research (nuclear fusion, supercolliders, etc) to other nations. A lot of the R&D in America is high-profit (such as medical work, advanced microelectronics, etc) and requires relatively little investment once the research facility has been put together. Silicon Valley would never have survived otherwise, given the enormous cost of constructing some of those facilities.
Monocultures are a Bad Idea (Michigan can help explain that one rather better than it would like) but there's nothing wrong with optimizing to your strengths. Indeed, it seems very likely that if America stopped trying to compete where it is weak and started competing where it is strong, it would not run into so many problems. The same goes for the EU and everyone else. Diverting money to lost causes only achieves inferior progress everywhere else.
Of course, you have to be a bit careful with federating technologies. Although a federation is nominally superior to over-generalized societies, it is open to abuse. America doesn't produce its own Rare Earths, but depends utterly on China for them. Not because of any scaricity in America, more for convenience. That turned out to be an incorrect path. Politics now utterly controls the availability of critical elements, which is utterly wrong. You've got to have some balance in there.
Unfortunately, balanced thinking is something corporations (and people in general) are rather bad at.
Pfffft. As if America hadn't done the same. America, prior to signing onto international treaties on copyright and patents, was notorious for reverse-engineering European products and then using mass-production (as opposed to specialist workshops) to undercut the Europeans and sell back to them. Indeed, most major nations throughout history have been... loose on morals and ethics in their formative years. The Romans stole all their technologies - and usually stole the countries that invented them too. The only "we" in this equation is humanity, since every nation on Earth that made it big did so on the back of other nations, robbing them at first, then exploiting them later. The usual end result is an addiction to those other nations, resulting in the inevitable death from that addiction.
(This is why I would like to see a nation actually acheve something honestly for a change. If there isn't that addictive quality, if using others isn't the drug of choice, then you might actually get stable, sustainable achievement. Might. Without any actual case studies to examine, this is a difficult theory to test.)
It depends on the details, none of which exist yet. The theorietical benefit of a quango is that because they can get some/all income via taxes, they should be able to do a better job. Market forces dictate that a private company can NEVER do a better job than the market will bear and it is clear from the multitude of SSL disasters over time (I'm including Verisign's handing out of Microsoft's private keys in the early days) that the market won't tolerate quality work at all. A quango has no such limitation. However, for precisely the same reason, the market can't dictate a minimum level of quality either, but someone has to and it has to be exceedingly high. The quangos that are a disaster are the ones with no oversight to ensure that quality control.
Since all tyrannies require those tyrranized to still be breathing, oxygen is the thin end of the wedge to tyranny. (In other words, almost anything can be dual-purposed for "good" and "evil", so almost anything can be considered the thin end of some wedge or other. It renders that entire line of reasoning pointless.)
It's some rule or other (43? I forget) that if it can be imagined, it's on the Internet. So, somewhere, at some point in time, SCP will indeed have porn popups of Cowboy Neil.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be extremely difficult to find a stable orbit for a planet in such a system. It would require not only that but that the goldilocks zone always overlap the entire planet at all times within the system's cycle. The evidence from our own solar system also suggests that the necessary criteria for life rarely arise from what could be called "simple" planet formation. Venus and Mars formed by simple accretion, both are in the goldilocks zone but neither has the necessary composition to sustain life. Earth is an amalgam of two planetoids, such that the density of the planet is abnormally high and the composition abnormally mixed. A lot of lighter elements got blasted off, some congealing into the moon.
Early versions of Office couldn't hold a candle to Smartware's integrated office suite (which, as far as I'm concerned, defined the minimal feature set for something to be a useful office application). Somewhere in the middle, it did great. Office today has too many hidden menus and non-obvious relationships between menu options. It's hard to find anything.
This image is worse than the normal office parties how?
I dunno. The image of a balanced office package seems just as good as a free office package.
The addition law of vectors, as stated by Gallileo, is that the relative vector of two bodies is given by the sum of the vectors for each body. In other words, take the components in the X, Y and Z directions for the velocity of each of the two, then the relative velocity vector is (X1+X2, Y1+Y2, Z1+Z2).
The planets are a very different mass than the sun and there's no suggestion in his model of planetary motion that he considered the sun plus planets to be orbiting a shared center of gravity. Rather, he was quite clear that the sun should be regarded as static with the planets moving round it. The n-body problem is so bloody difficult to solve for similar masses because this breaks down. You can't do that approximation. This means that the center of gravity moves with each instant in time, which in turn means that unless you have a special case in which the center of gravity moves along a mathematically well-defined path, you HAVE to calculate the motion iteratively and you WILL accumulate error because you can't perform infinitely small steps. The solar system is sufficiently close to a special case (the mass of the planets is insignificant to the mass of the sun, so even when all lined up won't displace the center of gravity significantly) that numerical methods are just fine.
Applying Newton's laws as they stand and applying a transform to space instead actually works really well. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this was, in fact, the early thinking Einstein used. It is also how some schools teach relativity today, since it's easier to teach Newton's laws and merely alter the shape of the space it is applied to than it is to substitute models as though they were urelated in any way and duck inevitable questions from students. The former fits with the standard concept of science as an evolutionary progression of ideas with very few real discontinuities and it allows students to feel as though they're progressing rather than treading water with ideas being replaced without explanation.
It doesn't get done a lot because schools prefer to teach to a syllabus and traditional syllabuses are based on what can be taught en-masse using cheap, throw-away textbooks and disposable teachers who teach a very narrow range of grades. The object for the teacher is to get the students to score highly (especially after the No Child Left Behind act), not to convey any level of understanding of the reasoning, methodology, history or even physics behind the models. With superior consequences for leaving students embittered about science but successfully passing the exams with a high score versus enthusiastic, knowledgable students who merely scrape by, naturally it is considered better to have students feel like nothing they learn is meaningful, useful or applicable - or even correct.
(Yes, I tend to get passionate on this subject.)
*draws a picture with the charcoal*
Hmm.. You're right, it is. :)
The idea of physical theories being bounded was actually quite popular in Newton's time - hence the phrasing of Hooke's Law, the approximation of the motion of pendulums, etc. The laws were all quite specifically written in the form "provided these preconditions are true, this result WILL apply". Newton didn't change this in the slightest.
Indeed, that should be obvious from the description of gravitational attraction. Object X is pulled towards object Y because of the mass of object Y alone. However, it is equally true, by the same law, that object Y is pulled towards object X because of object X's mass. They are both pulled towards a common point. Newton was quite aware of this. If you jump up, you do not fall to the Earth, both you and the Earth move towards a common point. Because your mass is insignificant compared to that of the Earth (well, depending on how addicted you are to fast food), you can treat the Earth as in effect a stationary object.
Thus, although Newton's laws require you to apply the laws in both directions to get the "exact" result of his theory, you won't ever find that done in practice. By the time you get to objects of comparable size that can orbit each other you have to start factoring in relativity anyway. Even Newton never really considered the common center of gravity - he expressly confined himself to objects of significantly different mass such that the common center of mass is approximately the same as the center of mass of the larger object. There was never any attempt by Newton to extrapolate outside of that boundary.
There was an unwritten limitation also imposed on it. The addition law of vectors had to apply. This was a geometric property and there were certainly geometries known at the time in which the addition law did NOT hold. Thus, Newtonian Mechanics has the implicit precondition that you are working in a valid geometry. All QM and GR/SR geometries are invalid EXCEPT for special cases when both these theories reduce quite nicely to classical Newtonian Mechanics.
Just wait for Physics 3.0 - The Quantum DLLs can be both installed and not installed at the same time.
I'm not sure that you can say that it replaces the theory. You can use Newtonian mechanics exactly as Newton wrote them, without changing them one iota, but merely pass in the relativistic values rather than the classical ones. That doesn't sound like a replacement, that's a pre-processing routine at best. Gallilean addition of velocities is then modified by dividing the original result with a new result. A post-processing module.
In relativity, light still travels along straight lines but along a warped topology. The result is the appearance of light being bent by gravity, when it is space that is bent. Light is unaffected.
Where is the replacement?
I think it's fair to consider the relativistic velocity* of the particles as being the key part of the experiment for ATLAS (much as it was for EUROGAM, the one I worked on). However, even if you consider the relativistic velocity of the detectors, it would be relative to the byproducts of the collision and not to the observing scientist. Thus, the velocity of the experiment is still not zero -- except in summation. (Although the relativistic velocity is very high, the resultant velocity is nearly zero.)
*In relativity, it is prohibited for any particle to observe another particle moving faster than C. In order for this to be true when a central observer sees two particles each closing in at near-C from opposite directions, you have to assume that you cannot simply sum up the velocities. You have to divide by 1 + vu/(c^2).
To be fair to the concept, it is certainly true that the rate of cell death increases with the energy being metabolized, which is why eating close to starvation point will increase your life expectancy. (There are toxic byproducts of metabolism, such as free radicals.) Thus, sugars could certainly increase cell damage and increase the risk of cancers. However, excess eating will certainly cause far more damage. Barbecued food is also far worse for you, it's covered in carcinogens. I'd still eat barbecued food and not consider it significantly hazardous, where a significant hazard is one that increases the risk above the variation expected by the noise in the system.
In this case, "noise" includes air pollution (eg: cars generate oxides of nitrogen, which produce nitric acis and nitrous acid when water is added - these acids then do interesting things to your lungs), natural and exploited sources of radiation, stress from excessive work and abusive societies, toxic chemicals used in household stuff, food poisoning, lack of exercise, lack of exposure to sunlight, poor diet (lacking vitamins, lacking the right types of protein, lacking the right minerals, etc).
You also have to consider what is meant by sugar. Fructose? Sucrose? Dextrose? Maltose? Lactose? The last is only really digestable by those with a mutation for processing milk (which evolved somewhere in northern Europe 11,000 years ago - no time at all in human history - and a couple of other places, but is nonetheless an extremely rare mutation to have). We also have consider the context. Sugar beet sugar is chemically identical to cane sugar sugar (both are sucrose) but the minerals and organics that go with them are very different. The context alters not only how the body processes the sugar but also how much sugar is even present (since context alters taste).
Finally, we have to consider what is meant by "toxic". Suget is hydroscopic. It will absorb water. This makes it good for treating certain poisons, as you can draw them out. The best natural sugar for wounds is medical-grade honey. Ideally, medical grade manuka honey. It has the sugars, but it also has antibiotics for which natural resistance by bacteria is still exceedingly low.
This means that honey (which is essentially sugar) is toxic... ...to MRSA and a range of other really nasty bugs.
I disagree with the claim that it is falsified. All theories in physics come with two sets of conditions: the bounds in magnitude and the bounds in resolution. Newton's theory came with well-defined bounds - those of classical phenomena. You cannot extrapolate beyond those bounds and claim you are still working with the theory because the theory isn't defined beyond those bounds. Nor can you interpolate to the quantum level for the same reason - the theory isn't defined there.
Relativity didn't replace Newton's theory, it supplemented it. In computing terms, it's a third-party module you can add on. When you install the Relativity dynamic library, the combined theory applies to a much larger range of phenomena.
The only time a theory will actually be falsified is if QM's gravity or relativity can be patched to work within the other's range. They are contradictory and you cannot load both modules into Newtonian physics at the same time. Only one of these two will stand the test of time, the other will die. Whichever one wins will then merge with Newtonian mechanics to produce a universal law of gravity.
I thought statistics was the leading cause. Just goes to show how much the numbers lie.
Never tried cutting steak with a toothbrush. I rather suspect that unless you tenderize the hell out of it before cooking, a toothbrush cannot cut it. You can certainly cut steak with a spoon, and I could even see you being able to cut it with paper. In 500 years time, these posts will be used to program the android Data.
Analogies are usually fairly pointless. Instead of creating an artificial construct that doesn't really relate at all, try explaining better. Use clarity, not brevity. Use depth, not shortcuts. In short, do what works, not what is easiest on you.
Why? Were the cites given by goodmanj flawed?And if so, why's this not a reply to their post?
Any sources you can point me to would be appreciated. (QiMen Black tea from Tea-of-Chinese costs $80 for 250g. That's twice your upper estimate, so either it's the greatest tea ever made or they're ripping people sideways.)
Almost forgot. If you like tea history and don't have this link, shame on you.
I now almost exclusively drink high-end teas. I used to like Tetley but it now tastes thoo rough for me. PG Tips is good. Yorkshire Gold Blend is also great. If you've not tried it, do so. Of the high end, my preference is for Hao Ya A but I'm not earning enough to keep up. What importers do you use? Upton is ok but some of the high-end tea shops in Portland are getting higher-grade imports than them so I know there's better.
Ok, I can buy your argument on greed and artificial constructs. As for your .sig, the Brits used espionage to steal tea secrets from the Chinese. As I said, all nations have used theft to get ahead. (For those interested in the history of tea, the Brits used to drink coffee. They switched to tea to protest government efforts to shut down the trade unions and other "unapproved" organizations. America switching to coffee as a protest against essentially the same government for essentially the same practices is one of history's greatest ironies.)
It's not enough to focus on skilled tasks. They need to be skilled tasks that the mindset is well-adapted for. Britain's penchant for risk-taking is why it is a key R&D center for not only Formula 1 but Indycar as well. America is risk-averse, which is why it has outsourced a lot of the low-profit, high-investment research (nuclear fusion, supercolliders, etc) to other nations. A lot of the R&D in America is high-profit (such as medical work, advanced microelectronics, etc) and requires relatively little investment once the research facility has been put together. Silicon Valley would never have survived otherwise, given the enormous cost of constructing some of those facilities.
Monocultures are a Bad Idea (Michigan can help explain that one rather better than it would like) but there's nothing wrong with optimizing to your strengths. Indeed, it seems very likely that if America stopped trying to compete where it is weak and started competing where it is strong, it would not run into so many problems. The same goes for the EU and everyone else. Diverting money to lost causes only achieves inferior progress everywhere else.
Of course, you have to be a bit careful with federating technologies. Although a federation is nominally superior to over-generalized societies, it is open to abuse. America doesn't produce its own Rare Earths, but depends utterly on China for them. Not because of any scaricity in America, more for convenience. That turned out to be an incorrect path. Politics now utterly controls the availability of critical elements, which is utterly wrong. You've got to have some balance in there.
Unfortunately, balanced thinking is something corporations (and people in general) are rather bad at.
Pfffft. As if America hadn't done the same. America, prior to signing onto international treaties on copyright and patents, was notorious for reverse-engineering European products and then using mass-production (as opposed to specialist workshops) to undercut the Europeans and sell back to them. Indeed, most major nations throughout history have been... loose on morals and ethics in their formative years. The Romans stole all their technologies - and usually stole the countries that invented them too. The only "we" in this equation is humanity, since every nation on Earth that made it big did so on the back of other nations, robbing them at first, then exploiting them later. The usual end result is an addiction to those other nations, resulting in the inevitable death from that addiction.
(This is why I would like to see a nation actually acheve something honestly for a change. If there isn't that addictive quality, if using others isn't the drug of choice, then you might actually get stable, sustainable achievement. Might. Without any actual case studies to examine, this is a difficult theory to test.)
It depends on the details, none of which exist yet. The theorietical benefit of a quango is that because they can get some/all income via taxes, they should be able to do a better job. Market forces dictate that a private company can NEVER do a better job than the market will bear and it is clear from the multitude of SSL disasters over time (I'm including Verisign's handing out of Microsoft's private keys in the early days) that the market won't tolerate quality work at all. A quango has no such limitation. However, for precisely the same reason, the market can't dictate a minimum level of quality either, but someone has to and it has to be exceedingly high. The quangos that are a disaster are the ones with no oversight to ensure that quality control.
Since all tyrannies require those tyrranized to still be breathing, oxygen is the thin end of the wedge to tyranny. (In other words, almost anything can be dual-purposed for "good" and "evil", so almost anything can be considered the thin end of some wedge or other. It renders that entire line of reasoning pointless.)
It's some rule or other (43? I forget) that if it can be imagined, it's on the Internet. So, somewhere, at some point in time, SCP will indeed have porn popups of Cowboy Neil.