Water would work, but water is also very very heavy. On the other hand, if the domes could be made strong enough to support sufficient water, you'd have a great way to create artificial rain via sprinklers.
We don't know, until someone tries an experiment (eg: analyzes the genome, takes it to some relatively unshielded part of the IIS, or drops seedlings from a transport plane over Chernobyl).
Indeed, it is because we don't know - and because exceptions are bound to happen - that I used the term "generally". Right now, we know it's a great candidate for testing what we think we know. At 50x the genome, it should be possible to test many ideas out about how the genome evolves.
In fact, if it turns out that there isn't much duplication, it could be interesting in other ways. With a genome that long, if there's little or no redundancy, the extra would presumably be a record of how the plant has evolved. Given the normal rate of evolution for plants, that would be one hell of a long record, which might well make a lot of biologists extremely excited.
So I'll freely admit that there are other (exciting) possibilities in addition to the one I suggested at first and possibly some other not-so-exciting possibilities (such as a dinosaur geneticist experimenting with genetically modified food).
Apologies to those who are honest election officials - and hopefully that is the majority.
Yes, the system I proposed would be overkill, but to some extent I intended it that way. Because there are doubts over the safety and reliability of an electronic voting system, I wanted to come up with an idea that would be sufficiently stronger than the existing system that it would be hard for anyone to succumb to the very natural and normal fear of things that are very different. You absolutely know that every time there is any problem with a computer in an election system, it can and will be used against electronic voting in any shape or form (be it computers in the ballot booths or voting at home).
It follows that if you want people to have confidence, there needs to be a system that is sufficiently hardened that it can establish confidence. There are going to be many ways of building such a system far less secure than the one I outlined that is still better than the existing one and would still be good enough to inspire confidence rather than inspire cynical headlines.
My fear is that this is not the approach being used. Diebold was a case of cheap-and-easy over secure. Well, cheap for the company. That will damage confidence and, in turn, will delay any improvements to the system.
Good point. Thanks. Yes, they'd need to be in different language groups.
In America, one option would be English, whichever native language is spoken in the area, and Japanese. These are guaranteed to be in different groups (Hispanic would not be, so is less valuable in this regard as Khasim rightly points out). In those areas where there is no native language any more, or there's political opposition to speaking it, there's a few thousand other languages to pick from. Maori, Finn, Icelandic, Basque - all very different and part of distinct families. Basque is ideal for this in some respects as it's an isolate, with no common ancestor known with any other language. Likewise, if Japanese is a problem, then Chinese or one of the other Asian languages might be a good alternative. The Indian language that was recently reported as "new to science" (actually, it's a distant branch of a known family, not a new language entirely) might also be good for similar reasons.
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation. This plant should, therefore, be highly resistant. That is potentially quite useful knowledge. Back in the days when people looked to hydroponics and Biosphere 2 as a way of getting oxygen into an artificial environment, they forgot to take into consideration that most plantlife won't cope with the radiation on, say, Mars. In order to be able to get a livable environment for humans, you must first create a livable environment for the plants needed. Obvious solution - use rad-resistant plants as part of an initial program for building up the environment.
Once you've got an artificial environment that is biologically stable and sustaining good O:CO2 ratios for plantlife, you can look to advancing that environment. I'd suggest having a two layer dome, with the gap between the inner dome and outer dome flooded at as high a pressure as the domes can take something that'll filter the radiation. By having an organic system that can cope, you can take your time getting it right. Regardless of what is actually done, these plants will provide a rich topsoil that will be valuable to the plants that are actually needed by humans.
Reading texts and listening to the teacher are valuable, yes, but that has never been the whole of the equation. Practice is the only way to make perfect, and for that you need simple - not advanced - technology that allows the children to perform experiments, make predictions, compare what is discovered with what is expected, and draw conclusions. In the end, the only facts that a school should actually teach are those which are either fundamental (you don't want to be looking them up every time) or essential (you can't look anything useful up without knowing them). Everything else should ultimately be skill-based (research skills in science, for example).
A person can always look a fact up, but a person can NEVER look up a skill. That is something that can only ever be learned, not referenced.
There is one exception to the above rule, which I've said elsewhere - there are types of knowledge which have little direct use but which alter the way in which the brain is formed so as to increase the speed and capacity. This knowledge is only useful in this regard within very narrow age-ranges. Outside of those ranges, it has some benefit but nowhere near as much. This kind of accelerator knowledge can be forgotten after leaving school, it probably doesn't even merit testing beyond classroom exercises, but it does empower a person. The better the brain works, the more that can be learned later on so the less important that every last bit of useful knowledge is crammed in early.
I would make one additional point in this regard. Because of the way the brain forms, school should be mandatory up to 18 and there should be little-to-no provision for rural off-days. If my great uncle could computerize his farm to require almost no extra hands 30 years ago, with the cost and complexity (and innovation) involved back then, it should be trivial for any rural farm to do today with virtually everything off-the-shelf for practically nothing. Kids should not be "required" by a farm. Plain and simple. They would benefit the farm (if that is even where they want to go) far better by understanding the fundamental principles correctly rather than mimicking practices that are apparently so defective as to require all this extra manpower.
Well, there are a few things that really should be on the list. As demonstrated by Bletchley Park's teaching centre, tech that lets you get into the low-level details is best. On this basis, I suggest the following:
A "Great Egg Race"-style eggmobile (a machine that can carry an egg through an obstacle course, powered by just an elastic band) - teaches the fundamentals of power efficiency and mechanics
A Micromouse (a self-contained, self-steering robot that can navigate a maze - schools used to build these for fun) - teaches herustics, space efficiency and logic
An 80s-era computer (the BBC microcomputer is by far the best, as it has every imaginable sort of I/O) - teaches elementary programming and the I/O teaches elementary analogue and digital electronics
An S-Deck (a standard plug-board for electronics kits, makes assembling solderless circuits a cinch) - goes with the above for teaching elementary electronics
Newton's Cradle (teaches some of the basics of Newtonian mechanics)
A Slide Rule (children should understand WHY maths produces the results it does - the results themselves aren't important)
An Archimedes Diver and a Lava Lamp (two ways to illustrate buoyancy)
A prism (helps in teaching about optics - a skill obviously not taught very well given the reasons offered by those who believe the moon landings were a hoax)
A Didgeridoo, a string and a strobe light (helps teach about standing waves in different ways)
Dry ice and a small chunk of granite (a nice way to teach the basics of radioactivity)
As you can see, some of these COULD have been done in Laura Ingles' time. They weren't, not because the stuff wasn't there but because the schools at the time (and the parents at the time) were rather bone-headed. Passing tests and not being punished were then (as now) the important things. Knowing stuff was an optional extra. Getting a person to the point where they COULD know more was not merely optional but actually discouraged. Farms needed hands and getting kids too smart might make them move out.
In addition to tech, I'd advise teaching 2-3 languages, or anything else that is high volume, low density (ie: builds up lots of neurons but doesn't require a hell of a lot of connections between them), as the ages 11-18 especially is when the brain's growth is at a maximum. Forcing the brain to expand at that time allows the person to learn more later on. (Certain knowledge requires lots of cells, other types of knowledge - usually the important stuff - requires lots of connections. Having lots of extra brain cells means you can build more of these connections so can learn more of the important stuff. It also seems to impact how quickly the brain ages later in life, with more cells equaling a longer time at peak mental capacity.) Languages seem to be the best for creating extra space. Doesn't matter if they're never used later on, since they're not being learned to be directly useful but rather to malloc out a large heap for the brain to work with. Endangered languages are therefore the best, since they will require the most additional room - a language only becomes endangered if so few relate to it that it's not useful in and of itself. But that's exactly the property you want for this brain padding. You want something that forces the brain to make as much extra space as possible, so the fewest possible shortcuts the brain can take the better.
Actually, Be->NULL. Seriously, not fighting Microsoft has never been a good idea for anyone else, so why should it be a good idea now? Insanity - repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
What I am talking about is that America has no legal protection for the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but Canada does. Ok, got the bill of rights/declaration of independence mixed up. It had been a long day. So shoot me for it. What you completely ignored is the fact that America is a country that does NOT recognize "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", despite it being the basis of its founding. If you'd like to address that, that would be wonderful. Blasting me for a mixup doesn't address what's important and gets side-tracked on a non-issue.
Let us say you have an electronic ballot system, where the voter's registration card has a public encryption key. The ballot is then encrypted using that key. The corresponding private key is in a central computer, with no record linking it to the public key (thus preserving anonymity). This allows the central computer to verify that any one encryption key is used once and only once (one person cannot cast more than one vote), and that no vote that is counted comes from a person without a valid encryption key (so all votes are from people). Let us also say that observers and election officials are supplied with crytographic hashes of the unencrypted ballots at the time of the vote being cast. The total number of votes tallied at the end must equal the total number of cryptographic hashes if no fraud was perpetrated. Since the hash will uniquely identify the cast vote (without identifying what any individual voted), stolen votes (votes injected into the system by an attacker) would be readily identifiable as they would not match a hash. Fraudulent votes could then be eliminated and replaced with the real ones in a semi-automated recount.
We now have three things that cannot be tested with any paper ballot and one corrective action that cannot be achieved by paper ballot.
If you want to show that it is easier to rig an electronic election, find a way you could rig the above system that would be easier than an election official substituting a real ballot box with a pre-stuffed one (something that actually happened in the 2000 election) or that would be easier than an election official "losing" thousands of votes behind office furnishings (something that actually happened in the 2004 election).
The above system is not perfect, but show me that it isn't better. It may be that paper ballots are better, but that doesn't mean it is "obvious". Oh, and as for dodgy software (as happened with Diebold), let's say the election system used a CC EAL7 (Orange Book A1) rated platform, that the software AND submitted proof was open to independent scrutiny, that all networking was encrypted and run over a virtual circuit (so it can't be tampered with and can't be DDoSed) and that both NIST scrutiny and independent scrutiny had certified the systems as secure, politically agnostic, reliable, fault-tolerant and robust.
Again, these are all criteria you can look for in an electronic system, but not a single one of them applies to a manual system. The current system is run by party stooges, for a start. That automatically creates means, motive and opportunity for electoral fraud. Independent international observers have tried to monitor US elections but were blocked from doing so, so independent scrutiny is impossible. Reliability is obviously false, given that electoral fraud has happened on a fairly substantial scale in the past (hence the interest by international observers).
Now, if you meant "the proposed electronic system is open to fraud", then I'd agree with you. It's the generic that I'm not happy with, as it's possible to show that there's examples of superior electronic systems even if they're not ones that would likely be deployed in practice.
...just about every other national domain has been (ab)used by people thinking of ways to use the letters in "cute" ways, this will doubtless be used the same way. North Korea won't care - money is money. Though I just can't see Kim Possible fans being amongst the takers.
Freedom must include freedom to be in a government, or any other organization. If freedom only exists when there is no government, we have a paradox. You cannot be free to be in a government if you cannot have a government.
Secondly, you're only defining personal freedom, not collective freedom or any other kind of freedom. Freedom is not a thing, it is an attribute of a thing. Freedom in the abstract has no meaning, you can only have a freedom of.
Let us say that you are correct that totally free individuals have no government. Then the government, by definition, has no freedom at all. Nor does any other collective. But if you have a dictatorship (the government has total freedom), then neither individuals nor any other collective has freedom. In a total corporate state, it is the collectives that have freedom, not individuals nor government.
This leads to something I stated in a discussion a while back: The sum of all freedoms is a constant. The question is only how you divide the freedom up. There will be some optimal balance. I suspect this is going to work out at something like a 40:40:20 divide of freedom between people:collectives:government. Political scientists have tried to define the "perfect" system for millenia and failed, so I doubt I'll succeed any time soon. Equally, I doubt anyone else will, either.
Maybe the GP has discovered an underground channel linking the east and west coasts far beneath Hadrian's Wall, with a tributary running down to the Severn.
...the Bill of Rights is not recognized as part of the Constitution in America, but it IS recognized as such in Canada. Now we know what the Founding Fathers actually intended, eh?
Y'know, just asking. If this isn't a demand with menaces, it sure the hell ain't kippers.
The interesting part of this is the use of the patent system to prevent an inventor patenting their invention. (You know damn well that the company WILL file patents in ten years anyway and will make gob-loads of money, prior-art not withstanding.) The sole value of a patent system is to ALLOW the inventor to patent their invention. It serves no other function. (The other theoretical value of properly documenting an invention has long-since given up the ghost.) That we now have a verifiable, demonstrable example of patent inversion shows that the system as it stands must be replaced.
Yeah, long baselines work. I was working on the assumption that at any given frequency there will be gaps in what you can know because of absorption so by changing frequency you can change what gaps there are. (Since you can't tell in a noisy signal whether the gap is due to noise swamping the data or there really being a gap.)
Ok, that works. We can remove the technology-dependence by describing it in the abstract. If you have a signal, you will have noise. We can then circumvent the question of the type of noise and the conditions surrounding it. If the noise conceals the signal, you will not be able to detect the signal.
Now, we can apply a bit of theory to this. If we treat each possible path from the object to the detector as a continuous-time analog channel and the presence/absence of some count of photons of a given frequency in a given interval of time as your digital data, you can use the Shannon-Hartley theorem to determine how often the apparent detection of a photon or block of photons will be correct.
Now it gets fun. If we can alter the frequency of the photons (say by using a different light source), the overall noise characteristics will be the same (the details may differ though). If the change is small enough, the diffraction will also be the same with the absorption differing. If you step up the frequency such that the absorption is the same, the diffraction will necessarily differ. You can therefore vary those two parameters independently. (This assumes that these two effects - fluorescence and diffraction - are the underlying cause of all other optical properties. You'd need to extend this if other fundamental properties exist.)
The idea here is that noise is random but information is not. Therefore for any set of data sets, the noise will be random on each but all the information must be related using well-defined rules. If you count the number of 1s and 0s (be they individual photons or blocks of photons) and place them into a bucket, some of that bucket will be noise and some will be data. If you have one data set, every possible division between noise and data could potentially be correct. As you increase the number of data sets, the number of possible divisions is reduced. You will never get to just one potentially valid division in the case of a totally swamped signal. If you can get down to a workable number of candidates, that may be sufficient. (For something as complex as the human body, there will always be multiple conditions that produce the same output - this just increases the range of potential causes.)
It's really a variant on the most basic form of error-correction (sending multiple copies), on the assumption that different types of signal will have errors in different places, allowing for more probable reconstruction.
Since the information is generated by the body the light passes through and not the source, adding any actual error-correcting codes to the data would be extremely hard if not impossible.
Oh, and no I don't think modern technology would be capable of producing a large enough set of data sets to be able to un-entangle the data from the noise.
Part of the problem is that a lack of knowledge can result in poor infrastructure that is actually more dangerous than no infrastructure at all. Utility, likewise, has to reach a certain standard before something really is better than nothing. Many past (and present) disasters are the result of having something that is worse than nothing. Helping third-world nations become disaster areas is probably not useful.
You are actually better off developing knowledge first (up to a point) and then bringing in the rest. What is that point? Frankly, I haven't the foggiest. Looking at Western civilization, there seem to be alternate periods of building quality structures and periods of building structures that collapse at the slightest provocation. It may be possible to infer from that the minimum level of knowledge the West required in order for a given level of technology to work as intended.
You are correct, but there you get into the muddy waters of whether you mean "enough to form an image" even in theory (ie: regardless of technological constraints) or whether it's constrained to some specific level of technology. The theory option then depends on how complete the theory is (you can only extrapolate so far before any theory breaks down) and whether there even is much in the way of theory when it comes to photons passing through matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Water would work, but water is also very very heavy. On the other hand, if the domes could be made strong enough to support sufficient water, you'd have a great way to create artificial rain via sprinklers.
We don't know, until someone tries an experiment (eg: analyzes the genome, takes it to some relatively unshielded part of the IIS, or drops seedlings from a transport plane over Chernobyl).
Indeed, it is because we don't know - and because exceptions are bound to happen - that I used the term "generally". Right now, we know it's a great candidate for testing what we think we know. At 50x the genome, it should be possible to test many ideas out about how the genome evolves.
In fact, if it turns out that there isn't much duplication, it could be interesting in other ways. With a genome that long, if there's little or no redundancy, the extra would presumably be a record of how the plant has evolved. Given the normal rate of evolution for plants, that would be one hell of a long record, which might well make a lot of biologists extremely excited.
So I'll freely admit that there are other (exciting) possibilities in addition to the one I suggested at first and possibly some other not-so-exciting possibilities (such as a dinosaur geneticist experimenting with genetically modified food).
Apologies to those who are honest election officials - and hopefully that is the majority.
Yes, the system I proposed would be overkill, but to some extent I intended it that way. Because there are doubts over the safety and reliability of an electronic voting system, I wanted to come up with an idea that would be sufficiently stronger than the existing system that it would be hard for anyone to succumb to the very natural and normal fear of things that are very different. You absolutely know that every time there is any problem with a computer in an election system, it can and will be used against electronic voting in any shape or form (be it computers in the ballot booths or voting at home).
It follows that if you want people to have confidence, there needs to be a system that is sufficiently hardened that it can establish confidence. There are going to be many ways of building such a system far less secure than the one I outlined that is still better than the existing one and would still be good enough to inspire confidence rather than inspire cynical headlines.
My fear is that this is not the approach being used. Diebold was a case of cheap-and-easy over secure. Well, cheap for the company. That will damage confidence and, in turn, will delay any improvements to the system.
Good point. Thanks. Yes, they'd need to be in different language groups.
In America, one option would be English, whichever native language is spoken in the area, and Japanese. These are guaranteed to be in different groups (Hispanic would not be, so is less valuable in this regard as Khasim rightly points out). In those areas where there is no native language any more, or there's political opposition to speaking it, there's a few thousand other languages to pick from. Maori, Finn, Icelandic, Basque - all very different and part of distinct families. Basque is ideal for this in some respects as it's an isolate, with no common ancestor known with any other language. Likewise, if Japanese is a problem, then Chinese or one of the other Asian languages might be a good alternative. The Indian language that was recently reported as "new to science" (actually, it's a distant branch of a known family, not a new language entirely) might also be good for similar reasons.
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation. This plant should, therefore, be highly resistant. That is potentially quite useful knowledge. Back in the days when people looked to hydroponics and Biosphere 2 as a way of getting oxygen into an artificial environment, they forgot to take into consideration that most plantlife won't cope with the radiation on, say, Mars. In order to be able to get a livable environment for humans, you must first create a livable environment for the plants needed. Obvious solution - use rad-resistant plants as part of an initial program for building up the environment.
Once you've got an artificial environment that is biologically stable and sustaining good O:CO2 ratios for plantlife, you can look to advancing that environment. I'd suggest having a two layer dome, with the gap between the inner dome and outer dome flooded at as high a pressure as the domes can take something that'll filter the radiation. By having an organic system that can cope, you can take your time getting it right. Regardless of what is actually done, these plants will provide a rich topsoil that will be valuable to the plants that are actually needed by humans.
Reading texts and listening to the teacher are valuable, yes, but that has never been the whole of the equation. Practice is the only way to make perfect, and for that you need simple - not advanced - technology that allows the children to perform experiments, make predictions, compare what is discovered with what is expected, and draw conclusions. In the end, the only facts that a school should actually teach are those which are either fundamental (you don't want to be looking them up every time) or essential (you can't look anything useful up without knowing them). Everything else should ultimately be skill-based (research skills in science, for example).
A person can always look a fact up, but a person can NEVER look up a skill. That is something that can only ever be learned, not referenced.
There is one exception to the above rule, which I've said elsewhere - there are types of knowledge which have little direct use but which alter the way in which the brain is formed so as to increase the speed and capacity. This knowledge is only useful in this regard within very narrow age-ranges. Outside of those ranges, it has some benefit but nowhere near as much. This kind of accelerator knowledge can be forgotten after leaving school, it probably doesn't even merit testing beyond classroom exercises, but it does empower a person. The better the brain works, the more that can be learned later on so the less important that every last bit of useful knowledge is crammed in early.
I would make one additional point in this regard. Because of the way the brain forms, school should be mandatory up to 18 and there should be little-to-no provision for rural off-days. If my great uncle could computerize his farm to require almost no extra hands 30 years ago, with the cost and complexity (and innovation) involved back then, it should be trivial for any rural farm to do today with virtually everything off-the-shelf for practically nothing. Kids should not be "required" by a farm. Plain and simple. They would benefit the farm (if that is even where they want to go) far better by understanding the fundamental principles correctly rather than mimicking practices that are apparently so defective as to require all this extra manpower.
Well, there are a few things that really should be on the list. As demonstrated by Bletchley Park's teaching centre, tech that lets you get into the low-level details is best. On this basis, I suggest the following:
As you can see, some of these COULD have been done in Laura Ingles' time. They weren't, not because the stuff wasn't there but because the schools at the time (and the parents at the time) were rather bone-headed. Passing tests and not being punished were then (as now) the important things. Knowing stuff was an optional extra. Getting a person to the point where they COULD know more was not merely optional but actually discouraged. Farms needed hands and getting kids too smart might make them move out.
In addition to tech, I'd advise teaching 2-3 languages, or anything else that is high volume, low density (ie: builds up lots of neurons but doesn't require a hell of a lot of connections between them), as the ages 11-18 especially is when the brain's growth is at a maximum. Forcing the brain to expand at that time allows the person to learn more later on. (Certain knowledge requires lots of cells, other types of knowledge - usually the important stuff - requires lots of connections. Having lots of extra brain cells means you can build more of these connections so can learn more of the important stuff. It also seems to impact how quickly the brain ages later in life, with more cells equaling a longer time at peak mental capacity.) Languages seem to be the best for creating extra space. Doesn't matter if they're never used later on, since they're not being learned to be directly useful but rather to malloc out a large heap for the brain to work with. Endangered languages are therefore the best, since they will require the most additional room - a language only becomes endangered if so few relate to it that it's not useful in and of itself. But that's exactly the property you want for this brain padding. You want something that forces the brain to make as much extra space as possible, so the fewest possible shortcuts the brain can take the better.
Actually, Be->NULL. Seriously, not fighting Microsoft has never been a good idea for anyone else, so why should it be a good idea now? Insanity - repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
What I am talking about is that America has no legal protection for the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but Canada does. Ok, got the bill of rights/declaration of independence mixed up. It had been a long day. So shoot me for it. What you completely ignored is the fact that America is a country that does NOT recognize "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", despite it being the basis of its founding. If you'd like to address that, that would be wonderful. Blasting me for a mixup doesn't address what's important and gets side-tracked on a non-issue.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.
Let us say you have an electronic ballot system, where the voter's registration card has a public encryption key. The ballot is then encrypted using that key. The corresponding private key is in a central computer, with no record linking it to the public key (thus preserving anonymity). This allows the central computer to verify that any one encryption key is used once and only once (one person cannot cast more than one vote), and that no vote that is counted comes from a person without a valid encryption key (so all votes are from people). Let us also say that observers and election officials are supplied with crytographic hashes of the unencrypted ballots at the time of the vote being cast. The total number of votes tallied at the end must equal the total number of cryptographic hashes if no fraud was perpetrated. Since the hash will uniquely identify the cast vote (without identifying what any individual voted), stolen votes (votes injected into the system by an attacker) would be readily identifiable as they would not match a hash. Fraudulent votes could then be eliminated and replaced with the real ones in a semi-automated recount.
We now have three things that cannot be tested with any paper ballot and one corrective action that cannot be achieved by paper ballot.
If you want to show that it is easier to rig an electronic election, find a way you could rig the above system that would be easier than an election official substituting a real ballot box with a pre-stuffed one (something that actually happened in the 2000 election) or that would be easier than an election official "losing" thousands of votes behind office furnishings (something that actually happened in the 2004 election).
The above system is not perfect, but show me that it isn't better. It may be that paper ballots are better, but that doesn't mean it is "obvious". Oh, and as for dodgy software (as happened with Diebold), let's say the election system used a CC EAL7 (Orange Book A1) rated platform, that the software AND submitted proof was open to independent scrutiny, that all networking was encrypted and run over a virtual circuit (so it can't be tampered with and can't be DDoSed) and that both NIST scrutiny and independent scrutiny had certified the systems as secure, politically agnostic, reliable, fault-tolerant and robust.
Again, these are all criteria you can look for in an electronic system, but not a single one of them applies to a manual system. The current system is run by party stooges, for a start. That automatically creates means, motive and opportunity for electoral fraud. Independent international observers have tried to monitor US elections but were blocked from doing so, so independent scrutiny is impossible. Reliability is obviously false, given that electoral fraud has happened on a fairly substantial scale in the past (hence the interest by international observers).
Now, if you meant "the proposed electronic system is open to fraud", then I'd agree with you. It's the generic that I'm not happy with, as it's possible to show that there's examples of superior electronic systems even if they're not ones that would likely be deployed in practice.
...just about every other national domain has been (ab)used by people thinking of ways to use the letters in "cute" ways, this will doubtless be used the same way. North Korea won't care - money is money. Though I just can't see Kim Possible fans being amongst the takers.
Is it good for making mead? That's the only thing that I care about with honey.
No, no, we just need to find Magrathea and a very very large sum of money.
Care to back that up? IRC is a chat system on the Internet and should not be trusted for information. :P
Freedom must include freedom to be in a government, or any other organization. If freedom only exists when there is no government, we have a paradox. You cannot be free to be in a government if you cannot have a government.
Secondly, you're only defining personal freedom, not collective freedom or any other kind of freedom. Freedom is not a thing, it is an attribute of a thing. Freedom in the abstract has no meaning, you can only have a freedom of.
Let us say that you are correct that totally free individuals have no government. Then the government, by definition, has no freedom at all. Nor does any other collective. But if you have a dictatorship (the government has total freedom), then neither individuals nor any other collective has freedom. In a total corporate state, it is the collectives that have freedom, not individuals nor government.
This leads to something I stated in a discussion a while back: The sum of all freedoms is a constant. The question is only how you divide the freedom up. There will be some optimal balance. I suspect this is going to work out at something like a 40:40:20 divide of freedom between people:collectives:government. Political scientists have tried to define the "perfect" system for millenia and failed, so I doubt I'll succeed any time soon. Equally, I doubt anyone else will, either.
Maybe the GP has discovered an underground channel linking the east and west coasts far beneath Hadrian's Wall, with a tributary running down to the Severn.
Well, zombies are kinda nasty, y'know. The biggest problem is what he's going to tell the girls at his college now.
...the Bill of Rights is not recognized as part of the Constitution in America, but it IS recognized as such in Canada. Now we know what the Founding Fathers actually intended, eh?
Y'know, just asking. If this isn't a demand with menaces, it sure the hell ain't kippers.
The interesting part of this is the use of the patent system to prevent an inventor patenting their invention. (You know damn well that the company WILL file patents in ten years anyway and will make gob-loads of money, prior-art not withstanding.) The sole value of a patent system is to ALLOW the inventor to patent their invention. It serves no other function. (The other theoretical value of properly documenting an invention has long-since given up the ghost.) That we now have a verifiable, demonstrable example of patent inversion shows that the system as it stands must be replaced.
Yeah, long baselines work. I was working on the assumption that at any given frequency there will be gaps in what you can know because of absorption so by changing frequency you can change what gaps there are. (Since you can't tell in a noisy signal whether the gap is due to noise swamping the data or there really being a gap.)
As for hamburgers, I think that anything moving would prefer something more substantial. :)
Be, Inc. thought the same as you, whereas Novell did not. Novell still exists, Be does not.
That tells me it is indeed necessary.
Ok, that works. We can remove the technology-dependence by describing it in the abstract. If you have a signal, you will have noise. We can then circumvent the question of the type of noise and the conditions surrounding it. If the noise conceals the signal, you will not be able to detect the signal.
Now, we can apply a bit of theory to this. If we treat each possible path from the object to the detector as a continuous-time analog channel and the presence/absence of some count of photons of a given frequency in a given interval of time as your digital data, you can use the Shannon-Hartley theorem to determine how often the apparent detection of a photon or block of photons will be correct.
Now it gets fun. If we can alter the frequency of the photons (say by using a different light source), the overall noise characteristics will be the same (the details may differ though). If the change is small enough, the diffraction will also be the same with the absorption differing. If you step up the frequency such that the absorption is the same, the diffraction will necessarily differ. You can therefore vary those two parameters independently. (This assumes that these two effects - fluorescence and diffraction - are the underlying cause of all other optical properties. You'd need to extend this if other fundamental properties exist.)
The idea here is that noise is random but information is not. Therefore for any set of data sets, the noise will be random on each but all the information must be related using well-defined rules. If you count the number of 1s and 0s (be they individual photons or blocks of photons) and place them into a bucket, some of that bucket will be noise and some will be data. If you have one data set, every possible division between noise and data could potentially be correct. As you increase the number of data sets, the number of possible divisions is reduced. You will never get to just one potentially valid division in the case of a totally swamped signal. If you can get down to a workable number of candidates, that may be sufficient. (For something as complex as the human body, there will always be multiple conditions that produce the same output - this just increases the range of potential causes.)
It's really a variant on the most basic form of error-correction (sending multiple copies), on the assumption that different types of signal will have errors in different places, allowing for more probable reconstruction.
Since the information is generated by the body the light passes through and not the source, adding any actual error-correcting codes to the data would be extremely hard if not impossible.
Oh, and no I don't think modern technology would be capable of producing a large enough set of data sets to be able to un-entangle the data from the noise.
Part of the problem is that a lack of knowledge can result in poor infrastructure that is actually more dangerous than no infrastructure at all. Utility, likewise, has to reach a certain standard before something really is better than nothing. Many past (and present) disasters are the result of having something that is worse than nothing. Helping third-world nations become disaster areas is probably not useful.
You are actually better off developing knowledge first (up to a point) and then bringing in the rest. What is that point? Frankly, I haven't the foggiest. Looking at Western civilization, there seem to be alternate periods of building quality structures and periods of building structures that collapse at the slightest provocation. It may be possible to infer from that the minimum level of knowledge the West required in order for a given level of technology to work as intended.
You are correct, but there you get into the muddy waters of whether you mean "enough to form an image" even in theory (ie: regardless of technological constraints) or whether it's constrained to some specific level of technology. The theory option then depends on how complete the theory is (you can only extrapolate so far before any theory breaks down) and whether there even is much in the way of theory when it comes to photons passing through matter.
+1 political satire, +1 tech satire, +1 original