If what is presented to the browser is always pre-processed server-side, then the server can use the browser string (and any other retrievable information) to select what transforms need to be applied. In the case of SVG, you might convert the SVG into a static PNG or a VRML diagram, depending on what capabilities the browser has.
Let's take the case of a diagram. The data is stored as raw data on the server. Browser A has SVG support and gets an SVG version of the data. Browser B has no real diagramming support and gets a PNG or a GIF, depending on the browser version. Browser C has VRML support and gets a VRML image. Browser D has no native diagramming support but does have the capacity to run a Java applet, so it gets a generic Java applet with a parameter that tells it that it should display the diagram whose data is at the given URL.
Four different ways to present an identical data set, which will cover virtually any browser from Mosaic onwards, other than for the non-sighted. For them, you'd need a fifth standard to support data gloves with a feedback mechanism if you want the data presented.
2D visual art would be tougher. There may be a way to transform it into something spacial so that you could still use a data glove, but it's not clear how you could do this in a way that would let the blind compare different pieces of art meaningfully. That would be a major challenge and shall be left as an exercise for the reader.
Music has form of sorts. You can associate pitch and volume with height fields. Therefore you can create a "surface" for any piece of music that would allow anyone who was deaf to "see" that music.
This is all very basic transform stuff. I would be shocked if there's a single person here who has NOT been taught about keeping data and presentation separate, and dismayed if those lecturers failed in their duty to explain WHY and HOW. (What is meaningless without the why and how. I do not blame people for reaching false conclusions if they've been given only fragmentary information, especially if the fragments make it obvious that the source didn't understand what they were presenting.)
The original plan was that the Internet backbone would use IPv6 first, tunneling all IPv4 traffic. After which, ISPs would migrate. Since appliances can be dual-stacked, end-users would be the last, using a hybrid of IPv4 and IPv6 transparently (since end-users use names and names will "just work"). This transition would allow people to migrate over to IPv6 with no real "drop-dead" date.
It never happened.
Multicast has been native on the Internet backbone for over a decade, but most ISPs refuse flat-out to enable it. Resistance to IPv6 is even tougher, with mainstream name registration only happening recently.
There will now be an IPv6 drop-dead date, because of the laziness and ineptitude of ISPs. There is no time for the planned transition and the dual stack plan has been largely foiled by IPv6 being disabled by default. (Grandma can't just have her computer "just work" during a transition because Microsoft chose to not let her computer "just work" during a transition. Mind you, most Linux distros don't auto-detect it either, so it's not just a Microsoft fault. However, as they have the bulk of users, they have the bulk of the impact.)
There can't be a sudden switch-over without disabling practically the entire user-base. Having said that, it might mean work will get done, so maybe the backbone providers should enforce this anyway. It would be good for America.
Y2K was only a minor issue BECAUSE every programmer and their cousin was busy fixing the bugs for several years. A few million man-hours and workarounds from hell later, you'd expect things to function fine. There were vendors that ignored the issue and it is those vendors that reported problems in 2000. It is THOSE examples you should look at, because THAT is what your world would have been had the rest of us not fixed things for you. Be grateful, wretch, that we bothered. Because next time we might not. And there is NOTHING you can do or say to change that.
My understanding is that it is graphite if there's more than one layer and it is only graphene when it is a single layer, which by definition is also a monatomic layer. If this is correct, then you cannot have graphene a few atoms thick. That has no meaning.
I'll concur with that, but would prefer to generalize it to "for every nation that mandates vulnerability to wiretapping, the cost for the Nth nation will be less than the cost for the (N-1)th nation." (This avoids the inevitable comeback of "but XYZ did it first" and recognizes the knock-on effect whenever any nation goes down that road.)
I wrote a "generic" metalanguage that could be compiled together with a template into any specific metalanguage with suitable formatting back in 1997. It was a bugger to write, but it was writable. In modern web languages, especially with server scripting languages (eg: PHP) and browser scripting (eg: AJAX), especially with the verifiers present in things like Firefox and the debugging tools like Selenium, it should be a cinch to write clean, elegant web pages that work well on any browser and which can adapt to any specific user's needs.
Ultimately, though, this comes back to Software Engineering 101: One should NEVER mix the processing with the presentation. It should always be possible to present the same information in any way, shape and form.
It is not worth an article, perhaps. I can agree with that. And, no, I do not believe that wiretaps exist because of the US - my father worked in signals intelligence in Cyprus as part of the British forces there, so I know of what I speak. Indeed, I specified in my prior post that to be responsible, the end result has to depend on the purported link being present. (If you get the same result whether or not a given variable is present, then that variable contributed effectively nothing.) So I already covered that aspect.
And, yes, I concur that we are all a part of the government. Indeed, I remember saying that as well. So I think we're more in agreement than you suggest.
Blame isn't binary, despite every effort by lawyers to convince you otherwise. Your responsibility is directly proportional to the degree your action contributed to the result, no more and no less. If the US Government's actions were 25%, 33% or 50% responsible for the feature being present in the hardware exported to Iran, then the US Government should be accorded 25%, 33% or 50% of the blame respectively.
Nor is responsibility limited to immediate one-step cause-and-effect. Distance dilutes responsibility but it does not negate it. The idea that because it wasn't your hand on the trigger or your hand signing the bill means that you have no responsibility is a fallacy believed by those who prefer to shove their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge that they were wrong for what they DID do.
If there exists at least one direct chain of causes-and-effects, regardless of how long that chain is, where the absence of that chain would be sufficient to prevent the end result, ever person along that chain has some measure of responsibility for that end result. To say otherwise is simple denial of reality.
The first practical upshot is that you'd best be damn sure that something really IS wrong before pointing fingers. Now, in this case there seems little question that something is indeed very wrong. Unfortunately, since most of what is wrong was decided by democratically-elected officials, all those who democratically elected them share in the responsibility for the wrongdoing of those they elected. (The unfortunate part being that the voters don't really give a damn about who they vote for, so long as they wave the right color banner.)
And you don't use Squid or SOCKS5 why? There's plenty of ways to hide the hosts without using NAT. And hosts that don't need a direct connection to the Internet can be hidden via virtual circuits (MPLS for Linux has been out for some time), if you don't want to use a proxy.
What's wrong with the clueful using migratory endpoints via MobileIP or NEMO? They were invented for precisely the problem you describe. IPv6 is especially good for this as the early design work concentrated on having an endpoint whose address and routing path could change during the course of a session. (ie: it isn't dependent on the mailbox approach that is sometimes used.)
Hard to say. MobileIP and NEMO allows a computer of one address to receive packets for a different address. Proxy servers (such as Squid) handle most other cases I can think of. Tunnels (IPSec) and Virtual Circuits (MPLS) handle most of the rest. I can think of no useful purpose for NAT given the non-NAT ways of achieving all of the results NAT provides.
I'm unclear about the need for secrets. If they assume that said information is secret and it has actually been obtained by an enemy, then they're vulnerable. (See: Germany and Japan, after codebreakers successfully broke their secure lines of communication.) On the other hand, if they don't assume that said information is secret, then it doesn't matter whether it is actually secret or published. The third option, of them assuming it is secret and it being secret is something that a government can never prove. If it really is secret, then they will see nothing. If it is not secret but the other side is hiding how much they know (as the allies did during the war), then the government will also see nothing. There is no way to tell the difference.
Thus, the only sane strategy is to assume that everything that is currently secret is potentially knowable by others, and therefore not rely on it being secret in the first place. That should be a bonus, nothing more.
Maybe. Let's say it resembles a bacterium on Earth except for the fact that the one on Mars has organelles or other internal structural features that take a very long time to develop that are absent from the one on Earth (or vice versa). You can then say with some certainty that it wasn't contamination during the Space Age. If further samples indicated that the variation in DNA was so great that the most recent common ancestor to all of them was a few million years ago at the earliest, it's old enough to call it Martian life regardless of the ultimate source of organic matter.
The reason neutrino detectors are underground is that you don't want them to detect any old neutrino. You can indeed shield from -some- neutrinos, and it is my argument that the very fact that you can shield from them makes them interesting. If they are being absorbed, they must presumably do something. The question then becomes one of what do they do. The sorts of neutrinos that affect one chlorine atom per many thousands of moles of the stuff are less interesting. Any effect they have would be too small for this experiment to measure.
But what makes this difference? Well, my experiment rests on the underlying assumption that the interaction between a neutrino and matter depends on a valid quantum state being achieved with absolutely nothing left over, that weakly-interacting neutrinos have a state such that almost no possible "collision" between a nucleus and the neutrino could produce such a state, and that more-strongly interacting neutrinos have a state such that there are a number of possible valid interactions.
If this is true, then you would expect different decay rates between the bottom of an oceanic trench and ground level.
However, it isn't just neutrinos that are absorbed. Cosmic rays of all kinds will be. How do you differentiate between a neutrino and a cosmic ray? Well, the atmosphere absorbs quite a few cosmic rays but practically no neutrinos. So by measuring the level of cosmic rays at altitude vs. on the ground, and the change in decay rate (if any), you can calibrate your experiment accordingly. Rather more worrying would be if the decay rate is the same in both cases, precisely because high-energy particles blasting into unstable nuclei generally don't just bounce off. Further, you can't just look up the average values because the whole point of the experiment is that it is intended to be extremely sensitive. Direct measurement at the time of the experiment is the only way you can know the values and the impact of those values.
Why is this important? Because the signal you're looking for is extremely weak. You must be able to eliminate or filter out any/all noise stronger than that. There's no guarantee that you can, but if you don't filter it out, you'll certainly never see what you're looking for.
Yes, a larger mass would definitely help, as does the sensitivity of the measurements. You can also lengthen the time of the experiment. This is not dependent on the half-life as documented anywhere, except insofar as there has to be enough radioactive material left in all three samples that you can draw useful conclusions. Now, a larger mass only helps to a degree. Remember, after one half-life, half of that mass is gone as far as the experiment is concerned. You have to double the amount of mass to add a single half-life's duration to the maximum duration of the experiment, to stay above whatever threshold you've set as the minimum amount of radioactive material left to be useful.
At some point, it becomes impractical to make the mass larger. In order to get a mass onto an aircraft as a film with a well-defined decay rate, you can only cover the total floorspace. Nothing on the walls, no extra layers anywhere, the floor area is it. In order to get an identical mass to the bottom of an oceanic trench, it's got to be light enough for an ROV. That's a significant limit. Fortunately, these are both far in excess of the mass of radioactive material most labs are allowed, let alone how much space they have available.
This isn't too catastrophic - Avagadro's number is very very large, so any sample you have will have a LOT of atoms. And because AMS is able to count down to the level of atoms, your threshold point is impressively low. (Weighing the mass, or measuring decay events, at the end of the experiment as a measure is infinitely less accurate. That would not be an unusual way of doing such a test though.)
You do need to consider the bit in between World War II and the monarchy that was overthrown by the Iranian "Revolution":
In 1951, the Majlis (Parliament of Iran) named Mohammad Mossadegh as new prime minister by a vote of 79-12, who shortly after nationalized the British-owned oil industry (see Abadan Crisis). Mossadegh was opposed by the Shah who feared a resulting oil embargo imposed by the west would leave Iran in economic ruin. The Shah fled Iran but returned when the United Kingdom and United States staged a coup against Mossadegh in August 1953 (see Operation Ajax). Mossadegh was then arrested by pro-Shah army forces.
Now, it is certainly true that the prior government, run by Reza Shah, tended to be sympathetic to Germany. But, let's face it, prior to entry into the war, so were Britain and America. This doesn't mean such attitudes were correct - far from it - but you cannot sanely interpret the actions of anyone out of context. The context of the time was that Germany was extremely popular and was a major player in technology and science. (German was one of the established "scientific" languages of the time, along with Russian. Scientists often knew both.)
Also consider that when Germany and Britain went to war, Britain "insisted that German engineers and technicians in Iran were spies with missions to sabotage British oil facilities in southwestern Iran". In short, charges that absolutely no government in the world would believe or respond to - even if true. And, frankly, it's doubtful it was true, at least at that point. The oil facilities would be far too valuable intact, given the limited resources available at the start of the war. Hitler's strategy at that time could be summed up as capturing the maximum resources in the shortest possible time. Blowing up perfectly good refineries in 1939 would not seem to go along with this. Britain wasn't helping matters by being pushy - they'd spent much of the Quajar Dynasty dividing Persia between themselves and Russia. They might have done better to have left well enough alone until Germany pushed further, then used Iran's fears of imperial nations to convince the Shah that it was only a matter of time before he'd be overrun as well.
This doesn't mean I think the guy was the smartest cookie in the block. Quite the opposite. By the time Russia had entered the war, it should have been obvious to any idiot that Germany had no intention of stopping. Ok, it wasn't obvious to America either, as they were still supplying Germany at that time. There was no official embargo on Germany until the Germans torpedoed a civilian liner with American passengers (the effectiveness of which is dubious) and no active support by America towards the allies until Japan attacked them. Blindness and apathy were very popular traits of the day.
As far as I'm concerned, ALL nations (Iran included) are responsible in their own ways and to their own degree for the current mess. The only way anything is going to get done is by them ALL accepting responsibility for their share of the situation and by collectively working to fix it. The moment you allow for the possibility of an exception or an excuse by so much as a single country, the moment you create a get-out clause, is the moment you provide the next wanna-be Emperor with a pretext for invading. Name me one Emperor (or wannabe) that hasn't had some excuse at the ready in order to get things started.
In principle, the emission of a neutrino with some energy E and momentum M should be identical to the absorption of an anti-neutrino of identical energy and momentum. BUT, and this is important, it would have to be absorbed in such a way as to alter the angular momentum of the nucleus by the correct amount. Because ALL of the equations have to match up exactly, it's not merely a matter of a neutrino being in the general vicinity. It has to impact in a way that makes the symmetry complete.
Because the system is quantized, if the system of equations would not result in a valid change of state, no interaction would take place. It is if and only if the end result is perfectly valid that the nucleus would absorb the neutrino, and if multiple such solutions exist, it is only those solutions for which a decay event exists that a decay event would occur, assuming neutrino absorption affected decay.
Although a lot of care was put into the experiment, there are some problems with it. First, there's no critical mass for a thin film of radioactive material, but there is one for a sphere. By implication, shape is going to change what you observe. Second, because ONLY valid quantized interactions occur, ALL invalid interactions will result in the neutrino passing by/through the nucleus. This is already known to be virtually all such interactions. Thus, the shape won't significantly alter the number of neutrinos any given gold nucleus would interact with. It might alter it a little, but if the variation in neutrino flux is smaller than the variation in decay events due to shape, your signal just got swamped.
Ok, mr smartypants, if you're so much better at this, you design an experiment!
I'll design one for you, sure, but I'd be an idiot to think that it would ever be utilized. Let us take some of this Gold-198*, but only thin films of it, all of equal size. Let's place them in three locations that we can expect to have different neutrino fluxes. Let's have one at high altitude, say a passenger jet that's going to make a fair number of transatlantic journeys. The second can be in a laboratory. The third, let's put that in a box and have an ROV place it in some deep sea trench. There are some highly accurate crystal clocks, or at least accurate to within the margin of error we're concerned with here. One should go along for the ride with each film. Gold-198 has a half-life of 2.69 days. So after 5.38 days, three-quarters should have decayed. That's sufficient for our purposes. The half-life only matters here in that we want enough decay events to make the experiment sufficiently sensitive.
Ok, so after however long the experiment runs for, you take an identical-sized chunk out of each film and run it through an AMS to count the number of daughter nucleotides there are. All radioactive nucleii decay into lighter nucleii, these are termed daughter nucleii. Since they can form no other way, they are the most sensitive measure of the number of decay events of the original gold atoms. Radioactive daughter nucleii will themselves produce further daughter nucleii when they decay. By counting the individual atoms of each kind, you can know precisely how many events have occurred. There is no question about it. There isn't a more sensitive test possible.
Because decay events are going to occur between retrieval and measurement for the two outside units, if you're using the same lab for all measurements, you can use the clocks to subtract out events after the official finish of the experiment, so that only events in the different environments are considered. If you like, note the timestamp on each clock at the start and at the point of retrieval and you can adjust for relativistic effects as well.
This should be about the most sensitive measure of external influence on decay that you can do on Earth.
I'm not going to bother RTFAing, but this would depend on whether the test is two-tailed or one-tailed, in terms of how to interpret the p value. Because this kind of statistical test ultimately boils down to a simple measure of the observed versus a given expected, it is also only really good at testing against H0, the Null Hypothesis. There are more complex tests which allow you to measure against multiple variables in a single test (a good approach as it, in theory, allows you to examine the interactions between variables).
However, these all make one core assumption: that variables you're not testing out are randomly distributed. In other words, as the sample size goes up, the errors will all balance out and so the noise approaches zero. Which is entirely fair if it is indeed noise, which is why we were taught at University that you should do an analysis of variance that allowed you to test to make sure that there weren't any untested factors.
Like I said, I've not RTFA'ed, so I can't say if they did this here, but the experiment seems to have been designed with some measure of care - better than anything I've seen from earlier stories on the subject.
Does it matter what the acronyms mean? If you are given some string S, and that string has a SHA256 hash value of H(S), and the system is later found to have a value of S' with a hash value of H(S'), where H(S) and H(S') are not equal, what the effing hell do you care what those strings mean? S and S' are not the same. It doesn't matter how long or complex S and S' are, it doesn't matter if they're in an alphabet you don't understand, it doesn't even matter if the author is from Alpha Centauri. You can still do the comparison.
Ok, so let's say that there are some rules that go along with it. XY = YX except when preceded by A or followed by B, for example. Pfft. A competent geek can break strings down into the legal substrings following logic so far beyond "normal" comprehension as to appear beyond belief. (For example, it doesn't matter if LAT:LONG is given as LONG:LAT if the two fields are named, "3 north" = "north 3" except when followed by "west" and no units, and so on.) Each substring can be hashed independently, or sorted into some sort of natural order and then hashed. A geek can do this far, far, far better than any non-geek, as illustrated by the fact that ordering rules and substitution are the two areas of maths non-geeks complain about the most. If they can't handle basic algebra in a classroom, they expect us to believe they can handle it under fire?
A corporate firewall should enforce corporate policy. A DSL/Cable modem firewall should enforce home policy. A desktop firewall should enforce desktop policy.
Desktops will always have more specific requirements than corporations, as desktops are generally doing a whole lot less. Further, users like being able to experiment with software in a sandbox-like environment. Ok, I do. That can include software that uses ports that I don't want outside individuals being able to connect to. Finally, desktop firewalls that log attempts to access closed ports are effectively intrusion detection systems without needing any additional programs running.
The whole point of the Internet 2 project was to provide secure, robust, high-speed communication to those who needed it. Not that I really know what makes "Internet 2" anything more than a section of the regular Internet 1 with restrictions on traffic routing off the high-speed backbone they've got. That and a functional IPv6 infrastructure which they've had in place for about 15 years without the need of tunnel brokers. Oh, and IPv6-aware applications - something else Internet 1 users have too few of and they've plenty of.
So the military have only NOW realized that putting sensitive or mission-critical information over a public network is a Bad Idea? Pffft. Pull the other one. They're one of the key players IN the Internet 2 endeavor. I can understand them wanting to get power stations and other critical infrastructure onto it, I can even understand them thinking Joe Public is too stupid to remember all of the news coverage Internet 2 has had over they years, or to google to see if such a network exists. But I'm frankly amazed that they've not been called on it by anyone, and shocked (shocked I tell you!) that nobody on Slashdot has mentioned it.
Slashdot Mirror
If what is presented to the browser is always pre-processed server-side, then the server can use the browser string (and any other retrievable information) to select what transforms need to be applied. In the case of SVG, you might convert the SVG into a static PNG or a VRML diagram, depending on what capabilities the browser has.
Let's take the case of a diagram. The data is stored as raw data on the server. Browser A has SVG support and gets an SVG version of the data. Browser B has no real diagramming support and gets a PNG or a GIF, depending on the browser version. Browser C has VRML support and gets a VRML image. Browser D has no native diagramming support but does have the capacity to run a Java applet, so it gets a generic Java applet with a parameter that tells it that it should display the diagram whose data is at the given URL.
Four different ways to present an identical data set, which will cover virtually any browser from Mosaic onwards, other than for the non-sighted. For them, you'd need a fifth standard to support data gloves with a feedback mechanism if you want the data presented.
2D visual art would be tougher. There may be a way to transform it into something spacial so that you could still use a data glove, but it's not clear how you could do this in a way that would let the blind compare different pieces of art meaningfully. That would be a major challenge and shall be left as an exercise for the reader.
Music has form of sorts. You can associate pitch and volume with height fields. Therefore you can create a "surface" for any piece of music that would allow anyone who was deaf to "see" that music.
This is all very basic transform stuff. I would be shocked if there's a single person here who has NOT been taught about keeping data and presentation separate, and dismayed if those lecturers failed in their duty to explain WHY and HOW. (What is meaningless without the why and how. I do not blame people for reaching false conclusions if they've been given only fragmentary information, especially if the fragments make it obvious that the source didn't understand what they were presenting.)
The original plan was that the Internet backbone would use IPv6 first, tunneling all IPv4 traffic. After which, ISPs would migrate. Since appliances can be dual-stacked, end-users would be the last, using a hybrid of IPv4 and IPv6 transparently (since end-users use names and names will "just work"). This transition would allow people to migrate over to IPv6 with no real "drop-dead" date.
It never happened.
Multicast has been native on the Internet backbone for over a decade, but most ISPs refuse flat-out to enable it. Resistance to IPv6 is even tougher, with mainstream name registration only happening recently.
There will now be an IPv6 drop-dead date, because of the laziness and ineptitude of ISPs. There is no time for the planned transition and the dual stack plan has been largely foiled by IPv6 being disabled by default. (Grandma can't just have her computer "just work" during a transition because Microsoft chose to not let her computer "just work" during a transition. Mind you, most Linux distros don't auto-detect it either, so it's not just a Microsoft fault. However, as they have the bulk of users, they have the bulk of the impact.)
There can't be a sudden switch-over without disabling practically the entire user-base. Having said that, it might mean work will get done, so maybe the backbone providers should enforce this anyway. It would be good for America.
Y2K was only a minor issue BECAUSE every programmer and their cousin was busy fixing the bugs for several years. A few million man-hours and workarounds from hell later, you'd expect things to function fine. There were vendors that ignored the issue and it is those vendors that reported problems in 2000. It is THOSE examples you should look at, because THAT is what your world would have been had the rest of us not fixed things for you. Be grateful, wretch, that we bothered. Because next time we might not. And there is NOTHING you can do or say to change that.
My understanding is that it is graphite if there's more than one layer and it is only graphene when it is a single layer, which by definition is also a monatomic layer. If this is correct, then you cannot have graphene a few atoms thick. That has no meaning.
I'll concur with that, but would prefer to generalize it to "for every nation that mandates vulnerability to wiretapping, the cost for the Nth nation will be less than the cost for the (N-1)th nation." (This avoids the inevitable comeback of "but XYZ did it first" and recognizes the knock-on effect whenever any nation goes down that road.)
I wrote a "generic" metalanguage that could be compiled together with a template into any specific metalanguage with suitable formatting back in 1997. It was a bugger to write, but it was writable. In modern web languages, especially with server scripting languages (eg: PHP) and browser scripting (eg: AJAX), especially with the verifiers present in things like Firefox and the debugging tools like Selenium, it should be a cinch to write clean, elegant web pages that work well on any browser and which can adapt to any specific user's needs.
Ultimately, though, this comes back to Software Engineering 101: One should NEVER mix the processing with the presentation. It should always be possible to present the same information in any way, shape and form.
It is not worth an article, perhaps. I can agree with that. And, no, I do not believe that wiretaps exist because of the US - my father worked in signals intelligence in Cyprus as part of the British forces there, so I know of what I speak. Indeed, I specified in my prior post that to be responsible, the end result has to depend on the purported link being present. (If you get the same result whether or not a given variable is present, then that variable contributed effectively nothing.) So I already covered that aspect.
And, yes, I concur that we are all a part of the government. Indeed, I remember saying that as well. So I think we're more in agreement than you suggest.
Blame isn't binary, despite every effort by lawyers to convince you otherwise. Your responsibility is directly proportional to the degree your action contributed to the result, no more and no less. If the US Government's actions were 25%, 33% or 50% responsible for the feature being present in the hardware exported to Iran, then the US Government should be accorded 25%, 33% or 50% of the blame respectively.
Nor is responsibility limited to immediate one-step cause-and-effect. Distance dilutes responsibility but it does not negate it. The idea that because it wasn't your hand on the trigger or your hand signing the bill means that you have no responsibility is a fallacy believed by those who prefer to shove their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge that they were wrong for what they DID do.
If there exists at least one direct chain of causes-and-effects, regardless of how long that chain is, where the absence of that chain would be sufficient to prevent the end result, ever person along that chain has some measure of responsibility for that end result. To say otherwise is simple denial of reality.
The first practical upshot is that you'd best be damn sure that something really IS wrong before pointing fingers. Now, in this case there seems little question that something is indeed very wrong. Unfortunately, since most of what is wrong was decided by democratically-elected officials, all those who democratically elected them share in the responsibility for the wrongdoing of those they elected. (The unfortunate part being that the voters don't really give a damn about who they vote for, so long as they wave the right color banner.)
And you don't use Squid or SOCKS5 why? There's plenty of ways to hide the hosts without using NAT. And hosts that don't need a direct connection to the Internet can be hidden via virtual circuits (MPLS for Linux has been out for some time), if you don't want to use a proxy.
What's wrong with the clueful using migratory endpoints via MobileIP or NEMO? They were invented for precisely the problem you describe. IPv6 is especially good for this as the early design work concentrated on having an endpoint whose address and routing path could change during the course of a session. (ie: it isn't dependent on the mailbox approach that is sometimes used.)
Hard to say. MobileIP and NEMO allows a computer of one address to receive packets for a different address. Proxy servers (such as Squid) handle most other cases I can think of. Tunnels (IPSec) and Virtual Circuits (MPLS) handle most of the rest. I can think of no useful purpose for NAT given the non-NAT ways of achieving all of the results NAT provides.
The Internet is an illusion created by the Matrix.
I'm unclear about the need for secrets. If they assume that said information is secret and it has actually been obtained by an enemy, then they're vulnerable. (See: Germany and Japan, after codebreakers successfully broke their secure lines of communication.) On the other hand, if they don't assume that said information is secret, then it doesn't matter whether it is actually secret or published. The third option, of them assuming it is secret and it being secret is something that a government can never prove. If it really is secret, then they will see nothing. If it is not secret but the other side is hiding how much they know (as the allies did during the war), then the government will also see nothing. There is no way to tell the difference.
Thus, the only sane strategy is to assume that everything that is currently secret is potentially knowable by others, and therefore not rely on it being secret in the first place. That should be a bonus, nothing more.
Maybe. Let's say it resembles a bacterium on Earth except for the fact that the one on Mars has organelles or other internal structural features that take a very long time to develop that are absent from the one on Earth (or vice versa). You can then say with some certainty that it wasn't contamination during the Space Age. If further samples indicated that the variation in DNA was so great that the most recent common ancestor to all of them was a few million years ago at the earliest, it's old enough to call it Martian life regardless of the ultimate source of organic matter.
The reason neutrino detectors are underground is that you don't want them to detect any old neutrino. You can indeed shield from -some- neutrinos, and it is my argument that the very fact that you can shield from them makes them interesting. If they are being absorbed, they must presumably do something. The question then becomes one of what do they do. The sorts of neutrinos that affect one chlorine atom per many thousands of moles of the stuff are less interesting. Any effect they have would be too small for this experiment to measure.
But what makes this difference? Well, my experiment rests on the underlying assumption that the interaction between a neutrino and matter depends on a valid quantum state being achieved with absolutely nothing left over, that weakly-interacting neutrinos have a state such that almost no possible "collision" between a nucleus and the neutrino could produce such a state, and that more-strongly interacting neutrinos have a state such that there are a number of possible valid interactions.
If this is true, then you would expect different decay rates between the bottom of an oceanic trench and ground level.
However, it isn't just neutrinos that are absorbed. Cosmic rays of all kinds will be. How do you differentiate between a neutrino and a cosmic ray? Well, the atmosphere absorbs quite a few cosmic rays but practically no neutrinos. So by measuring the level of cosmic rays at altitude vs. on the ground, and the change in decay rate (if any), you can calibrate your experiment accordingly. Rather more worrying would be if the decay rate is the same in both cases, precisely because high-energy particles blasting into unstable nuclei generally don't just bounce off. Further, you can't just look up the average values because the whole point of the experiment is that it is intended to be extremely sensitive. Direct measurement at the time of the experiment is the only way you can know the values and the impact of those values.
Why is this important? Because the signal you're looking for is extremely weak. You must be able to eliminate or filter out any/all noise stronger than that. There's no guarantee that you can, but if you don't filter it out, you'll certainly never see what you're looking for.
Yes. These days, they're industry-standard.
Yes, a larger mass would definitely help, as does the sensitivity of the measurements. You can also lengthen the time of the experiment. This is not dependent on the half-life as documented anywhere, except insofar as there has to be enough radioactive material left in all three samples that you can draw useful conclusions. Now, a larger mass only helps to a degree. Remember, after one half-life, half of that mass is gone as far as the experiment is concerned. You have to double the amount of mass to add a single half-life's duration to the maximum duration of the experiment, to stay above whatever threshold you've set as the minimum amount of radioactive material left to be useful.
At some point, it becomes impractical to make the mass larger. In order to get a mass onto an aircraft as a film with a well-defined decay rate, you can only cover the total floorspace. Nothing on the walls, no extra layers anywhere, the floor area is it. In order to get an identical mass to the bottom of an oceanic trench, it's got to be light enough for an ROV. That's a significant limit. Fortunately, these are both far in excess of the mass of radioactive material most labs are allowed, let alone how much space they have available.
This isn't too catastrophic - Avagadro's number is very very large, so any sample you have will have a LOT of atoms. And because AMS is able to count down to the level of atoms, your threshold point is impressively low. (Weighing the mass, or measuring decay events, at the end of the experiment as a measure is infinitely less accurate. That would not be an unusual way of doing such a test though.)
You do need to consider the bit in between World War II and the monarchy that was overthrown by the Iranian "Revolution":
In 1951, the Majlis (Parliament of Iran) named Mohammad Mossadegh as new prime minister by a vote of 79-12, who shortly after nationalized the British-owned oil industry (see Abadan Crisis). Mossadegh was opposed by the Shah who feared a resulting oil embargo imposed by the west would leave Iran in economic ruin. The Shah fled Iran but returned when the United Kingdom and United States staged a coup against Mossadegh in August 1953 (see Operation Ajax). Mossadegh was then arrested by pro-Shah army forces.
Now, it is certainly true that the prior government, run by Reza Shah, tended to be sympathetic to Germany. But, let's face it, prior to entry into the war, so were Britain and America. This doesn't mean such attitudes were correct - far from it - but you cannot sanely interpret the actions of anyone out of context. The context of the time was that Germany was extremely popular and was a major player in technology and science. (German was one of the established "scientific" languages of the time, along with Russian. Scientists often knew both.)
Also consider that when Germany and Britain went to war, Britain "insisted that German engineers and technicians in Iran were spies with missions to sabotage British oil facilities in southwestern Iran". In short, charges that absolutely no government in the world would believe or respond to - even if true. And, frankly, it's doubtful it was true, at least at that point. The oil facilities would be far too valuable intact, given the limited resources available at the start of the war. Hitler's strategy at that time could be summed up as capturing the maximum resources in the shortest possible time. Blowing up perfectly good refineries in 1939 would not seem to go along with this. Britain wasn't helping matters by being pushy - they'd spent much of the Quajar Dynasty dividing Persia between themselves and Russia. They might have done better to have left well enough alone until Germany pushed further, then used Iran's fears of imperial nations to convince the Shah that it was only a matter of time before he'd be overrun as well.
This doesn't mean I think the guy was the smartest cookie in the block. Quite the opposite. By the time Russia had entered the war, it should have been obvious to any idiot that Germany had no intention of stopping. Ok, it wasn't obvious to America either, as they were still supplying Germany at that time. There was no official embargo on Germany until the Germans torpedoed a civilian liner with American passengers (the effectiveness of which is dubious) and no active support by America towards the allies until Japan attacked them. Blindness and apathy were very popular traits of the day.
As far as I'm concerned, ALL nations (Iran included) are responsible in their own ways and to their own degree for the current mess. The only way anything is going to get done is by them ALL accepting responsibility for their share of the situation and by collectively working to fix it. The moment you allow for the possibility of an exception or an excuse by so much as a single country, the moment you create a get-out clause, is the moment you provide the next wanna-be Emperor with a pretext for invading. Name me one Emperor (or wannabe) that hasn't had some excuse at the ready in order to get things started.
In principle, the emission of a neutrino with some energy E and momentum M should be identical to the absorption of an anti-neutrino of identical energy and momentum. BUT, and this is important, it would have to be absorbed in such a way as to alter the angular momentum of the nucleus by the correct amount. Because ALL of the equations have to match up exactly, it's not merely a matter of a neutrino being in the general vicinity. It has to impact in a way that makes the symmetry complete.
Because the system is quantized, if the system of equations would not result in a valid change of state, no interaction would take place. It is if and only if the end result is perfectly valid that the nucleus would absorb the neutrino, and if multiple such solutions exist, it is only those solutions for which a decay event exists that a decay event would occur, assuming neutrino absorption affected decay.
Although a lot of care was put into the experiment, there are some problems with it. First, there's no critical mass for a thin film of radioactive material, but there is one for a sphere. By implication, shape is going to change what you observe. Second, because ONLY valid quantized interactions occur, ALL invalid interactions will result in the neutrino passing by/through the nucleus. This is already known to be virtually all such interactions. Thus, the shape won't significantly alter the number of neutrinos any given gold nucleus would interact with. It might alter it a little, but if the variation in neutrino flux is smaller than the variation in decay events due to shape, your signal just got swamped.
Ok, mr smartypants, if you're so much better at this, you design an experiment!
I'll design one for you, sure, but I'd be an idiot to think that it would ever be utilized. Let us take some of this Gold-198*, but only thin films of it, all of equal size. Let's place them in three locations that we can expect to have different neutrino fluxes. Let's have one at high altitude, say a passenger jet that's going to make a fair number of transatlantic journeys. The second can be in a laboratory. The third, let's put that in a box and have an ROV place it in some deep sea trench. There are some highly accurate crystal clocks, or at least accurate to within the margin of error we're concerned with here. One should go along for the ride with each film. Gold-198 has a half-life of 2.69 days. So after 5.38 days, three-quarters should have decayed. That's sufficient for our purposes. The half-life only matters here in that we want enough decay events to make the experiment sufficiently sensitive.
Ok, so after however long the experiment runs for, you take an identical-sized chunk out of each film and run it through an AMS to count the number of daughter nucleotides there are. All radioactive nucleii decay into lighter nucleii, these are termed daughter nucleii. Since they can form no other way, they are the most sensitive measure of the number of decay events of the original gold atoms. Radioactive daughter nucleii will themselves produce further daughter nucleii when they decay. By counting the individual atoms of each kind, you can know precisely how many events have occurred. There is no question about it. There isn't a more sensitive test possible.
Because decay events are going to occur between retrieval and measurement for the two outside units, if you're using the same lab for all measurements, you can use the clocks to subtract out events after the official finish of the experiment, so that only events in the different environments are considered. If you like, note the timestamp on each clock at the start and at the point of retrieval and you can adjust for relativistic effects as well.
This should be about the most sensitive measure of external influence on decay that you can do on Earth.
I'm not going to bother RTFAing, but this would depend on whether the test is two-tailed or one-tailed, in terms of how to interpret the p value. Because this kind of statistical test ultimately boils down to a simple measure of the observed versus a given expected, it is also only really good at testing against H0, the Null Hypothesis. There are more complex tests which allow you to measure against multiple variables in a single test (a good approach as it, in theory, allows you to examine the interactions between variables).
However, these all make one core assumption: that variables you're not testing out are randomly distributed. In other words, as the sample size goes up, the errors will all balance out and so the noise approaches zero. Which is entirely fair if it is indeed noise, which is why we were taught at University that you should do an analysis of variance that allowed you to test to make sure that there weren't any untested factors.
Like I said, I've not RTFA'ed, so I can't say if they did this here, but the experiment seems to have been designed with some measure of care - better than anything I've seen from earlier stories on the subject.
Does it matter what the acronyms mean? If you are given some string S, and that string has a SHA256 hash value of H(S), and the system is later found to have a value of S' with a hash value of H(S'), where H(S) and H(S') are not equal, what the effing hell do you care what those strings mean? S and S' are not the same. It doesn't matter how long or complex S and S' are, it doesn't matter if they're in an alphabet you don't understand, it doesn't even matter if the author is from Alpha Centauri. You can still do the comparison.
Ok, so let's say that there are some rules that go along with it. XY = YX except when preceded by A or followed by B, for example. Pfft. A competent geek can break strings down into the legal substrings following logic so far beyond "normal" comprehension as to appear beyond belief. (For example, it doesn't matter if LAT:LONG is given as LONG:LAT if the two fields are named, "3 north" = "north 3" except when followed by "west" and no units, and so on.) Each substring can be hashed independently, or sorted into some sort of natural order and then hashed. A geek can do this far, far, far better than any non-geek, as illustrated by the fact that ordering rules and substitution are the two areas of maths non-geeks complain about the most. If they can't handle basic algebra in a classroom, they expect us to believe they can handle it under fire?
A corporate firewall should enforce corporate policy. A DSL/Cable modem firewall should enforce home policy. A desktop firewall should enforce desktop policy.
Desktops will always have more specific requirements than corporations, as desktops are generally doing a whole lot less. Further, users like being able to experiment with software in a sandbox-like environment. Ok, I do. That can include software that uses ports that I don't want outside individuals being able to connect to. Finally, desktop firewalls that log attempts to access closed ports are effectively intrusion detection systems without needing any additional programs running.
Use a network protocol Linux supports and Windows doesn't? Install the MLPS patch and run the Linux boxes over an independent virtual circuit?
The whole point of the Internet 2 project was to provide secure, robust, high-speed communication to those who needed it. Not that I really know what makes "Internet 2" anything more than a section of the regular Internet 1 with restrictions on traffic routing off the high-speed backbone they've got. That and a functional IPv6 infrastructure which they've had in place for about 15 years without the need of tunnel brokers. Oh, and IPv6-aware applications - something else Internet 1 users have too few of and they've plenty of.
So the military have only NOW realized that putting sensitive or mission-critical information over a public network is a Bad Idea? Pffft. Pull the other one. They're one of the key players IN the Internet 2 endeavor. I can understand them wanting to get power stations and other critical infrastructure onto it, I can even understand them thinking Joe Public is too stupid to remember all of the news coverage Internet 2 has had over they years, or to google to see if such a network exists. But I'm frankly amazed that they've not been called on it by anyone, and shocked (shocked I tell you!) that nobody on Slashdot has mentioned it.
You can cluster Dr Strange, but it can alter the mystical properties of the universe.