Uranium is rather easier to estimate than oil. We know the abundance of the elements on Earth, whereas oil is a compound. Although oil cannot exceed the total amount of hydrogen or carbon, the amount of hydrogen and carbon that form oil in pools large enough to extract close enough to the surface to be extractable is much harder to guess. Uranium is uranium, and we don't care what compounds it has formed, so the total minable uranium will be much closer to the abundance of the element than oil is to the abundance of its constituent elements. Oil reserves are guesses, uranium reserves are a mathematically provable value.
Having said that, you assume that the guesses were wrong. Actually, there are some excellent reasons for believing the guesses were right.
Britain now consumes more food than it produces - it fell into a food deficit a few weeks back. Not sure about other countries, but I suspect that many do likewise. The 80s is about when starvation in Africa hit the point where people were dying in vast numbers. In America and other industrialized countries, it is no longer possible to feed everyone a healthy diet. People are fed extremely bloaty, chemical-laced, drug-laced* toxic sludge instead, unless they're rich enough to afford the real stuff.
We're not "out of food" in the sense that nobody has any, but we ARE "out of food" in the sense that it is no longer economically viable to keep people fed. I strongly expect the region incapable of maintaining human life (because there simply isn't any food) to continue expanding, and for those regions with high population densities to place more and more people in the position of eating dangerously unhealthy products in a desparate effort to avoid admitting to the fact that they simply don't have the food to feed their people. (The picture is complicated by Africa having extremely high death rates from disease and war, as well as from starvation, but the evidence seems to be that a significant portion of the world CANNOT feed itself.)
We should also bear in mind that the oceans have supplied a very large percent of the food for some time. However, cod stocks are extinct in some places and down 90% in others, with many edible fish stocks down 70-80%. The oceans can no longer support human life in the manner to which it is accustomed.
*Angel dust and other illegal substances are, according to some reports, routinely added to cattle feed along with extremely high levels of antibiotics and growth hormones. All this because the livestock have to be kept in unhealthy conditions in order to feed the population at all, and have to be bulked up to maximise meat per square foot of land used. The majority of farmers don't use organic farming - not because it's more expensive (they'd simply raise their prices, and would probably make greater profits) but because it's not physically possible to supply sufficient food using any kind of sane system of farming. If sane farming practices were mandated, a good half of the American population would look like the BBC images of Ethiopia that spawned Live Aid.
Oil has passed its peak and North Sea oil is virtually exhausted (having passed peak sometime in the 80s). Nor is oil the only fossil fuel in trouble. There are no working coal mines in Great Britain - the very few minable seams left are far too contaminated with sulpher to be of much value. It is unclear how much oil is left in Saudi Arabia, but it is notable that they have failed to increase capacity although they have quota to spare. There have been no major oil finds ANYWHERE in the world for some time and it is thought likely that this is because there are none to find. The arctic wildlife refuge has so little oil that although the area Bush wants drilled would take 10-15 years to get the pipeline and installations in place, there is at most 10 years worth of oil there, assuming the best possible estimates given.
All in all, the usual cry of "there will always be more" demonstrably has no validity. We are not in good shape, as things stand, and drastic changes will need to be made to human habits if humanity plans on staying around long enough to care about fusion.
The prime numbers were just an indicator for the TV clip (did the aliens ever ask the MPAA for permission?) which, in turn, was an indicator for the Message which, in turn, carried the primer within the polarity.
The message was also coded from first principles, starting with true = true and true != false. A messgae of that kind long enough to talk about radioactive waste would be too long to be useful or have much chance of surviving. A better method would be to have a diagram of the periodic table, highlighting the elements present. Even if the periodic table itself is unknown in the future, it contains enough basic information (mass, name, charge, valency, etc) that any advanced civilization descended from an existing human civilization should be able to interpret it sufficiently to at least be on guard.
BNFL really F'ed up the whole reprocessing idea at Windscale, err, Selafield, by occasionally "accidently" dumping radioactive waste into the Irish Sea (which is now the most radioactive in the world). The sea spray contains measurable levels of plutonium. Cancer levels are something like 100 times background levels. A burst pipe contaminated so much of the infrastructure of THORP that it is unclear if it can ever be made safe. And this is the center that was taking radioactive waste from nuclear power stations across the globe, on account of nobody else wanting something like that in their backyard.
Nuclear reprocessing is a must. At the current rate of development and fuel use, uranium ore will run out 25+ years before we are due to have a commercially viable fusion reactor, never mind enough such reactors that fission reactors can all be replaced. Well, either reprocessing is a must, or we need to invest an order of magnitude more in fusion research, but Governments don't like funding speculative research much and the decades of fuel we currently have will outlast the career of any politician currently with sufficient influence to actually bring about radical funding programs.
However, if we do have reprocessing, it absolutely needs to be far better managed than BNFL can do. Oh, and don't get Group 4 to carry the nuclear fuel, either. They tend to lose things a lot.
Just leave the radioactive waste in the open, add something that attracts animals, and let the future civilizations figure it out from the three-headed buffalo in the region.
Oh well. Anyways, this is slashdot - nobody RTFA here, especially when we know more than the journalists (which is 99.9% of the time). The bottom line is that there's bugger all any agency can do to block encrypted VoIP or encrypted phone calls because (as I pointed out) you can insert the crypto device prior to wherever they mandate the backdoor. If they backdoor the ISP, then encrypt the link. IPSec is good enough for most people. If they backdoor ALL VoIP software, then encrypt the microphone and headset the way I outlined.
I don't NEED to read the article to know that no problem exists outside the minds of the foolish and the lazy. Anyone else can be as secure as they damn well please. (But what if they outlaw such methods? Duh, read my post. You don't leave your methods in plain-sight, you hide them. All you need is the signature of your data to look like something they'd be ok with.)
Normally, I wouldn't respond to trolls that are so unoriginal, but this is an important issue and some poor fool might think there's something to be scared of. The ONLY thing to fear is fear itself, the rest is subject to logical thought.
First, STU phones have indeed been around for ages. I believe the military use STU III, which gives them public-key encryption. The biggest problem is that the people often natter on the unsecured connection first, which not only tells any attackers whose keys are being used but some of the content of the message they are trying to break. Commercial scramblers, for low-grade security, have been around longer but probably are nowhere near as secure.
Second, you can trivially encrypt an ordinary telephone very easily. Feed the handset into the microphone input of your soundcard. Apply a stream cipher to the recorded input. Play the output through the soundcard and into the base of the telephone. Not quite public-key standard, but I'll bet you STU phones just send the encryption key by public key and actually use a stream cipher for the data itself.
It may be possible to put an eliptic curve cipher into hardware - an ASIC, or something, then place an ADC one side and a DAC the other. Then you'd have true end-to-end public encryption hardware for a phone. You'd need to have one group of chips for the incoming and the other for the outgoing, then have some means of entering the public and private keys.
Not sure you could encrypt a mobile phone very easily - you'd need to rip a lot of it apart, unless you could code something in Java and have the sound go through the applet. It would kill the battery, even if there were some way to do that, though.
The trick with VoIP is to produce a degree of randomness very similar to a commercial scrambler. (Same, actually, for landline encryption.) The idea there would be to use what appeared - to all intents and purposes - to be lawful encryption technology for phones. (Well, technically it ALL is, but the Government is less likely to want to tangle with the corporate sector. They have more money than geeks.) If it cannot be distinguished from a commercial scrambler (except that their usual scripts won't break the code) then it'll probably not worry anyone too much. Except for those in the NSA who like selling industrial trade secrets on the side.
The reason you want to mimic the signature of another system is that it'll make it harder for said authorities to justify finding out what this new crypto tech is. If it looks the same, and the exhaustive key search is incomplete, then there isn't anything to suggest a new tech exists to obtain. And, face it, beurocrats are as lazy as everyone else. They're paranoid, too, so don't play on the paranoia, but DO engineer towards the lazy.
(I was developing radionuclide analysis software by gamma energies for O-levels, so this is an area I tend to know just that little bit about).
Radionuclides occur in just about every substance on Earth. There no elements that I know of that have no naturally-occuring radioactive isotopes. Many have a large number. They require no active power source to be radioactive, they just are. Power makes zero difference. An example would be the copper used to make the antenna of the RFID embedded chip. There are a lot of radioisotopes for copper - most of them are beta emitters, though, not alpha. You want to tell me you personally check the RFID tags you implant for isotope purity? No? Then you'll be including some of these in everything you implant, according to the usual rules for the frequency of each isotope on Earth. Sorry, you can't escape it by turning the radio off.
If someone's found a way to actively emit alpha particles, PLEASE let me in on the secret!:) Seriously, the glues used on older computer chips were particularly bad and had to be changed when chips got small enough to be corrupted or damaged.
There are many, many natural alpha emitters. Radon is perfectly natural and requires no batteries. A few millimeters is usually sufficient to block alpha particles, but the entire thickness of an implant thin enough not to cause an obvious problem couldn't be much thicker than that in total (both sides of the casing plus the interior).
Beta would be more penetrating, but wouldn't be as damaging. A single electron won't do a whole lot (charge of -1, insignificant mass) but a helium ion (charge of +2, mass of 4) tends to be rather nastier provided it actually gets anywhere.
You are correct that keys (in the case of, say, a door or car) are adequate security in many cases. If you need better security, use a "thieves lock" (it actually unlocks in the reverse direction than normal, with the normal direction causing the lock to disable itself until reset).
However, let's assume that this person WANTS the most high-tech solution imaginable. RFID tags are dumb devices with no meaningful logic, which means you can't do encryption key negotiation - or, indeed, any form of encryption at all. Anyone with a scanner can lift ALL of your keys with a simple RFID reader and can then impersonate you with impunity with ALL electronic devices.
If someone wants an implant - genuinely, truthfully, absolutely would die without one - then they should implant an intelligent device, preferably a small embedded general purpose computer. General purpose? Yes, then you only need one implant, which you can then program for ALL of your devices you want to control, rather than having one implant per device.
Strong, crypto would utterly defeat the RFID attack on cars mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story. It would also make the computer "unscannable" the way an RFID tag is, because it's no longer just a passive device. Further, an intelligent device could do ANYTHING you wanted, whereas an RFID tag could not. An embedded computer could monitor your temperature and control the thermostat accordingly, for example. An embedded tag could do nothing more than get crushed as the blood vessels expanded.
Personally, I would avoid implants. Implants can be thought of as deliberate splinters or deliberate cysts, depending on size. Both of these, when they occur naturally, can potentially turn nasty. The body really doesn't take kindly to foreign objects, if it detects them. When you've any kind of device that was probably not assembled in a clean-room environment, sterilized and completely clensed, there's a good risk that implants could carry unwanted hitchhikers. Even when it's all done properly, a good bruise near the implant could turn nasty. That's ignoring any chemical reactions between the implant and the body, which may have other unexpected consequences.
(You should also be aware of materials used. Materials that have a higher-than-normal level of alpha-particle emitters could seriously screw things up. The skin is thick enough to absorb alpha particles, in typical real-world conditions, which is just as well - soft tissue tends not to react too well to such things.)
The embedded computer shares ALL of the health problems of an RFID tag, though scaled up because it is more complex and involves more components. It also needs a power source, so you'll occasionally need to rip yourself open to replace the lithium batteries.
Now, there ARE ways to embed a computer in a person in a way that would minimize hazards on a day-to-day basis. However, there you're talking major surgery for the implant plus for each recharge. Surgery is, itself, extremely dangerous and not something you'd normally do just to add a gadget to your life.
It's possible to imagine surgical implants that COULD be recharged with less effort - such as enlarging the skull and using some of the space added, with a power outlet the bone can grow around - but we're talking serious sci-fi medical techniques here. Sure, there have been experiments involving wiring EEG devices directly to the human brain. Sure, even Stone Age medics could drill holes large enough to run a power outlet or an ethernet port. Sure, there are societies even today that deliberately reshape the skull. But to combine all of this AND enlarge an adult skull, not just reshape a child's... That is probably too complex for existing technology.
However, were implants to be a useful thing for society as a whole, a deep implant (such as in the chest cavity - if you can staple a stomach in half safely, you can wedge a matchbox-sized motherboard in there with absolutely zero impact), or a skull implant would seem to be far more resistant to damage, far more powerful, far more useful, far less toxic and far less likely to trigger an immune response.
Ok, the more "correct" version is "win or draw under any conditions". However, if the game can continue forever, then that would be a valid "draw" condition, as neither side has lost. In chess, they have a three-repeat rule to avoid continuous cycles of this kind by just classing it as a stalemate.
Please don't lump all of us Yanks into that particular bucket. Like Brits, Canucks, Ozzies, Kiwis, and the rest of the Commonwealth, we come in a wide variety of flavors.:)
Later landings were refugees in England, as Oliver Cromwell (a Puritan) had seized power through force and bribery, had the King killed, and declared himself the head of the "Protectorate" (a military dictatorship, in which anyone with religious or political leanings different from his own were abused or just simply killed).
(He bribed the Scots into supporting him in the Civil War by offering tolerence towards their Presbetyrian religion. That offer never actually materialized, once he no longer had use for them.)
Eventually, the Protectorate collapsed through internal conflicts. A massive crushing of the various sects and communes that had formed out of the chaos also resulted in a heavy resentment towards Parliament. (The Quakers are a surviving relic of one such commune.) After it collapsed, the monarchy was restored and the dictatorship abolished. A lot of Cromwell's sympathisers moved to America around then.
Cromwell is also the guy who invaded Ireland, butchered a lot of the Catholics and imposed Protestant rule at gun-point. Ireland, to this day, suffers the consequences of Cromell's gunboat diplomacy.
No, "terrorism" wasn't a legal concept at that time, but treason (such as overthrowing the King) certainly was, the showtrial of King Charles I and the killing of suspected Royalists afterwards definitely fell far short of the Magna Carta's requirement that to none shall justice be denied. I'm not sure if invading Ireland was illegal, per se, but as a lot of Cromwell's supporters had backed him to engender tolerence and bring about the end of religious bloodshed, they must certainly have been rather upset by this turn of events.
This isn't a diss of SoC - quite the opposite. I really appreciate their efforts to get people into coding and to organize an event on a very impressive scale. That is no mean feat!
What I would like to say, though, is that I noticed at least a few people felt left out - their projects weren't accepted, or they didn't meet one or another entry requirement. (Hell, I've a whole bunch of projects that I could use help with! I'm working on some games, some crypto stuff, some utilities... Nothing quite like the smell of shorted-out synapses!)
I really do urge those who don't want (or can't) code for SoC but do want to get involved in a project that needs help to contact any of those who are mentioning projects being short of coders. We can't all pay or give prizes, but volunteer work on any serious project can be enjoyable and can be a good addition to a resume in some cases. (Volunteer work experience is still work experience.)
Knowing the line won't help you figure out the exploit
Whether anyone tells you about a bug or not, you're always capable of scanning source - or even binaries - in search of unknown exploits
You knowing about a bug doesn't alter the odds of "Them" knowing about a bug - it only alters the odds of you fixing it
X11 bugs are rarely externally exploitable, as not many people run X sessions over the public internet and therefore those ports will be blocked at the corporate (or personal) firewall
The mathematical model of conflict ("Game Theory") only has a solution (ie: win no matter what the opponent does) when both sides know absolutely everything, ergo the only way to establish a sane IT security policy is to assume the attacker knows all the defects and exploits that exist, whether they are published or not
That last one makes things tough. How can you have security when everything is known? Well, in practice that is the only context security is even possible. "Security through obscurity" really means "we don't know what our opponents know and we're not even sure what we know". If, however, you assume that your opponents know everything then you don't take shortcuts. You plan for contingencies, you have fallback positions, you have not just a plan but a roadmap of possibilities and how to deal with them.
(At least, for any scenario too complex to actually have a complete solution for. For simpler problems, such as a chess puzzle or - for the past decade - the entire game of draughts, it is possible to map a complete, guaranteed winning strategy that will work no matter what the opponent does. Such a solution exists for the complete game of Chess and indeed for the complete game of Go, but has not yet been found. For any given computer system, such a solution must also exist for the operator/admin, but the chief problem has always been to get them to bother even putting the bits of solution that are known in place.)
...I could actually see Congress doing just that and taking it seriously. They'd probably do Special Renditions of Orc chieftains, on demand, if asked.
Oh, I don't expect there will ever be parity on pay. In fact, there are lots of reasons for not having that - the supply and demand of skills, as you mention, would be an example. As you increase the availability of a skill, you decrease its value. The only way to escape this is to increase the range of skills available, such that as many people as practical have a skill of significant market value.
Ideally, what you want is for the basic pay of the lowest paid to be comparable to the cost of living at an acceptable standard. (By that, I mean you can get an apartment that shouldn't be condemned, you can afford to meet your nutritional requirements, you can meet reasonable medical expenses, that sort of thing.) At present, there are many below "minimum wage" workers in the US who probably earn half to a third of what I consider an acceptable minimum.
True, there will always be a bottom of the pyramid. That is why you want automation. Machines don't need much, so put them at the bottom and raise humans to a more human level. It's not a perfect solution. I don't have any perfect solutions. But as a temporary fix, whilst society figures out what a perfect solution would look like, it sounds a lot better than what we have now.
When it comes to degrees and certifications, I do understand why rarity affects value. Again, it is supply and demand. On the other hand, breadth and depth of knowledge defines understanding. Merely knowing a formula by rote is nothing more than alchemy or religious indoctrination. It doesn't tell you anything of substance and the moment you fall outside of the straight and narrow, your knowledge becomes worthless.
(This is true of ANY educational program. I am definitely much more in favour of "Classical" or "Renaissance" thinking there, where context and diversity of knowledge was of the utmost importance. "Modern" education does better on the depth, which is important too. Knowing everything about nothing is just as useless as knowing nothing about everything.)
I'd prefer a system that provided continuous education and rolling tests throughout a person's life, or at least provide sabbaticals to approximate that. That way, you can dispense with a lot of the redundancies in the degree program and you can link certifications to a significant quality and quantity of knowledge.
I believe Britain has something like 60% of the population go through the University system now. That's not a bad start, provided the diversity is great enough that the degree has no value. It seems to work OK, but there are still more areas that need work than don't.
(By comparison, there are States in America which barely manage to get 54% of their population to even graduate High School. And, no, that's not because American standards are higher, when something like a third of those can't even find America on a map!)
Define "from each according to their ability". If you mean "don't ask more of a person than they are capable of giving", then that is hardly Communist. Unless you're someone who defines "Communist" as "someone who treats those around them as Christian lore expects, rather than as Christian countries do in practice".
(America taxes people according to their ability to pay. Does this make America a Communist state?)
Also define "to each, according to their need". If you mean "provide social services (health care, mass transit, education, etc) such that those who cannot provide for themselves are not artificially deprived of their right to the tools to better their lives", then this is embedded as a commandment in ancient cultures thousands of years before any notion of "communism" or "capitalism" even existed.
I find the practice of Americans labelling anything different to their values of the day as "Communist" to be one of the most depraved and disgusting habits, second only to their distortion of history - the Pilgrims didn't "flee persecution", they were kicked out for acts of terrorism. They were loose with the truth then, and they seem to have learned little since.
...There's a bug in their hash() and rehash() functions. But because they have no idea what the output should be, they're stress-testing them until they crash.
This was a side-thread on how important history was to various nations. The thread itself is important for several reasons: first, we have problems understanding a European pyramid due to there not being any others, but if nobody has regarded history as important, those may have been destroyed in the past to make way for hyperspace bypasses - oops, I mean car parks, or whatever the cultural popular thing to build was at the time.
The second reason has to do with real and imagined history. The more pumped-up history is, the more likely people are to invent it. "Modern" America has very little meaningful history, which is why there is a booming trade in things like fake war medals. (Oh, and stolen Italian art, but that's another issue.) In Europe, where there really is history to speak of, there is a lot of pressure for major population centers to have something ancient in their backyard to draw the tourists in. That's been true for a long time. Victorians would build fake ruins ("follies") for the prestige value and would often "decorate" real ruins with gaudy fake relics to spice up the site. The Roman city of Bath, in England, was badly destroyed by these tourist hunters.
Bosnia desperately needs people to visit. It's in bad shape, after being devastated by deliberate destruction of population centers AND of cultural heritage. A pyramid could bring in the kind of hard currency they need.
This archaeologist also has a major credibility problem, and that's going to affect how he is treated. He would not be the first to invent a major discovery for the sole purpose of trying to restore his image, assuming that it is a fake. He would also not be the first to stretch his work to the absolute limits to find something - anything - that is real, so that history would forgive him the fakes, assuming that the discovery is real.
However, much of this becomes moot when history is wantonly destroyed (as has happened in many countries, Bosnia included, although there the Serbs did most of the destroying). If a site is completely and irretrievably destroyed, then all we have is what is recorded. And usually, that is suspect at best. Had the Pyramids or the Sphinx of Egypt been destroyed, nobody would believe they ever existed. To this day, people are highly skeptical about all of the other Seven Wonders as they seem far too dramatic for the cultures of the time. We have as much evidence of the Colossus of Rhodes as we do of Atlantis. Archaeologists refused to believe ancient navigators were capable of anything much, until the Kon Tiki Expedition, and even then they spent far more time slagging off those involved than they did in reconciling the observed results with the archaeology as it was known.
People need to see things to believe in them. That's not always a bad thing, but it can get awfully complicated when no effort whatsoever is made - even in the slightest - to preserve the necessary evidence.
Remember that when you get saddled with death taxes. Hey, they gave up their right to the continued existance of their estate when they died, right? No? How's it different? Besides, history doesn't belong to an individual, so the rights of an individual are of no consequence. Oh, and they died because humans have a tendancy to do that. You will too, someday. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
Regardless, though, I gave as one option the recording of all that information so that people could "clear it away" and let someone build there. If you didn't do that some of the time, you'd run out of space and resources very quickly. Recycling of physical material is inevitable. However, the capacity to store information with regards to something far exceeds the physical space to keep those somethings, and storing information does not obstruct your building.
My argument is solely that the data is kept in SOME form or other. I care little about what form you end up choosing.
That's a tough one. There's no universal standard. Is a program that is feature-complete but bug-ridden superior to a program that is partial but bug-free? In theory, they are just as near to the end-goal as each other.
Personally, I do agree that scraps of paper are best left for janitors. (I don't have anything against janitors, but they're paid to pick up paper, I'm paid to develop software.) That's not the same as saying that people shouldn't learn new skills. I believe that technology advances fast enough that anyone who is working full-time is physically incapable of learning at the necessary pace at the same time and therefore companies should pay for a sabatical to get people back up to speed.
(I also believe that stagnation is why many people do their best work shortly after leaving college and then just brain-rot in-situ for the rest of their career. Sure, the brain is at peak efficiency in the mid-20s to early 30s, but good mental exercise and a strong drive to stay fresh should keep the brain useful maybe even into a person's 40s.)
Certifications, as "proof" of skills, are worthless as they really show very little more than your ability to regurgitate some standard set piece of information. The battery test for ANY examination is whether you could modify "Eliza" or "Animals" - two very primitive decision-based systems - to pass the exam using nothing more than the course material. If the answer is "yes", then the examination requires no actual thought or understanding. A skill, as opposed to mechanical labour, requires a high level of thought and understanding.
(This is not to under-value so-called "working-class" folk - I sincerely question whether they are "working-class" because that is where they want to be or because that is where society has placed them. Sure, some will enjoy mechanical work, but I doubt in anything like the numbers that are there. Besides, society can't afford to have people do low-grade work. To keep the US and Europe solvent, we need a much higher percentage of people in highly skilled work. Although ignorance is not the same as stupidity, we really can't afford either, but we can afford ignorance far less.)
Yes, there is no question that the claims made are utterly absurd. They have far too little information at this point to say anything other than "we have these artifacts, datable to year X". Mind you, archaeologists (even the reputable ones) do make such claims a lot. It can take decades - sometimes centuries - before archaeological groups will 'fess up, and usually grudgingly. As such, the claims do not shock me in the fact that they were made, but rather it shocks me that anybody takes such unsubstantiated claims seriously despite the notorious history of the field.
It would not surprise me in the least if there is a pyramid in Europe, somewhere. Stone circle technology migrated from somewhere in the north of Scotland down through Britain and much of Europe. Pyramids, once the technology was mastered, would have looked far more impressive and would therefore likely have appealed to societies that went seriously overboard on monumental constructions. Indeed, the idea that nobody the Egyptians traded with bought access to pyramid technology, when they bought any other technology they could lay their hands on, seems absurd.
However absurd the notion of there not being something akin to a pyramid in Europe, it should be kept in mind that none has been found and no evidence exists that any were ever built. It is certainly possible that a pyramid has accumulated so much topsoil that it has become a hill - this happened to a number of Duns in Scotland. This seems awfully large, though, and I'd want more evidence first.
Are there more likely possibilities? Yes. We do have limited evidence that European cultures may have built underground settlements and much more evidence that they built underground tombs. This would explain the apparent tunnel into the mountain. We also have EXTENSIVE evidence that Europeans terraced hills and mountains - there are many known examples, even if we don't always know the reasons. Virtually everything so far discovered can be accounted for by these known and established facts alone.
Does this mean that there's something there? No. Merely that what is described has proven alternative explanations. The guy has suspect credibility and the finds have not been confirmed (as far as I know) by any independent archaeologist. However, even a hoaxer will eventually find something of interest, even if it isn't what they say it is.
Does this mean it's not a pyramid? No. We won't know that until much more information has been collected. The largest provably man-made hill in the ancient world is Silbury Hill, and that's a mole-hill compared to this mountain, making it very unlikely that it is artificial. However, as I pointed out, the technology existed, technology was traded, and one-upmanship was the name of the game in those times.
For now, at least, I'll stick with the theory that the "steps" are indeed artificial but just your plain, ordinary, vanilla terraces that exist everywhere, that the mountain itself really is just a mountain and nothing more.
...but it was also one of the largest ever found and one of the most significant cities in the Roman empire, according to the article. Personally, I am of the opinion that since we only have one history and whatever is lost can NEVER be replaced, any destruction of our heritage should be treated as a crime of extreme seriousness. Ok, they need a car park. Let the archaeologists gather ALL the data, excavate ALL the ruins, build a complete virtual model and salvage what they can. THEN build your friggin' car park.
(Mass transit is infinitely superior to cars, anyway, and any "socialist" worthy of the title should know this. Wiping out a key piece of history is also about as anti-social as you can get. Besides which, the city can't take up that much space. Build the car park UNDER it. Spain does have mining equiptment, right? It's not totally deprived of technology, however bereft of wits it might be. Then you can have the ruins AND the car park.)
Last I heard, PCI-family latencies were still over 4ms, rather than sub-ms. (HyperTransport, however, is definitely sub-ms.) Ok, that's not a huge difference, but given the number of cards needed in a modern game (ethernet, graphics, possibly a SCSI card if you need better disk access, etc) it's gotta bite after a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Having said that, you assume that the guesses were wrong. Actually, there are some excellent reasons for believing the guesses were right.
Britain now consumes more food than it produces - it fell into a food deficit a few weeks back. Not sure about other countries, but I suspect that many do likewise. The 80s is about when starvation in Africa hit the point where people were dying in vast numbers. In America and other industrialized countries, it is no longer possible to feed everyone a healthy diet. People are fed extremely bloaty, chemical-laced, drug-laced* toxic sludge instead, unless they're rich enough to afford the real stuff.
We're not "out of food" in the sense that nobody has any, but we ARE "out of food" in the sense that it is no longer economically viable to keep people fed. I strongly expect the region incapable of maintaining human life (because there simply isn't any food) to continue expanding, and for those regions with high population densities to place more and more people in the position of eating dangerously unhealthy products in a desparate effort to avoid admitting to the fact that they simply don't have the food to feed their people. (The picture is complicated by Africa having extremely high death rates from disease and war, as well as from starvation, but the evidence seems to be that a significant portion of the world CANNOT feed itself.)
We should also bear in mind that the oceans have supplied a very large percent of the food for some time. However, cod stocks are extinct in some places and down 90% in others, with many edible fish stocks down 70-80%. The oceans can no longer support human life in the manner to which it is accustomed.
*Angel dust and other illegal substances are, according to some reports, routinely added to cattle feed along with extremely high levels of antibiotics and growth hormones. All this because the livestock have to be kept in unhealthy conditions in order to feed the population at all, and have to be bulked up to maximise meat per square foot of land used. The majority of farmers don't use organic farming - not because it's more expensive (they'd simply raise their prices, and would probably make greater profits) but because it's not physically possible to supply sufficient food using any kind of sane system of farming. If sane farming practices were mandated, a good half of the American population would look like the BBC images of Ethiopia that spawned Live Aid.
Oil has passed its peak and North Sea oil is virtually exhausted (having passed peak sometime in the 80s). Nor is oil the only fossil fuel in trouble. There are no working coal mines in Great Britain - the very few minable seams left are far too contaminated with sulpher to be of much value. It is unclear how much oil is left in Saudi Arabia, but it is notable that they have failed to increase capacity although they have quota to spare. There have been no major oil finds ANYWHERE in the world for some time and it is thought likely that this is because there are none to find. The arctic wildlife refuge has so little oil that although the area Bush wants drilled would take 10-15 years to get the pipeline and installations in place, there is at most 10 years worth of oil there, assuming the best possible estimates given.
All in all, the usual cry of "there will always be more" demonstrably has no validity. We are not in good shape, as things stand, and drastic changes will need to be made to human habits if humanity plans on staying around long enough to care about fusion.
The message was also coded from first principles, starting with true = true and true != false. A messgae of that kind long enough to talk about radioactive waste would be too long to be useful or have much chance of surviving. A better method would be to have a diagram of the periodic table, highlighting the elements present. Even if the periodic table itself is unknown in the future, it contains enough basic information (mass, name, charge, valency, etc) that any advanced civilization descended from an existing human civilization should be able to interpret it sufficiently to at least be on guard.
Nuclear reprocessing is a must. At the current rate of development and fuel use, uranium ore will run out 25+ years before we are due to have a commercially viable fusion reactor, never mind enough such reactors that fission reactors can all be replaced. Well, either reprocessing is a must, or we need to invest an order of magnitude more in fusion research, but Governments don't like funding speculative research much and the decades of fuel we currently have will outlast the career of any politician currently with sufficient influence to actually bring about radical funding programs.
However, if we do have reprocessing, it absolutely needs to be far better managed than BNFL can do. Oh, and don't get Group 4 to carry the nuclear fuel, either. They tend to lose things a lot.
Just leave the radioactive waste in the open, add something that attracts animals, and let the future civilizations figure it out from the three-headed buffalo in the region.
I don't NEED to read the article to know that no problem exists outside the minds of the foolish and the lazy. Anyone else can be as secure as they damn well please. (But what if they outlaw such methods? Duh, read my post. You don't leave your methods in plain-sight, you hide them. All you need is the signature of your data to look like something they'd be ok with.)
Normally, I wouldn't respond to trolls that are so unoriginal, but this is an important issue and some poor fool might think there's something to be scared of. The ONLY thing to fear is fear itself, the rest is subject to logical thought.
Second, you can trivially encrypt an ordinary telephone very easily. Feed the handset into the microphone input of your soundcard. Apply a stream cipher to the recorded input. Play the output through the soundcard and into the base of the telephone. Not quite public-key standard, but I'll bet you STU phones just send the encryption key by public key and actually use a stream cipher for the data itself.
It may be possible to put an eliptic curve cipher into hardware - an ASIC, or something, then place an ADC one side and a DAC the other. Then you'd have true end-to-end public encryption hardware for a phone. You'd need to have one group of chips for the incoming and the other for the outgoing, then have some means of entering the public and private keys.
Not sure you could encrypt a mobile phone very easily - you'd need to rip a lot of it apart, unless you could code something in Java and have the sound go through the applet. It would kill the battery, even if there were some way to do that, though.
The trick with VoIP is to produce a degree of randomness very similar to a commercial scrambler. (Same, actually, for landline encryption.) The idea there would be to use what appeared - to all intents and purposes - to be lawful encryption technology for phones. (Well, technically it ALL is, but the Government is less likely to want to tangle with the corporate sector. They have more money than geeks.) If it cannot be distinguished from a commercial scrambler (except that their usual scripts won't break the code) then it'll probably not worry anyone too much. Except for those in the NSA who like selling industrial trade secrets on the side.
The reason you want to mimic the signature of another system is that it'll make it harder for said authorities to justify finding out what this new crypto tech is. If it looks the same, and the exhaustive key search is incomplete, then there isn't anything to suggest a new tech exists to obtain. And, face it, beurocrats are as lazy as everyone else. They're paranoid, too, so don't play on the paranoia, but DO engineer towards the lazy.
Radionuclides occur in just about every substance on Earth. There no elements that I know of that have no naturally-occuring radioactive isotopes. Many have a large number. They require no active power source to be radioactive, they just are. Power makes zero difference. An example would be the copper used to make the antenna of the RFID embedded chip. There are a lot of radioisotopes for copper - most of them are beta emitters, though, not alpha. You want to tell me you personally check the RFID tags you implant for isotope purity? No? Then you'll be including some of these in everything you implant, according to the usual rules for the frequency of each isotope on Earth. Sorry, you can't escape it by turning the radio off.
There are many, many natural alpha emitters. Radon is perfectly natural and requires no batteries. A few millimeters is usually sufficient to block alpha particles, but the entire thickness of an implant thin enough not to cause an obvious problem couldn't be much thicker than that in total (both sides of the casing plus the interior).
Beta would be more penetrating, but wouldn't be as damaging. A single electron won't do a whole lot (charge of -1, insignificant mass) but a helium ion (charge of +2, mass of 4) tends to be rather nastier provided it actually gets anywhere.
However, let's assume that this person WANTS the most high-tech solution imaginable. RFID tags are dumb devices with no meaningful logic, which means you can't do encryption key negotiation - or, indeed, any form of encryption at all. Anyone with a scanner can lift ALL of your keys with a simple RFID reader and can then impersonate you with impunity with ALL electronic devices.
If someone wants an implant - genuinely, truthfully, absolutely would die without one - then they should implant an intelligent device, preferably a small embedded general purpose computer. General purpose? Yes, then you only need one implant, which you can then program for ALL of your devices you want to control, rather than having one implant per device.
Strong, crypto would utterly defeat the RFID attack on cars mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story. It would also make the computer "unscannable" the way an RFID tag is, because it's no longer just a passive device. Further, an intelligent device could do ANYTHING you wanted, whereas an RFID tag could not. An embedded computer could monitor your temperature and control the thermostat accordingly, for example. An embedded tag could do nothing more than get crushed as the blood vessels expanded.
Personally, I would avoid implants. Implants can be thought of as deliberate splinters or deliberate cysts, depending on size. Both of these, when they occur naturally, can potentially turn nasty. The body really doesn't take kindly to foreign objects, if it detects them. When you've any kind of device that was probably not assembled in a clean-room environment, sterilized and completely clensed, there's a good risk that implants could carry unwanted hitchhikers. Even when it's all done properly, a good bruise near the implant could turn nasty. That's ignoring any chemical reactions between the implant and the body, which may have other unexpected consequences.
(You should also be aware of materials used. Materials that have a higher-than-normal level of alpha-particle emitters could seriously screw things up. The skin is thick enough to absorb alpha particles, in typical real-world conditions, which is just as well - soft tissue tends not to react too well to such things.)
The embedded computer shares ALL of the health problems of an RFID tag, though scaled up because it is more complex and involves more components. It also needs a power source, so you'll occasionally need to rip yourself open to replace the lithium batteries.
Now, there ARE ways to embed a computer in a person in a way that would minimize hazards on a day-to-day basis. However, there you're talking major surgery for the implant plus for each recharge. Surgery is, itself, extremely dangerous and not something you'd normally do just to add a gadget to your life.
It's possible to imagine surgical implants that COULD be recharged with less effort - such as enlarging the skull and using some of the space added, with a power outlet the bone can grow around - but we're talking serious sci-fi medical techniques here. Sure, there have been experiments involving wiring EEG devices directly to the human brain. Sure, even Stone Age medics could drill holes large enough to run a power outlet or an ethernet port. Sure, there are societies even today that deliberately reshape the skull. But to combine all of this AND enlarge an adult skull, not just reshape a child's... That is probably too complex for existing technology.
However, were implants to be a useful thing for society as a whole, a deep implant (such as in the chest cavity - if you can staple a stomach in half safely, you can wedge a matchbox-sized motherboard in there with absolutely zero impact), or a skull implant would seem to be far more resistant to damage, far more powerful, far more useful, far less toxic and far less likely to trigger an immune response.
Ok, the more "correct" version is "win or draw under any conditions". However, if the game can continue forever, then that would be a valid "draw" condition, as neither side has lost. In chess, they have a three-repeat rule to avoid continuous cycles of this kind by just classing it as a stalemate.
Nah. Brits come only in flavours.
You're right on most of the major points. Several references for you. Of the first landings, some of the "Pilgrims" were economic migrants (basically, medieval illegal aliens!), others were escaping religious freedom.
Later landings were refugees in England, as Oliver Cromwell (a Puritan) had seized power through force and bribery, had the King killed, and declared himself the head of the "Protectorate" (a military dictatorship, in which anyone with religious or political leanings different from his own were abused or just simply killed).
(He bribed the Scots into supporting him in the Civil War by offering tolerence towards their Presbetyrian religion. That offer never actually materialized, once he no longer had use for them.)
Eventually, the Protectorate collapsed through internal conflicts. A massive crushing of the various sects and communes that had formed out of the chaos also resulted in a heavy resentment towards Parliament. (The Quakers are a surviving relic of one such commune.) After it collapsed, the monarchy was restored and the dictatorship abolished. A lot of Cromwell's sympathisers moved to America around then.
Cromwell is also the guy who invaded Ireland, butchered a lot of the Catholics and imposed Protestant rule at gun-point. Ireland, to this day, suffers the consequences of Cromell's gunboat diplomacy.
No, "terrorism" wasn't a legal concept at that time, but treason (such as overthrowing the King) certainly was, the showtrial of King Charles I and the killing of suspected Royalists afterwards definitely fell far short of the Magna Carta's requirement that to none shall justice be denied. I'm not sure if invading Ireland was illegal, per se, but as a lot of Cromwell's supporters had backed him to engender tolerence and bring about the end of religious bloodshed, they must certainly have been rather upset by this turn of events.
What I would like to say, though, is that I noticed at least a few people felt left out - their projects weren't accepted, or they didn't meet one or another entry requirement. (Hell, I've a whole bunch of projects that I could use help with! I'm working on some games, some crypto stuff, some utilities... Nothing quite like the smell of shorted-out synapses!)
I really do urge those who don't want (or can't) code for SoC but do want to get involved in a project that needs help to contact any of those who are mentioning projects being short of coders. We can't all pay or give prizes, but volunteer work on any serious project can be enjoyable and can be a good addition to a resume in some cases. (Volunteer work experience is still work experience.)
That last one makes things tough. How can you have security when everything is known? Well, in practice that is the only context security is even possible. "Security through obscurity" really means "we don't know what our opponents know and we're not even sure what we know". If, however, you assume that your opponents know everything then you don't take shortcuts. You plan for contingencies, you have fallback positions, you have not just a plan but a roadmap of possibilities and how to deal with them.
(At least, for any scenario too complex to actually have a complete solution for. For simpler problems, such as a chess puzzle or - for the past decade - the entire game of draughts, it is possible to map a complete, guaranteed winning strategy that will work no matter what the opponent does. Such a solution exists for the complete game of Chess and indeed for the complete game of Go, but has not yet been found. For any given computer system, such a solution must also exist for the operator/admin, but the chief problem has always been to get them to bother even putting the bits of solution that are known in place.)
If it's in UTF16 on a 16-bit machine, or UTF32 on a 32-bit machine, then yes.
...I could actually see Congress doing just that and taking it seriously. They'd probably do Special Renditions of Orc chieftains, on demand, if asked.
Ideally, what you want is for the basic pay of the lowest paid to be comparable to the cost of living at an acceptable standard. (By that, I mean you can get an apartment that shouldn't be condemned, you can afford to meet your nutritional requirements, you can meet reasonable medical expenses, that sort of thing.) At present, there are many below "minimum wage" workers in the US who probably earn half to a third of what I consider an acceptable minimum.
True, there will always be a bottom of the pyramid. That is why you want automation. Machines don't need much, so put them at the bottom and raise humans to a more human level. It's not a perfect solution. I don't have any perfect solutions. But as a temporary fix, whilst society figures out what a perfect solution would look like, it sounds a lot better than what we have now.
When it comes to degrees and certifications, I do understand why rarity affects value. Again, it is supply and demand. On the other hand, breadth and depth of knowledge defines understanding. Merely knowing a formula by rote is nothing more than alchemy or religious indoctrination. It doesn't tell you anything of substance and the moment you fall outside of the straight and narrow, your knowledge becomes worthless.
(This is true of ANY educational program. I am definitely much more in favour of "Classical" or "Renaissance" thinking there, where context and diversity of knowledge was of the utmost importance. "Modern" education does better on the depth, which is important too. Knowing everything about nothing is just as useless as knowing nothing about everything.)
I'd prefer a system that provided continuous education and rolling tests throughout a person's life, or at least provide sabbaticals to approximate that. That way, you can dispense with a lot of the redundancies in the degree program and you can link certifications to a significant quality and quantity of knowledge.
I believe Britain has something like 60% of the population go through the University system now. That's not a bad start, provided the diversity is great enough that the degree has no value. It seems to work OK, but there are still more areas that need work than don't.
(By comparison, there are States in America which barely manage to get 54% of their population to even graduate High School. And, no, that's not because American standards are higher, when something like a third of those can't even find America on a map!)
(America taxes people according to their ability to pay. Does this make America a Communist state?)
Also define "to each, according to their need". If you mean "provide social services (health care, mass transit, education, etc) such that those who cannot provide for themselves are not artificially deprived of their right to the tools to better their lives", then this is embedded as a commandment in ancient cultures thousands of years before any notion of "communism" or "capitalism" even existed.
I find the practice of Americans labelling anything different to their values of the day as "Communist" to be one of the most depraved and disgusting habits, second only to their distortion of history - the Pilgrims didn't "flee persecution", they were kicked out for acts of terrorism. They were loose with the truth then, and they seem to have learned little since.
...There's a bug in their hash() and rehash() functions. But because they have no idea what the output should be, they're stress-testing them until they crash.
The second reason has to do with real and imagined history. The more pumped-up history is, the more likely people are to invent it. "Modern" America has very little meaningful history, which is why there is a booming trade in things like fake war medals. (Oh, and stolen Italian art, but that's another issue.) In Europe, where there really is history to speak of, there is a lot of pressure for major population centers to have something ancient in their backyard to draw the tourists in. That's been true for a long time. Victorians would build fake ruins ("follies") for the prestige value and would often "decorate" real ruins with gaudy fake relics to spice up the site. The Roman city of Bath, in England, was badly destroyed by these tourist hunters.
Bosnia desperately needs people to visit. It's in bad shape, after being devastated by deliberate destruction of population centers AND of cultural heritage. A pyramid could bring in the kind of hard currency they need.
This archaeologist also has a major credibility problem, and that's going to affect how he is treated. He would not be the first to invent a major discovery for the sole purpose of trying to restore his image, assuming that it is a fake. He would also not be the first to stretch his work to the absolute limits to find something - anything - that is real, so that history would forgive him the fakes, assuming that the discovery is real.
However, much of this becomes moot when history is wantonly destroyed (as has happened in many countries, Bosnia included, although there the Serbs did most of the destroying). If a site is completely and irretrievably destroyed, then all we have is what is recorded. And usually, that is suspect at best. Had the Pyramids or the Sphinx of Egypt been destroyed, nobody would believe they ever existed. To this day, people are highly skeptical about all of the other Seven Wonders as they seem far too dramatic for the cultures of the time. We have as much evidence of the Colossus of Rhodes as we do of Atlantis. Archaeologists refused to believe ancient navigators were capable of anything much, until the Kon Tiki Expedition, and even then they spent far more time slagging off those involved than they did in reconciling the observed results with the archaeology as it was known.
People need to see things to believe in them. That's not always a bad thing, but it can get awfully complicated when no effort whatsoever is made - even in the slightest - to preserve the necessary evidence.
Regardless, though, I gave as one option the recording of all that information so that people could "clear it away" and let someone build there. If you didn't do that some of the time, you'd run out of space and resources very quickly. Recycling of physical material is inevitable. However, the capacity to store information with regards to something far exceeds the physical space to keep those somethings, and storing information does not obstruct your building.
My argument is solely that the data is kept in SOME form or other. I care little about what form you end up choosing.
Personally, I do agree that scraps of paper are best left for janitors. (I don't have anything against janitors, but they're paid to pick up paper, I'm paid to develop software.) That's not the same as saying that people shouldn't learn new skills. I believe that technology advances fast enough that anyone who is working full-time is physically incapable of learning at the necessary pace at the same time and therefore companies should pay for a sabatical to get people back up to speed.
(I also believe that stagnation is why many people do their best work shortly after leaving college and then just brain-rot in-situ for the rest of their career. Sure, the brain is at peak efficiency in the mid-20s to early 30s, but good mental exercise and a strong drive to stay fresh should keep the brain useful maybe even into a person's 40s.)
Certifications, as "proof" of skills, are worthless as they really show very little more than your ability to regurgitate some standard set piece of information. The battery test for ANY examination is whether you could modify "Eliza" or "Animals" - two very primitive decision-based systems - to pass the exam using nothing more than the course material. If the answer is "yes", then the examination requires no actual thought or understanding. A skill, as opposed to mechanical labour, requires a high level of thought and understanding.
(This is not to under-value so-called "working-class" folk - I sincerely question whether they are "working-class" because that is where they want to be or because that is where society has placed them. Sure, some will enjoy mechanical work, but I doubt in anything like the numbers that are there. Besides, society can't afford to have people do low-grade work. To keep the US and Europe solvent, we need a much higher percentage of people in highly skilled work. Although ignorance is not the same as stupidity, we really can't afford either, but we can afford ignorance far less.)
Wouldn't it be cool if the US Government bought up a huge chunk of land in WoW and declare it a national park?
It would not surprise me in the least if there is a pyramid in Europe, somewhere. Stone circle technology migrated from somewhere in the north of Scotland down through Britain and much of Europe. Pyramids, once the technology was mastered, would have looked far more impressive and would therefore likely have appealed to societies that went seriously overboard on monumental constructions. Indeed, the idea that nobody the Egyptians traded with bought access to pyramid technology, when they bought any other technology they could lay their hands on, seems absurd.
However absurd the notion of there not being something akin to a pyramid in Europe, it should be kept in mind that none has been found and no evidence exists that any were ever built. It is certainly possible that a pyramid has accumulated so much topsoil that it has become a hill - this happened to a number of Duns in Scotland. This seems awfully large, though, and I'd want more evidence first.
Are there more likely possibilities? Yes. We do have limited evidence that European cultures may have built underground settlements and much more evidence that they built underground tombs. This would explain the apparent tunnel into the mountain. We also have EXTENSIVE evidence that Europeans terraced hills and mountains - there are many known examples, even if we don't always know the reasons. Virtually everything so far discovered can be accounted for by these known and established facts alone.
Does this mean that there's something there? No. Merely that what is described has proven alternative explanations. The guy has suspect credibility and the finds have not been confirmed (as far as I know) by any independent archaeologist. However, even a hoaxer will eventually find something of interest, even if it isn't what they say it is.
Does this mean it's not a pyramid? No. We won't know that until much more information has been collected. The largest provably man-made hill in the ancient world is Silbury Hill, and that's a mole-hill compared to this mountain, making it very unlikely that it is artificial. However, as I pointed out, the technology existed, technology was traded, and one-upmanship was the name of the game in those times.
For now, at least, I'll stick with the theory that the "steps" are indeed artificial but just your plain, ordinary, vanilla terraces that exist everywhere, that the mountain itself really is just a mountain and nothing more.
(Mass transit is infinitely superior to cars, anyway, and any "socialist" worthy of the title should know this. Wiping out a key piece of history is also about as anti-social as you can get. Besides which, the city can't take up that much space. Build the car park UNDER it. Spain does have mining equiptment, right? It's not totally deprived of technology, however bereft of wits it might be. Then you can have the ruins AND the car park.)
Last I heard, PCI-family latencies were still over 4ms, rather than sub-ms. (HyperTransport, however, is definitely sub-ms.) Ok, that's not a huge difference, but given the number of cards needed in a modern game (ethernet, graphics, possibly a SCSI card if you need better disk access, etc) it's gotta bite after a while.