Searching for extraterrestrial life is not stupid. Spending Billions on bombs to destroy our own civilization is though. If we are going to give scientists a task, I figure it is better to give them something that doesn't involve finding faster and more emotionally disconnected ways to kill his fellow human.
If you look at the Drake equation and note much the probability of finding a planet has increased from the human perspective, we would be negligent if we ignored the ET search. Additionally, we get a lot of beneficial research from SETI that gets little press. Military research benefits very few people when compared to it's non-military counterparts.
No, not for stealing the Slurpee, but for shooting the clerk.
What used to be standard hacker myth in universities, has crossed over into public prosecution. Law enforcement uses the same tools these bozos used all of the time, but nobody cries foul. Certainly they broke the law, certainly they need some sort of punishment, but it sounds like they were completely unaware of the serious nature of their crimes. On another note, why is it more serious because they took money when they broke the law, instead of for some altruistic reason? Is it right to commit a crime if you "meant well"? Agents in various intelligence communities throughout the country and the world, do the exact same things on a routine level, but because they have the guns, and because nobody dares squeak about it, only the private citizen get prosecuted.
When everything becomes illegal, everyone will be criminals, and so nobody will say anything when atrocities are committed in the name of justice.
Cobalt is very toxic. It is most toxic when in particulate form in the lungs. A catalyst works only in direct contact with the reaction compounds. What will keep the cobalt powder from eroding under heat stress and getting air born?
By stating a Turing machine is universal, one is saying that the machine can handle the entire spectrum of possible inputs, something the Turing machine in the document clearly does not. By stipulating that the inputs are by some arbitrary rule finite (in the sense that the writer would want to restrict the initial conditions even a little), the universal nature of the test is eliminated and thus becomes yet another of the countless examples of failed attempts at Turing completeness.
If businesses weren't lying to the government about how there are no qualified people in this country for the jobs they want to fill, maybe there wouldn't be so many engineers and scientists working in Wal-Mart these days. With the import and export of jobs, we are rapidly putting ourselves out of the race for economic viability. If you think more engineering work is going to come here because of H1-B visas then you probably also believe in the tooth fairy. The reality is, for every job that is filled in this country, by a foreign worker, the purchasing power of those Americans who are pushed out by greed, drops a little more.
Which industries do you propose? Can you name any that haven't been severally damaged by importation or out-sourcing? If you can mention any, I bet there will a research effort on somebody's part to export that industry as well. A nations viability is based, in a great degree, upon it's self-sufficiency. Its ability to produce all of the products essential to its survival. If you think the free market is so grand, then you are abysmally stupid, naive, or both. Go to any of the factory towns in this country and drive down the miserable and desolate streets. Look at the hopelessness of what the free market system has created. Easily the majority of US cities have been affected. Certainly the West coast has been somewhat insulated since your industries are fairly young and have only recently been sold to the highest bidder.
As an example look at the Lackawanna Valley. They started by mining coal, until competition from other nations made it too expensive. They switched to textiles, before they lost the battle again. Every time they switched to a new industry, they ended up getting the rug pulled out from under them by the same sort of slimy carpet baggers, you claim to be a member of.
Free market for you means slave labor for millions.
I'm not going to be a sport and wish you well, in keeping your job, when in reality, I sincerely hope it happens to you, and soon!
You couldn't be more wrong. The Roman Catholic Church schismated from the Seven Holy Orthodox Churches in 1054, and has be branching into more and more pieces ever since. There are plenty of Churches in the world that are neither ancestors nor descendants of Roman Catholicism. Because the west is dominated by the Roman Church and its fragments, much of its factional disputes have a decidedly RC bias.
No, by definition, secularism is the separation of Church and State. That is the central tenant of that ideology. Communism not only separated Church and State, but made it a capital offense in many situations to practice a religion, thus the ultimate separation. If you look at the philosophical tree you will see that democracy, is actually on the same branch as communism, and that branch is called secularism.
The real difference between those ideologies has nothing to do with God, but rather on redistribution of wealth. While democracy relies on the power of the people, e.g Mob Rule, communism uses principle of reeducation and indoctrination.
All secular ideologies suffer from the same fundamental flaw, human nature. I don't think democracy is bad, and I despise the thing communists have done, but democracy without a defining moral system, will always fail, and fail miserably. Thus while democracy strives for separation from the Church, it cannot do without it.
Actually Allah is a contraction of Ba'allamech. The Bull god, Ba'al of the Hittites and Sumarians. Mohammad added the fiction about Yahweh when he couldn't get the Cabalist Jews to align with him during the siege of Medina. This is the first time he started talking about the followers of the Book, prior to that he hated everyone equally.
Sorry to pop your balloon, but it wasn't Christianity that wiped out the Indians, it was capitalism at its worst. Every crooked treaty, raw deal, and massacre, were driven by one unswerving factor. Greed. When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they saw gold, and it was gold that motivated them to kill, not God. God didn't say "kill all of these people in my name", but a promise of untold treasure motivated them instead. Look how many priest, yes Catholic priests, were killed when they ran up against the greed machine. In the years from 1492 to 1650 the Catholic church recorded 714 priests or nuns who were murdered for standing between Indians and slavers, miners, plantation owners, land holders, and soldiers. Just because a lousy western education tells lies about a faith does not make it true, it just makes it easy to believe.
Not entirely true. The ultimate secularism was communism, which succeeded in killing millions either through incompetence or genocide. Is see either ideology as base and degraded. Both as mob rule. Both as giving lip service to kindness but having bloodied hearts of stone.
Not exactly. It's just that Nihilistic and Islamic factions both take supreme joy in crucifying Christ over and over, who they see as a common enemy. Both factions have a dark side as well, and both have resorted to genocide in the past. Who would you trust? I remember seeing a poster of Saddam Hussein in Jordan in the early 80's, depicting him in an almost messianic fashion, and below him in graffiti was a reference to the holocaust. Whenever you see a faith with those "fair game" rules that allow hatred to become a valid component of worship, you inevitably see the sorts of individuals who will kill to get approval in that faith. When the faith sees killing as cleansing, such as Fascism, $cientology, or Islam, even if nobody has acted on the impulse implied by the doctrine, somebody eventually will. True Christian Orthodoxy, makes no provision for killing in any fashion, for any reason, at any time. Not in peace or war, not in assault or self defense, not sanctioned by the state, or by a religious leader. Killing is killing, period.
Unfortunately in the world, there are plenty that call themselves Christian, who harbor hatred for their fellow man, and attempt to justify it with a selective but literal interpretation of the Bible, even though Jesus made it abundantly clear that to do so was sin itself. But for every one Christian with this attitude there are hundreds in other faiths or ideologies who would be happy to slit another's throat, if it meant getting in good with the Misogynistic, pedophiliac, monomaniacs who founded their faiths.
Not only that, but with the most common case, the "inside job", the program can be altered or corrupted to produce non random sequences, or worse, the programmer who designs the system could use a pseudo random number generator, which *can* always be predicted.
As an example, if I wanted to compromise the security of a company, I would get on the cleaning staff, get chummy with the rest of the staff, do my job well, and have complete access to the facility after only a few months. After installing passive sniffers (ones with modified drivers which don't send beacon packets when in promiscuous mode), key loggers, tempest scoops, and A/V cameras, I could capture enough information to do plenty of damage, or make a bundle. No amount of patrols, random or otherwise, are going to catch me at it, because I would be by then a *recognized* and *trusted* entity: e.g insider.
Security systems are only as secure as the people that operate them. If the cleaners are required to stay within sight of each other, at all times, or if a guard is to accompany them through all areas, then the level of mistrust can reduce penetration. Just like innovation is fueled by cooperation and ideas, security is powered by fear and mistrust. I was once at a company meeting where the president invited a security expert to give a presentation regarding recent thefts of personal items during the previous week. During the meeting, security was searching the offices, and found many of the items of non other than a leading VP, who had a gambling problem. The woman was not a shifty eyed, back stabbing, low life with coke in the nose, but rather a mother of two, who got too deep into online poker, and was liked by everyone there.
As a practical matter, you want people in your trusted organization to get along and behave respectfully, but you want the people in your security organization to hate their guts. When you have a company picnic, make the security team work overtime at the office. Do things that put the two organizations at a suspicious distance. Do not allow fraternization between the two, and give the security team an unforgiving rule set that keeps order and mistrust at an enhanced level. Monitor everything that enters or leaves the facility, and above all, have security review all cleaning staff appointments, especially during the probationary period, which should be no less than a year, since that is the most common window of time for socially engineered inside operations.
I'm not saying to treat your security staff like trash though, but rather, make them think that the trusted members of the facility are getting a much better deal. Above all: Security is the *least* trusted organization of any facility, and the most easily comprimised. Night watchmen are a dime a dozen, paid poorly, disrespected, and generally treated poorly. With the appropriate financial and social pressures, there are very few security organization that cannot be subverted given time and patience.
Randomness in passwords is one thing, but when you do it with human beings it rapidly becomes less random over time. Actually the perfect guard is two guards who hate each other and fear their boss. This is why crime organization do security very well. It takes a certain healthy dose of jealousy and mistrust to keep a guard detail functioning effectively. If everyone gets along, and the computer gets to decide when the patrol details goes out, then it is fairly easy to subvert a single guard and affect the entire detail, but if they loath or fear each other, and patrol in a group, then they will all be watching out for themselves and doing their best not to slip up.
Random patrols just stir the pot, since nearly every penetration into security systems are a result of inside jobs. If nobody but the computer knows where the patrol is supposed to be, and the computer can be tampered with, then there is no way to say a person is in the wrong place at the wrong time, add to that the tendency for people to share information, and you lose the benefit of chaos in the patrol plan.
Randomized patrols have been around along time. There are several problems with this guy's approach. First, there are inner and outer bounds to patrol initiation and duration, as well as the human tendency to repeat the familiar, thus while the schedule may get changed, the actual patrols will follow a non-random, pattern. In addition, consigning the schedule to a computer also adds a level of security failure potential that shouldn't exist. If the guards, examiners, and cameras, are on a purely random schedule, and are following the direct orders of a machine, eventually, a social engineering exploit would open the door for the opponent to get a complete schedule from the computer itself. Just like lost page encryption can be circumvented by compromising the message sender, random patrols can be brought down by compromising the computer, and unlike computers in Hollywood movies, no computer on Earth, is secure, and connected at the same time.
The thing about having "Perfect Knowledge" of a patrol or observation pattern, is that you have to expect certain variations anyways, and plan accordingly, but the polar bear under the ice is that you also have to expect certain regularities, certain things that repeat, regardless of schedule. Most unit commanders and security bosses have had to learn this the hard way, and after they loose a certain amount of confidence in human nature, they learn how to manipulate it to make their facility more secure.
A low level security guard is going to look at the schedule, and try to make it conform to his own sense of order, rounding up or down patrol times, falsifying patrols, or just plain blowing off the whole schedule entirely. After going through more than a few guards, the commander is going to have to admit, that going against human nature is not only counter productive, but dangerous. The radio messages, audio stimulus, and other auditory or visual stimulus that is used to keep the pattern random, can always be intercepted and used to an opponent's advantage, and with the high turnover rate already present in security jobs, it is a simple matter to place somebody on location that can compromise everything.
What the commander has to do is assume that his bottom line guards are going to be compromised, individually. For instance, he can safely assume, that at even if all of his guards are compromised that very few of them are going to entrust that fact with another guard. By identifying the loners on guard staff, he can group them in pairs, or triplets that are socially incompatible, and thus untrusting of one another. Since self preservation is a stronger human reaction than loyalty, the commander has to rely on this to prevent an actual incursion.
In military units, officers do not mix much with enlisted, and doing so can mean punishment or even jail time for the offenders. The reason for this, is that if two groups are not socially compatible, and they have a common stated goal, then the change of a conspiracy amongst the two is greatly reduced. If The officers decided as a group to betray, then military code would force the enlist, or non-commissioned officers to act against it, and visa versa.
The military relies on routine, because, unlike the scientist with his computer driven, game theory approach, they know it works. If patrols become regular, then is easier for those patrols to spot anything out of order. The only way to have consistent security, is to have reliable, consistent, and above all, complete coverage of the facility.
There is only one, but rathe debilitating problem with the idea of a wormhole, and is the following.
A wormhole to be connected must be the prodict of two black holes since a "white" hole has never been observed. A black hole connecting to this universe, has to connect to something here that we can see, or in the the case of a black hole, detect. Matter falling into a wormhole would either come out of the other end in a blinding display of energy, or it would remain trapped in a singularity shared by the two defects in spacetime. It is more likely that the blackhole is not bottomless, and does not represent an infinately deep sack, but is instead mitigated by something we have yet to determine. Maybe quantum physics plays a much greater role and prohibits the certainty of both position and momentum found within the spacetime bubble. Maybe the energy trapped in the blackhole is not trapped at all but is instead radiated in all directions about the blackhole itself, due to the uncertainty principle.
A traversable wormhole would have to be constructed of something that wouldn't provide an inconvenient landing place for incoming objects, e.g. The ephimerical dark matter we hear so much about, that drived the money machine to make so many of the expensive toys in Illinois and Geneva, Switzerland. You would have a hard time constraining the dark matter since it wouldn't respond to to anything other than gravity, and if even if you made a darkmatter black hole, you would still get torn into tiny little bits at the event horizon. Foremost of all is the fact that anything, and I mean anything, stong enough to create a wormhole, is also strong enough to prevent easy escape to the far event horizon. It would be more analogous to what would happen if there was a hole through the Earth. To traverse, you would have to get a running start and hope your momentum would carry you far enough out the other horizone to safely escape falling back in.
If you wanted to make a safe wormhole that is not connected gravitationally, then you would need to use a stronger force capable of making sharper deformations in spacetime, and allthough, all of the known forces are stronger, none of them appear to deform spacetime so far. If it turns out that electromagnetic energy actually deforms spacetime in any way, then it would be the ideal candidate.
If, and that's a big if, we ever learn how to bridge different points in spacetime or even other universes, it woun't be done with blackholes, it will probably be done with EM and exotic matter, because the creation of blackholes of any size is not only dangerous, it is stupid as well.
The pesticide DTI in particular, used in the control of mosquitos, interupts the nymph phase of the bloodsucker, preventing it from reaching adulthood, this may also affect other metamorhic insects, such as bees and butterflies. Domestic bees are the leading pollinators in agricultural states, since wild bees only form small colinies, and other pollinators are usually whiped out by pesticides. Since DTI is added to the water via spraying, it could easily become concentrated in the honey by workers during water runs. I have personally experienced hive collapses, and have had the honey tested and found very high concentrations of DTI. The hives have to be completely cleaned before another colony can be added, otherwise they just swarm away. Bottom line, the theory is bogus, it's pesticides.
Contrast the different way that the media shows space exploration today from the 60's when man first walked on the moon, and it becomes clear that, much less emphasis is being placed upon space exploration, and more on self consuming intercenal feuding on a global scale. The space shuttle launch and construction mission received a total of 171 hours of programming while the war in Iraq 2416 hours over all of the cable and broadcast channels in the US and UK during the same time frame. Youth of today have a cynical view of space exploration since NASA makes a space career goal seem unatainable by mere mortals. If space access were more affordable and privitized, there would be a greater degree of anticipation for young and old alike. During the 60's, people watched with anticipation as man touched the moon, but groaned with malaise when faced with the bill. It is no different today, hence while Russia launches regular missions for support of the space station on a shoetring budget, the USA is forced to pay billions a pop to accomplish similar things. Space Ship One was an admirable attempt to break through the ceiling that NASA created, but without better support, they may go the way of any private space effort that has attempted to butt heads with government oversight.
Thus, if you want to see cheap access to space, and you don't like the image of young people rolling thier eyes at the accomplishements of space exploration, then you better get off your can and support private space enterprises.
One average computer uses 52,000 pine trees worth of energy a day? Thats, oh, about 10 billion watts of energy given the average dimemsions of a pine tree. If that's the case, my electric bill should be ALOT higher.
Since the sun is the primary form of energy input to our ecosystem, any harebrained scheme to tamper with it would inevitably end up in disaster. Who thinks this stuff up anyways? The temperature of the Earth is on a 600K year cycle that happens to be near the end of a warming trend, if the goal was to reduce the light level and starve humans out of existance, then this would probably be a pretty good solution. Sort of reminds me of the situation where the idiot keeps hitting the fuse on a high explosive dud in an effort to get it off, while a forcefull means to a solution may seem acceptable, it doesn't always end up as planned.
String theory fails the smell test, by being so complicated that none of it's predictions can actually be tested. For instance, the theory never explains HOW a dimension can be rolled up in the first place, and wouldn't a rolled up dimension require two more dimensions to adaquately describe. String theory also fails to explain the various constraints described by previous models. Many of the characteristics of string theory are actually inner-wound descriptions of larger characteristics of matter. How would string theory model elastic collisions without claiming the elastic nature of the strings themselves. Alot of physicists' careers have been brought to a standstill for doubting the "faith" of string theory. Scientists should stop the bloodletting and put this smoking pile to rest, along with the other untestable theories that have gone before it.
String theory has nearly stopped all real research into the subatomic universe, in favor of a load of wishfull thinking, written by a few individuals who are too heavily focused on padding their hats to make their heads look bigger.
Using hydrogen instead of helium for lift has many potential benefits. Hydrogen can lift a larger weight per unit volume. Helium atoms are slippery and can even escape from solid steel containers, while hydrogen, generally stays inside an intact container. Helium is made in reactors, the sun, and by alpha decay of transuranic elements, hydrogen can be generated through electrolysis. Hydrogen is really cheap, helium is fairly expensive. Since the ballon is both mechanically and electrically tethered, static charge can be safely sent to ground. Hydrogen is bouyant to ~500000 feet, helium, looses lifting power at around 350000.
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Searching for extraterrestrial life is not stupid. Spending Billions on bombs to destroy our own civilization is though. If we are going to give scientists a task, I figure it is better to give them something that doesn't involve finding faster and more emotionally disconnected ways to kill his fellow human.
If you look at the Drake equation and note much the probability of finding a planet has increased from the human perspective, we would be negligent if we ignored the ET search. Additionally, we get a lot of beneficial research from SETI that gets little press. Military research benefits very few people when compared to it's non-military counterparts.
No, not for stealing the Slurpee, but for shooting the clerk.
What used to be standard hacker myth in universities, has crossed over into public prosecution. Law enforcement uses the same tools these bozos used all of the time, but nobody cries foul. Certainly they broke the law, certainly they need some sort of punishment, but it sounds like they were completely unaware of the serious nature of their crimes. On another note, why is it more serious because they took money when they broke the law, instead of for some altruistic reason? Is it right to commit a crime if you "meant well"? Agents in various intelligence communities throughout the country and the world, do the exact same things on a routine level, but because they have the guns, and because nobody dares squeak about it, only the private citizen get prosecuted.
When everything becomes illegal, everyone will be criminals, and so nobody will say anything when atrocities are committed in the name of justice.
Cobalt is very toxic. It is most toxic when in particulate form in the lungs. A catalyst works only in direct contact with the reaction compounds. What will keep the cobalt powder from eroding under heat stress and getting air born?
By stating a Turing machine is universal, one is saying that the machine can handle the entire spectrum of possible inputs, something the Turing machine in the document clearly does not. By stipulating that the inputs are by some arbitrary rule finite (in the sense that the writer would want to restrict the initial conditions even a little), the universal nature of the test is eliminated and thus becomes yet another of the countless examples of failed attempts at Turing completeness.
Sorry, good try, maybe next time?
If businesses weren't lying to the government about how there are no qualified people in this country for the jobs they want to fill, maybe there wouldn't be so many engineers and scientists working in Wal-Mart these days. With the import and export of jobs, we are rapidly putting ourselves out of the race for economic viability. If you think more engineering work is going to come here because of H1-B visas then you probably also believe in the tooth fairy. The reality is, for every job that is filled in this country, by a foreign worker, the purchasing power of those Americans who are pushed out by greed, drops a little more.
Which industries do you propose? Can you name any that haven't been severally damaged by importation or out-sourcing? If you can mention any, I bet there will a research effort on somebody's part to export that industry as well. A nations viability is based, in a great degree, upon it's self-sufficiency. Its ability to produce all of the products essential to its survival. If you think the free market is so grand, then you are abysmally stupid, naive, or both. Go to any of the factory towns in this country and drive down the miserable and desolate streets. Look at the hopelessness of what the free market system has created. Easily the majority of US cities have been affected. Certainly the West coast has been somewhat insulated since your industries are fairly young and have only recently been sold to the highest bidder.
As an example look at the Lackawanna Valley. They started by mining coal, until competition from other nations made it too expensive. They switched to textiles, before they lost the battle again. Every time they switched to a new industry, they ended up getting the rug pulled out from under them by the same sort of slimy carpet baggers, you claim to be a member of.
Free market for you means slave labor for millions.
I'm not going to be a sport and wish you well, in keeping your job, when in reality, I sincerely hope it happens to you, and soon!
You couldn't be more wrong. The Roman Catholic Church schismated from the Seven Holy Orthodox Churches in 1054, and has be branching into more and more pieces ever since. There are plenty of Churches in the world that are neither ancestors nor descendants of Roman Catholicism. Because the west is dominated by the Roman Church and its fragments, much of its factional disputes have a decidedly RC bias.
No, by definition, secularism is the separation of Church and State. That is the central tenant of that ideology. Communism not only separated Church and State, but made it a capital offense in many situations to practice a religion, thus the ultimate separation. If you look at the philosophical tree you will see that democracy, is actually on the same branch as communism, and that branch is called secularism.
The real difference between those ideologies has nothing to do with God, but rather on redistribution of wealth. While democracy relies on the power of the people, e.g Mob Rule, communism uses principle of reeducation and indoctrination.
All secular ideologies suffer from the same fundamental flaw, human nature. I don't think democracy is bad, and I despise the thing communists have done, but democracy without a defining moral system, will always fail, and fail miserably. Thus while democracy strives for separation from the Church, it cannot do without it.
Actually Allah is a contraction of Ba'allamech. The Bull god, Ba'al of the Hittites and Sumarians. Mohammad added the fiction about Yahweh when he couldn't get the Cabalist Jews to align with him during the siege of Medina. This is the first time he started talking about the followers of the Book, prior to that he hated everyone equally.
Sorry to pop your balloon, but it wasn't Christianity that wiped out the Indians, it was capitalism at its worst. Every crooked treaty, raw deal, and massacre, were driven by one unswerving factor. Greed. When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they saw gold, and it was gold that motivated them to kill, not God. God didn't say "kill all of these people in my name", but a promise of untold treasure motivated them instead. Look how many priest, yes Catholic priests, were killed when they ran up against the greed machine. In the years from 1492 to 1650 the Catholic church recorded 714 priests or nuns who were murdered for standing between Indians and slavers, miners, plantation owners, land holders, and soldiers. Just because a lousy western education tells lies about a faith does not make it true, it just makes it easy to believe.
Not entirely true. The ultimate secularism was communism, which succeeded in killing millions either through incompetence or genocide. Is see either ideology as base and degraded. Both as mob rule. Both as giving lip service to kindness but having bloodied hearts of stone.
Not exactly. It's just that Nihilistic and Islamic factions both take supreme joy in crucifying Christ over and over, who they see as a common enemy. Both factions have a dark side as well, and both have resorted to genocide in the past. Who would you trust? I remember seeing a poster of Saddam Hussein in Jordan in the early 80's, depicting him in an almost messianic fashion, and below him in graffiti was a reference to the holocaust. Whenever you see a faith with those "fair game" rules that allow hatred to become a valid component of worship, you inevitably see the sorts of individuals who will kill to get approval in that faith. When the faith sees killing as cleansing, such as Fascism, $cientology, or Islam, even if nobody has acted on the impulse implied by the doctrine, somebody eventually will. True Christian Orthodoxy, makes no provision for killing in any fashion, for any reason, at any time. Not in peace or war, not in assault or self defense, not sanctioned by the state, or by a religious leader. Killing is killing, period.
Unfortunately in the world, there are plenty that call themselves Christian, who harbor hatred for their fellow man, and attempt to justify it with a selective but literal interpretation of the Bible, even though Jesus made it abundantly clear that to do so was sin itself. But for every one Christian with this attitude there are hundreds in other faiths or ideologies who would be happy to slit another's throat, if it meant getting in good with the Misogynistic, pedophiliac, monomaniacs who founded their faiths.
Not only that, but with the most common case, the "inside job", the program can be altered or corrupted to produce non random sequences, or worse, the programmer who designs the system could use a pseudo random number generator, which *can* always be predicted.
As an example, if I wanted to compromise the security of a company, I would get on the cleaning staff, get chummy with the rest of the staff, do my job well, and have complete access to the facility after only a few months. After installing passive sniffers (ones with modified drivers which don't send beacon packets when in promiscuous mode), key loggers, tempest scoops, and A/V cameras, I could capture enough information to do plenty of damage, or make a bundle. No amount of patrols, random or otherwise, are going to catch me at it, because I would be by then a *recognized* and *trusted* entity: e.g insider.
Security systems are only as secure as the people that operate them. If the cleaners are required to stay within sight of each other, at all times, or if a guard is to accompany them through all areas, then the level of mistrust can reduce penetration. Just like innovation is fueled by cooperation and ideas, security is powered by fear and mistrust. I was once at a company meeting where the president invited a security expert to give a presentation regarding recent thefts of personal items during the previous week. During the meeting, security was searching the offices, and found many of the items of non other than a leading VP, who had a gambling problem. The woman was not a shifty eyed, back stabbing, low life with coke in the nose, but rather a mother of two, who got too deep into online poker, and was liked by everyone there.
As a practical matter, you want people in your trusted organization to get along and behave respectfully, but you want the people in your security organization to hate their guts. When you have a company picnic, make the security team work overtime at the office. Do things that put the two organizations at a suspicious distance. Do not allow fraternization between the two, and give the security team an unforgiving rule set that keeps order and mistrust at an enhanced level. Monitor everything that enters or leaves the facility, and above all, have security review all cleaning staff appointments, especially during the probationary period, which should be no less than a year, since that is the most common window of time for socially engineered inside operations.
I'm not saying to treat your security staff like trash though, but rather, make them think that the trusted members of the facility are getting a much better deal. Above all: Security is the *least* trusted organization of any facility, and the most easily comprimised. Night watchmen are a dime a dozen, paid poorly, disrespected, and generally treated poorly. With the appropriate financial and social pressures, there are very few security organization that cannot be subverted given time and patience.
Randomness in passwords is one thing, but when you do it with human beings it rapidly becomes less random over time. Actually the perfect guard is two guards who hate each other and fear their boss. This is why crime organization do security very well. It takes a certain healthy dose of jealousy and mistrust to keep a guard detail functioning effectively. If everyone gets along, and the computer gets to decide when the patrol details goes out, then it is fairly easy to subvert a single guard and affect the entire detail, but if they loath or fear each other, and patrol in a group, then they will all be watching out for themselves and doing their best not to slip up.
Random patrols just stir the pot, since nearly every penetration into security systems are a result of inside jobs. If nobody but the computer knows where the patrol is supposed to be, and the computer can be tampered with, then there is no way to say a person is in the wrong place at the wrong time, add to that the tendency for people to share information, and you lose the benefit of chaos in the patrol plan.
Randomized patrols have been around along time. There are several problems with this guy's approach. First, there are inner and outer bounds to patrol initiation and duration, as well as the human tendency to repeat the familiar, thus while the schedule may get changed, the actual patrols will follow a non-random, pattern. In addition, consigning the schedule to a computer also adds a level of security failure potential that shouldn't exist. If the guards, examiners, and cameras, are on a purely random schedule, and are following the direct orders of a machine, eventually, a social engineering exploit would open the door for the opponent to get a complete schedule from the computer itself. Just like lost page encryption can be circumvented by compromising the message sender, random patrols can be brought down by compromising the computer, and unlike computers in Hollywood movies, no computer on Earth, is secure, and connected at the same time.
The thing about having "Perfect Knowledge" of a patrol or observation pattern, is that you have to expect certain variations anyways, and plan accordingly, but the polar bear under the ice is that you also have to expect certain regularities, certain things that repeat, regardless of schedule. Most unit commanders and security bosses have had to learn this the hard way, and after they loose a certain amount of confidence in human nature, they learn how to manipulate it to make their facility more secure.
A low level security guard is going to look at the schedule, and try to make it conform to his own sense of order, rounding up or down patrol times, falsifying patrols, or just plain blowing off the whole schedule entirely. After going through more than a few guards, the commander is going to have to admit, that going against human nature is not only counter productive, but dangerous. The radio messages, audio stimulus, and other auditory or visual stimulus that is used to keep the pattern random, can always be intercepted and used to an opponent's advantage, and with the high turnover rate already present in security jobs, it is a simple matter to place somebody on location that can compromise everything.
What the commander has to do is assume that his bottom line guards are going to be compromised, individually. For instance, he can safely assume, that at even if all of his guards are compromised that very few of them are going to entrust that fact with another guard. By identifying the loners on guard staff, he can group them in pairs, or triplets that are socially incompatible, and thus untrusting of one another. Since self preservation is a stronger human reaction than loyalty, the commander has to rely on this to prevent an actual incursion.
In military units, officers do not mix much with enlisted, and doing so can mean punishment or even jail time for the offenders. The reason for this, is that if two groups are not socially compatible, and they have a common stated goal, then the change of a conspiracy amongst the two is greatly reduced. If The officers decided as a group to betray, then military code would force the enlist, or non-commissioned officers to act against it, and visa versa.
The military relies on routine, because, unlike the scientist with his computer driven, game theory approach, they know it works. If patrols become regular, then is easier for those patrols to spot anything out of order. The only way to have consistent security, is to have reliable, consistent, and above all, complete coverage of the facility.
Need a new category: Pseudoscience.
There is only one, but rathe debilitating problem with the idea of a wormhole, and is the following.
A wormhole to be connected must be the prodict of two black holes since a "white" hole has never been observed. A black hole connecting to this universe, has to connect to something here that we can see, or in the the case of a black hole, detect. Matter falling into a wormhole would either come out of the other end in a blinding display of energy, or it would remain trapped in a singularity shared by the two defects in spacetime. It is more likely that the blackhole is not bottomless, and does not represent an infinately deep sack, but is instead mitigated by something we have yet to determine. Maybe quantum physics plays a much greater role and prohibits the certainty of both position and momentum found within the spacetime bubble. Maybe the energy trapped in the blackhole is not trapped at all but is instead radiated in all directions about the blackhole itself, due to the uncertainty principle.
A traversable wormhole would have to be constructed of something that wouldn't provide an inconvenient landing place for incoming objects, e.g. The ephimerical dark matter we hear so much about, that drived the money machine to make so many of the expensive toys in Illinois and Geneva, Switzerland. You would have a hard time constraining the dark matter since it wouldn't respond to to anything other than gravity, and if even if you made a darkmatter black hole, you would still get torn into tiny little bits at the event horizon. Foremost of all is the fact that anything, and I mean anything, stong enough to create a wormhole, is also strong enough to prevent easy escape to the far event horizon. It would be more analogous to what would happen if there was a hole through the Earth. To traverse, you would have to get a running start and hope your momentum would carry you far enough out the other horizone to safely escape falling back in.
If you wanted to make a safe wormhole that is not connected gravitationally, then you would need to use a stronger force capable of making sharper deformations in spacetime, and allthough, all of the known forces are stronger, none of them appear to deform spacetime so far. If it turns out that electromagnetic energy actually deforms spacetime in any way, then it would be the ideal candidate.
If, and that's a big if, we ever learn how to bridge different points in spacetime or even other universes, it woun't be done with blackholes, it will probably be done with EM and exotic matter, because the creation of blackholes of any size is not only dangerous, it is stupid as well.
German theorist Von Meuller came up with the same idea in the twenties. This one just has a fancier chart.
You could always use a high power maser to burn off the clouds...
The pesticide DTI in particular, used in the control of mosquitos, interupts the nymph phase of the bloodsucker, preventing it from reaching adulthood, this may also affect other metamorhic insects, such as bees and butterflies. Domestic bees are the leading pollinators in agricultural states, since wild bees only form small colinies, and other pollinators are usually whiped out by pesticides. Since DTI is added to the water via spraying, it could easily become concentrated in the honey by workers during water runs. I have personally experienced hive collapses, and have had the honey tested and found very high concentrations of DTI. The hives have to be completely cleaned before another colony can be added, otherwise they just swarm away. Bottom line, the theory is bogus, it's pesticides.
Contrast the different way that the media shows space exploration today from the 60's when man first walked on the moon, and it becomes clear that, much less emphasis is being placed upon space exploration, and more on self consuming intercenal feuding on a global scale. The space shuttle launch and construction mission received a total of 171 hours of programming while the war in Iraq 2416 hours over all of the cable and broadcast channels in the US and UK during the same time frame. Youth of today have a cynical view of space exploration since NASA makes a space career goal seem unatainable by mere mortals. If space access were more affordable and privitized, there would be a greater degree of anticipation for young and old alike. During the 60's, people watched with anticipation as man touched the moon, but groaned with malaise when faced with the bill. It is no different today, hence while Russia launches regular missions for support of the space station on a shoetring budget, the USA is forced to pay billions a pop to accomplish similar things. Space Ship One was an admirable attempt to break through the ceiling that NASA created, but without better support, they may go the way of any private space effort that has attempted to butt heads with government oversight.
Thus, if you want to see cheap access to space, and you don't like the image of young people rolling thier eyes at the accomplishements of space exploration, then you better get off your can and support private space enterprises.
So that's why I saw that guy down by the beach with happy faces drawn on his glasses mumbling to himself...
One average computer uses 52,000 pine trees worth of energy a day? Thats, oh, about 10 billion watts of energy given the average dimemsions of a pine tree. If that's the case, my electric bill should be ALOT higher.
Since the sun is the primary form of energy input to our ecosystem, any harebrained scheme to tamper with it would inevitably end up in disaster. Who thinks this stuff up anyways? The temperature of the Earth is on a 600K year cycle that happens to be near the end of a warming trend, if the goal was to reduce the light level and starve humans out of existance, then this would probably be a pretty good solution. Sort of reminds me of the situation where the idiot keeps hitting the fuse on a high explosive dud in an effort to get it off, while a forcefull means to a solution may seem acceptable, it doesn't always end up as planned.
String theory fails the smell test, by being so complicated that none of it's predictions can actually be tested. For instance, the theory never explains HOW a dimension can be rolled up in the first place, and wouldn't a rolled up dimension require two more dimensions to adaquately describe. String theory also fails to explain the various constraints described by previous models. Many of the characteristics of string theory are actually inner-wound descriptions of larger characteristics of matter. How would string theory model elastic collisions without claiming the elastic nature of the strings themselves. Alot of physicists' careers have been brought to a standstill for doubting the "faith" of string theory. Scientists should stop the bloodletting and put this smoking pile to rest, along with the other untestable theories that have gone before it.
String theory has nearly stopped all real research into the subatomic universe, in favor of a load of wishfull thinking, written by a few individuals who are too heavily focused on padding their hats to make their heads look bigger.
Using hydrogen instead of helium for lift has many potential benefits. Hydrogen can lift a larger weight per unit volume. Helium atoms are slippery and can even escape from solid steel containers, while hydrogen, generally stays inside an intact container. Helium is made in reactors, the sun, and by alpha decay of transuranic elements, hydrogen can be generated through electrolysis. Hydrogen is really cheap, helium is fairly expensive. Since the ballon is both mechanically and electrically tethered, static charge can be safely sent to ground. Hydrogen is bouyant to ~500000 feet, helium, looses lifting power at around 350000.