He said "common law couple" rather than "common law marriage".
While "common law couple" is not a phrase I've seen before, he's correct in that living with someone and having children with them tends to mean that you acquire some of the rights and obligations you would acquire if you were married.
At the moment there are two diametrically opposed camps - one that says that (excluding the complication of children) two people ought to be able to be in a "no obligation" relationship regardless of the length of the relationship and the other that says that, particularly after living together for a long period, people should have some responsibility to one another and not just be able to throw someone out in the street. (There are, of course, extremists on each side - I'm really only considering the ones who have rational, coherent arguments to support their views)
It's more usually the man who brings the most assets to a relationship and the man who wants the "no obligation" type of relationship so this is often characterized as "oppression of women".
Slashdot, being heavily biased towards American readers will obviously come down on the "it's no obligation, why the hell should the woman get anything" without being able to conceive that there is a whole spectrum of cases and there is no "one size fits all" solution.
The OP that started this subthread clearly understands that the relationship he has decided to get involved with has (probably) introduced some obligations to his partner that are not explicitly stated in law.
Steel is recovered from German warships sunk at Scapa Flow in 1919. Because the steel was forged prior to the nuclear age and the ships have been lying in 20+m of water this steel is extremely low in radioactive carbon.
The event on the problematic rig was highly unlikely to happen, but when it did happen there was no way to recover. It's still leaking now - two months later. Claiming that lightning won't strike twice is not an intelligent response.
Except that the way to recover was known from day one. And that is a relief well.
The fundamental problem is that regulations allow the drilling of the relief wells to be postponed until after something has gone wrong. So it takes months to get things under control instead of weeks.
Deep water drilling is very expensive. Oil companies are not going to drill holes that they expect never to use unless they are forced to by regulations.
If you use self signed certificates (or a CA that isn't in the browser) and Firefox 2 (or Konqueror etc) then you can usually detect this attack by not adding the CA to your browser and only accepting the certificate for the session.
As soon as the warning disappears when you visit the site you know someone is implementing a MITM attack.
Unfortunately, Firefox 3 forces you to add the certificate to the browser so you cannot detect a MITM attack that replaces the certificate with another one that the browser also accepts.
There's no way for an attacker to reliably attack self signed certs because they cannot tell if a particular browser is expecting a "valid" certificate or an "invalid" one for any particular user.
Nothing wrong with London's public transport. The problem is very large vehicles in London (centre). The roads are generally too narrow, too bendy and have too many junctions for very long vehicles.
Many junctions have had their stop lines moved right back (20-30m from the junction) to allow the buses to turn into them. It's all too common for a car driver to be unable to see the point of stopping so far back so they stop a cars length or two in front of the line. Then one of these buses comes around the corner and everybody is stuck. (over the years this has got to be a lesser and lesser problem as more and more car drivers have directly experienced the problems it causes but it's never gone away completely)
Or when the buses are going along a main road with two lanes they should wait until their exit is clear before entering a box junction (yellow hatched area where you are not allowed to enter unless your exit is clear and are not allowed to stop on unless you are turning right and are prevented from oncoming traffic). But cars in the other lane will "overtake" the bus and then pull across into the buses lane meaning that the 18m gap that the bus needs in front of it never happens. So the buses just block the junctions. (and pedestrian crossing are blocked even more often - it's not at all uncommon for once of these buses to end up slap bang across a pedestrian crossing for the entire green man phase - which tends to be fairly short anyway even when you've got a direct route across the road)
These buses have a surprisingly brisk acceleration - and there is a significant proportion of bus drivers who will just pull away when there is a car or cyclist overtaking. Typically for a car it's not too much problem but many cyclists cannot then get past them but end up stranded in the middle of the road with a bus that is now going slightly faster than they are but has 15m of vehicle behind them preventing them from getting back in.
For the people who use them, these buses are very good. But, unfortunately, they do not work well on the road infrastructure in central London.
Well officer, you see it's like I was doing 150mph relative to the ground in a 30mph limit but the Earth is going around the sun at 67000 mph so my 120mph over the limit is totally irrelevant.
In the UK in particular you *cannot* issue a receipt - anything which can be used to match a vote to a voter is illegal. Even signing your name instead of putting a cross renders your ballot spoiled.
Except, of course, the recording of the ballot paper number next to your name when you vote.
In the past it would have been difficult to automatically match up every vote with a voter but it certainly wouldn't have been difficult to find out who cast a particular vote. "Who voted communist?"
Nowadays I'd expect that the voter lists with the ballot numbers could be scanned and OCRed and the ballot papers run through an automatic feeder. Of course this needs access to the voter lists and ballot papers so not available to everybody.
4.4 Anecdotal evidence suggests that at every election Returning Officers - and more often Presiding Officers in polling stations - receive a number of complaints or concerns from electors over the use of serial numbers on ballot papers. Electors are often concerned that the number allows identification of how they have voted.
In fact, serial numbers are used specifically to allow for the tracing of papers cast fraudulently and are checked only where a claim of fraud is being investigated and a court order obtained to allow the identification of the ballot paper as being that of a particular person. Nevertheless, the regularity of such complaints, although not great, is thought to have increased in recent years with the increased use of postal voting. This is an issue also considered in the Commission's separate review of absent voting.
This was reported on BBC R4 today program yesterday morning.
The reason for the remote operation is because they're using X-rays. Previously, surgeons have had to wear heavy lead aprons while doing this. When these operations take 6 hours+ that's a physical demand it would be preferable they didn't have to suffer.
The water vapour from burning methane (or anything else) is completely irrelevant (unless you're planning to burn the methane in the stratosphere)
Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing. 70% or so of the surface of the Earth is open water. It's constantly evaporating and falling back as rain.
So quickly does the water vapour reach equilibrium that you could instantaneously remove ALL the water vapour from the atmosphere and not have any significant effect on the climate. Within a couple of weeks the water vapour will be back. The thermal inertia of the oceans and atmosphere will be amply sufficient to stop a catastrophic temperature fall during those two weeks.
CO2, OTOH, is a forcing. Instantaneously remove all the CO2 and the temperature will start to drop. As the temperature drops H2O will start to condense out. Within a few millennia we'd be back into a deep ice age. (Slowly, mainly from vulcanism, the CO2 will be replaced in the atmosphere and, with the right orbital forcings, eventually the planet would escape from the ice age again)
Or add CO2 to the atmosphere and the temperature will go up. That will cause more H2O to go into the atmosphere which will cause the temperature to rise more. Eventually an equilibrium will be reached but it takes centuries to millenia for the ocean temperature and hence water vapour to reach equilibrium for any significant step change in CO2.
And due to our insanely large number of MPs (625 IIRC, more than the US senate and house of representatives combined) in order to put a candidate in every ward you need 300K which is well outside the finances of all but the very richest of people.
OTOH, I'm not sure there would be anything to be gained from the Raving Monster Loony Party standing in every seat and very long ballot papers would probably mean people accidentally voting for the wrong person.
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
This is ridiculous. "There has been an uptrend that is not significant" can NEVER be interpreted as "there has been no warming". What it means is "There HAS been warming but there is a non-negligible probability that it could be an artifact of random noise and the error bounds on our predictions for the future based on the period include the case where temperatures do not continue to rise"
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
Are you reading the same quote as me. He said that there IS a warming trend (of 0.12C/decade) but it's not quite statistically significant at the 95% level.
It is just possible that the OBSERVED warming is an artifact of the natural weather variability.
By 2015, the expected temperature from the regression-line fit and that expected from the "no change" hypothesis will be far enough apart that we'll probably be able to distinguish between them with statistical significance.
Although you might not like the fact that, in the worst case, it could take until 2028 to separate the two cases of "It's warming" and "It's not warming".
By the end of 2015, it is in fact likely but by no means certain that one or the other side will have won. Eventually, the two regions get far enough apart that it's certain to happen. In fact, by 2028 we're sure to have two years outside the limits of one or the other side, so the bet can't take longer than 2028 to be decided.
Of course, in 2015 (or 2028) the deniers will be saying "But it hasn't warmed since 2012 (or 2025)
So, you stick something between the card and the terminal (the laptop) that intercepts the "Wrong PIN was entered" message from the card and forwards a "Correct PIN was entered" message to the terminal instead.
No. That could be detected.
What this does is that the terminal sends the pin to the card. This is intercepted and a "Authenticated by signature" message sent to the card instead. The OK response to that "Authenticated by signature" is changed into an OK response "Authenticated by PIN" before being sent to the terminal.
So the terminal sees a complete and correct "Authenticated by PIN" exchange and the card sees a complete and correct "Authenticated by Signature" exchange.
And, AFAICT, there is absolutely no way, after the fact, to detect that this has been done. There is nothing recorded on the card that would indicate a signature authentication would be done. Even the "incorrect pin" counter is not incremented as no incorrect pin was ever sent to the card.
The usage of insecure you are deriding has made its way into popular usage, and hence the dictionary. a LONG time ago:
2. Unsafe; exposed to danger; not firm; liable to give way, fail, or be overcome.
1654 H. L'Estrange Chas. I (1655) 56 So in-secure did overmuch security make them.
Can't speak for gmail as I've never used it but my online banking is enormously quicker with images turned off. Takes 27-30 seconds to display a page with images turned on. Takes 3-4 seconds with it turned off.
Unfortunately there are a few things that cannot be done without images turned on.:-(
(natwest one account)
Infact, so dire are most bank websites that I'm amazed that browsers don't yet have an option to turn on caching for images over https.
Not only did we not send our good tea, we used to tax them on it. It was no wonder they were unhappy.
Eventually, we realized that this was a bit unfair so we stopped taxing it. This was an anathema to the Americans, "How dare the British NOT tax our tea" so they threw it all into the sea. "Take that you British scum, we WILL be taxed".
The majority of the British, realizing that people who LIKED taxes were alien beyond comprehension (throwing good tea into the sea would also be incomprehensible but it's not clear whether or not the Americans realized that the tea they did discard was undrinkable anyway), quickly decided to kick them out of the Empire.
This was not easy to do. The same people who if you say "Hey, we'd like to reduce the taxes you pay" scream "NOOOOOO!!!" are hardly likely to go quietly when you tell them "We'd like you out of the Empire" so "a cunning plan" was hatched. We'd pretend we didn't want them to go (actually dear George was a bit simple and it's suspected that he didn't have to pretend) and, with a bit of subterfuge and intrigue, we could get those "onion wearing, garlic eating frogs" to "help" get rid ^W^Wthem gain their independence.
This has worked well, albeit for a brief 250 years, but it's starting to crumble. You now hear Americans using phrases like "cheese eating surrender monkeys" when talking about our close friends across the channel. Before you know it they'll be demanding lower taxes and heaven forbid that they might want to become the 55th member of the Commonwealth. Woe is me.
Tim.
Waiting with bated breath to see how this gets modded;-)
But we don't have "healthy skepticism". We have unquestioning belief of opinion that people want to believe in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary.
Even here on Slashdot, that I thought would be mainly visited by science trained people, we get countless posts along the lines of "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe CO2 can cause global warming".
There was some confusion over the role of CO2 in our atmosphere. Around the turn of the 20th Century Arrhenius realized that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere would cause temperatures to rise. A few years later Angstrom did some unfortunate experiments that were misleading but compelling and the vast majority of scientists decided that Arrhenius was wrong. Around the 20s or 30s we had the understanding to realize that Arrhenius must have been right which would have caused people to redo and reevaluate Angstrom's experiments and find the flaw. Unfortuately, that didn't happen and it wasn't until the 1940s and high altitude bombers that there was experimental evidence to directly contradict Angstrom. Since then the role of CO2 in our atmosphere is settled and adding CO2 will cause temperatures to rise. All that is left is to determine what the sensitivity is. And yet, 60+ years later we still see the same tired old arguments "CO2 absorption bands are saturated" and "CO2 is a trace gas so cannot affect climate."
Repeating these soundbites and others isn't healthy scepticism, it's spouting nonsense from a base of ignorance.
There are valid arguments that "business as usual" is the best way forwards. I happen to disagree - IMO the costs of mitigation will be miniscule in comparison to the costs of adapting regardless of the precise value of climate sensitivity - but denying the facts of science isn't valid or even intelligent, let alone healthy scepticism.
I've had to maintain code originally written by people with that attitude. To put it politely, I wish they'd switched careers to something besides computer programming; it would have saved everyone a lot of work, cost overruns, budget overruns, and pissed off a lot fewer customers.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
There's a worrisome sort of class distinction in programming between programmers who are satisfied with code that seems to work, versus programmers who insist on code that works for the right reasons. Unfortunately, of course, just because some code does work you don't necessarily know whether it's working for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Code that merely seems to work today can just as easily stop working tomorrow, leading to neverending bug-chasing. Code that works for the right reasons, on the other hand, has some decent chance of continuing to work properly tomorrow and next week and next month and next year, without continual hands-on maintenance (meaning among other things that the programmers involved are free to move on to new and different projects).
Buses (at least in London, can't speak for the town in question) are almost exclusively on a "accelerate from the last stop" or "brake for the next stop" sort of ride.
The Pendolino trains on the West Coast Main Line are claimed to get a 17% reduction in energy use due to regenerative braking and that's an intercity line.
I have no idea what sort of benefit regenerative braking would give for an urban bus but I'd be surprised if it was less than 30% and I could believe figures of 60%+.
Ok, I've done enough skim reading now to have a clue about what Bohm (and the subsequent theories) are about.
I don't accept that it's conceptually any simpler than the standard model. It has pilot wave/Quantum Field/Wavefunction/Whatever you want to call it propagating faster than light but that doesn't matter because we cannot measure it. I find that as uncomfortable as indeterminism in the standard model. But I can see how it can be made to work.
Everett had an interesting criticism of the Bohm model that resonates with me. The Bohm model elevates position to a special status (and momentum) since it is well defined and, IMO, therefore makes "particles" a core part of the theory. But Everett shows that the particles are completely unnecessary in the Bohm model and we still get the same results. (Extending that one step further - which Everett would not have agreed with - ISTM that we're then back to a non deterministic "probability field" problem. Everett, of course, stopped with the field and went down the many worlds path)
I might do some more reading around this subject in the future as it's certainly got possibilities to indicate new questions to ask that might not be so obvious when looking at the standard model (not that I'm going to be coming up with stuff like that) - for example it appears to be the importance of hidden variables in the Bohm model that drove Bell to produce his inequality and it's now obvious that non-locality is a requirement of any QM formulation. It also appears that the collapse of the wavefunction being an artifact of the interpretation rather than a requirement of the physics also wasn't appreciated - I hadn't realized that because the way I was taught QM emphasized from the start that the wavefunction was a mathematical model that could be used to do calculations and there was no known physical reality corresponding to it. (Which is also why I probably got no exposure to the Bohm model - people who think that the wavefunction is merely a model are hardly likely to have much truck with a theory that says that the wavefunction is a physical reality)
the wave function doesn't collapse until it hits the screen!
It's even worse than that. The wave function doesn't collapse until it's hit the screen AND we've decided whether to check the reading about which slit it went through.
When you wire your two detectors up to the same output, put a very long "wire" between the detectors and the output. Then, sometime after the electron hits the screen but while the signal is still propagating along the "wires" cut one of them (or not, depending on how you feel). Obviously if you cut one of the wires then we can tell which detector triggered based on the output and we don't see a diffraction pattern. But if we don't cut the wire then we do see a diffraction pattern. (you cannot look at where the electron finally hits until you've decided about cutting/not cutting the wire)
Slashdot Mirror
He said "common law couple" rather than "common law marriage".
While "common law couple" is not a phrase I've seen before, he's correct in that living with someone and having children with them tends to mean that you acquire some of the rights and obligations you would acquire if you were married.
At the moment there are two diametrically opposed camps - one that says that (excluding the complication of children) two people ought to be able to be in a "no obligation" relationship regardless of the length of the relationship and the other that says that, particularly after living together for a long period, people should have some responsibility to one another and not just be able to throw someone out in the street.
(There are, of course, extremists on each side - I'm really only considering the ones who have rational, coherent arguments to support their views)
It's more usually the man who brings the most assets to a relationship and the man who wants the "no obligation" type of relationship so this is often characterized as "oppression of women".
Slashdot, being heavily biased towards American readers will obviously come down on the "it's no obligation, why the hell should the woman get anything" without being able to conceive that there is a whole spectrum of cases and there is no "one size fits all" solution.
The OP that started this subthread clearly understands that the relationship he has decided to get involved with has (probably) introduced some obligations to his partner that are not explicitly stated in law.
Tim.
No.
I think it's question 3 in the introduction to Volume 1.
"Prove that there are no integer solutions to x^n+y^n=z^n for n>=3".
When I first read Knuth, this was an M50 problem.
It's now been relegated to an M45 problem. (Think that's right - I don't have my copy in front of me)
For the next edition he's going to make it an M3 problem.
Tim.
Steel is recovered from German warships sunk at Scapa Flow in 1919. Because the steel was forged prior to the nuclear age and the ships have been lying in 20+m of water this steel is extremely low in radioactive carbon.
Tim.
The event on the problematic rig was highly unlikely to happen, but when it did happen there was no way to recover. It's still leaking now - two months later. Claiming that lightning won't strike twice is not an intelligent response.
Except that the way to recover was known from day one. And that is a relief well.
The fundamental problem is that regulations allow the drilling of the relief wells to be postponed until after something has gone wrong. So it takes months to get things under control instead of weeks.
Deep water drilling is very expensive. Oil companies are not going to drill holes that they expect never to use unless they are forced to by regulations.
Tim.
If you use self signed certificates (or a CA that isn't in the browser) and Firefox 2 (or Konqueror etc) then you can usually detect this attack by not adding the CA to your browser and only accepting the certificate for the session.
As soon as the warning disappears when you visit the site you know someone is implementing a MITM attack.
Unfortunately, Firefox 3 forces you to add the certificate to the browser so you cannot detect a MITM attack that replaces the certificate with another one that the browser also accepts.
There's no way for an attacker to reliably attack self signed certs because they cannot tell if a particular browser is expecting a "valid" certificate or an "invalid" one for any particular user.
Tim.
Nothing wrong with London's public transport. The problem is very large vehicles in London (centre). The roads are generally too narrow, too bendy and have too many junctions for very long vehicles.
Many junctions have had their stop lines moved right back (20-30m from the junction) to allow the buses to turn into them. It's all too common for a car driver to be unable to see the point of stopping so far back so they stop a cars length or two in front of the line. Then one of these buses comes around the corner and everybody is stuck. (over the years this has got to be a lesser and lesser problem as more and more car drivers have directly experienced the problems it causes but it's never gone away completely)
Or when the buses are going along a main road with two lanes they should wait until their exit is clear before entering a box junction (yellow hatched area where you are not allowed to enter unless your exit is clear and are not allowed to stop on unless you are turning right and are prevented from oncoming traffic). But cars in the other lane will "overtake" the bus and then pull across into the buses lane meaning that the 18m gap that the bus needs in front of it never happens. So the buses just block the junctions. (and pedestrian crossing are blocked even more often - it's not at all uncommon for once of these buses to end up slap bang across a pedestrian crossing for the entire green man phase - which tends to be fairly short anyway even when you've got a direct route across the road)
These buses have a surprisingly brisk acceleration - and there is a significant proportion of bus drivers who will just pull away when there is a car or cyclist overtaking. Typically for a car it's not too much problem but many cyclists cannot then get past them but end up stranded in the middle of the road with a bus that is now going slightly faster than they are but has 15m of vehicle behind them preventing them from getting back in.
For the people who use them, these buses are very good. But, unfortunately, they do not work well on the road infrastructure in central London.
Tim.
Well officer, you see it's like I was doing 150mph relative to the ground in a 30mph limit but the Earth is going around the sun at 67000 mph so my 120mph over the limit is totally irrelevant.
Tim.
In the UK in particular you *cannot* issue a receipt - anything which can be used to match a vote to a voter is illegal. Even signing your name instead of putting a cross renders your ballot spoiled.
Except, of course, the recording of the ballot paper number next to your name when you vote.
In the past it would have been difficult to automatically match up every vote with a voter but it certainly wouldn't have been difficult to find out who cast a particular vote. "Who voted communist?"
Nowadays I'd expect that the voter lists with the ballot numbers could be scanned and OCRed and the ballot papers run through an automatic feeder. Of course this needs access to the voter lists and ballot papers so not available to everybody.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0018/16056/Ballot_paper_design_finalversion_13051-7979__E__N__S__W__.pdf
End of page 25:
Serial numbers
4.4 Anecdotal evidence suggests that at every election
Returning Officers - and more often Presiding Officers
in polling stations - receive a number of complaints or
concerns from electors over the use of serial numbers
on ballot papers. Electors are often concerned that the
number allows identification of how they have voted.
In fact, serial numbers are used specifically to allow for
the tracing of papers cast fraudulently and are checked
only where a claim of fraud is being investigated and a
court order obtained to allow the identification of the ballot
paper as being that of a particular person. Nevertheless,
the regularity of such complaints, although not great, is
thought to have increased in recent years with the increased
use of postal voting. This is an issue also considered in
the Commission's separate review of absent voting.
Tim.
This was reported on BBC R4 today program yesterday morning.
The reason for the remote operation is because they're using X-rays. Previously, surgeons have had to wear heavy lead aprons while doing this. When these operations take 6 hours+ that's a physical demand it would be preferable they didn't have to suffer.
Tim.
The water vapour from burning methane (or anything else) is completely irrelevant (unless you're planning to burn the methane in the stratosphere)
Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing. 70% or so of the surface of the Earth is open water. It's constantly evaporating and falling back as rain.
So quickly does the water vapour reach equilibrium that you could instantaneously remove ALL the water vapour from the atmosphere and not have any significant effect on the climate. Within a couple of weeks the water vapour will be back. The thermal inertia of the oceans and atmosphere will be amply sufficient to stop a catastrophic temperature fall during those two weeks.
CO2, OTOH, is a forcing. Instantaneously remove all the CO2 and the temperature will start to drop. As the temperature drops H2O will start to condense out. Within a few millennia we'd be back into a deep ice age. (Slowly, mainly from vulcanism, the CO2 will be replaced in the atmosphere and, with the right orbital forcings, eventually the planet would escape from the ice age again)
Or add CO2 to the atmosphere and the temperature will go up. That will cause more H2O to go into the atmosphere which will cause the temperature to rise more. Eventually an equilibrium will be reached but it takes centuries to millenia for the ocean temperature and hence water vapour to reach equilibrium for any significant step change in CO2.
Tim.
And due to our insanely large number of MPs (625 IIRC, more than the US senate and house of representatives combined) in order to put a candidate in every ward you need 300K which is well outside the finances of all but the very richest of people.
OTOH, I'm not sure there would be anything to be gained from the Raving Monster Loony Party standing in every seat and very long ballot papers would probably mean people accidentally voting for the wrong person.
I don't think there is an easy answer.
Tim.
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
This is ridiculous. "There has been an uptrend that is not significant" can NEVER be interpreted as "there has been no warming". What it means is "There HAS been warming but there is a non-negligible probability that it could be an artifact of random noise and the error bounds on our predictions for the future based on the period include the case where temperatures do not continue to rise"
Tim.
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
Are you reading the same quote as me. He said that there IS a warming trend (of 0.12C/decade) but it's not quite statistically significant at the 95% level.
It is just possible that the OBSERVED warming is an artifact of the natural weather variability.
Tim.
One question for the warmers reading. Can the theory of AGW be falsified?
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/you-bet/
That's how you falsify it.
By 2015, the expected temperature from the regression-line fit and that expected from the "no change" hypothesis will be far enough apart that we'll probably be able to distinguish between them with statistical significance.
Although you might not like the fact that, in the worst case, it could take until 2028 to separate the two cases of "It's warming" and "It's not warming".
By the end of 2015, it is in fact likely but by no means certain that one or the other side will have won. Eventually, the two regions get far enough apart that it's certain to happen. In fact, by 2028 we're sure to have two years outside the limits of one or the other side, so the bet can't take longer than 2028 to be decided.
Of course, in 2015 (or 2028) the deniers will be saying "But it hasn't warmed since 2012 (or 2025)
Tim.
So, you stick something between the card and the terminal (the laptop) that intercepts the "Wrong PIN was entered" message from the card and forwards a "Correct PIN was entered" message to the terminal instead.
No. That could be detected.
What this does is that the terminal sends the pin to the card. This is intercepted and a "Authenticated by signature" message sent to the card instead. The OK response to that "Authenticated by signature" is changed into an OK response "Authenticated by PIN" before being sent to the terminal.
So the terminal sees a complete and correct "Authenticated by PIN" exchange and the card sees a complete and correct "Authenticated by Signature" exchange.
And, AFAICT, there is absolutely no way, after the fact, to detect that this has been done. There is nothing recorded on the card that would indicate a signature authentication would be done. Even the "incorrect pin" counter is not incremented as no incorrect pin was ever sent to the card.
Tim.
The usage of insecure you are deriding has made its way into popular usage, and hence the dictionary.
a LONG time ago:
2. Unsafe; exposed to danger; not firm; liable to give way, fail, or be overcome.
1654 H. L'Estrange Chas. I (1655) 56 So in-secure did overmuch security make them.
Tim.
Can't speak for gmail as I've never used it but my online banking is enormously quicker with images turned off.
Takes 27-30 seconds to display a page with images turned on. Takes 3-4 seconds with it turned off.
Unfortunately there are a few things that cannot be done without images turned on. :-(
(natwest one account)
Infact, so dire are most bank websites that I'm amazed that browsers don't yet have an option to turn on caching for images over https.
Tim.
Not only did we not send our good tea, we used to tax them on it. It was no wonder they were unhappy.
Eventually, we realized that this was a bit unfair so we stopped taxing it. This was an anathema to the Americans, "How dare the British NOT tax our tea" so they threw it all into the sea. "Take that you British scum, we WILL be taxed".
The majority of the British, realizing that people who LIKED taxes were alien beyond comprehension (throwing good tea into the sea would also be incomprehensible but it's not clear whether or not the Americans realized that the tea they did discard was undrinkable anyway), quickly decided to kick them out of the Empire.
This was not easy to do. The same people who if you say "Hey, we'd like to reduce the taxes you pay" scream "NOOOOOO!!!" are hardly likely to go quietly when you tell them "We'd like you out of the Empire" so "a cunning plan" was hatched. We'd pretend we didn't want them to go (actually dear George was a bit simple and it's suspected that he didn't have to pretend) and, with a bit of subterfuge and intrigue, we could get those "onion wearing, garlic eating frogs" to "help" get rid ^W^Wthem gain their independence.
This has worked well, albeit for a brief 250 years, but it's starting to crumble. You now hear Americans using phrases like "cheese eating surrender monkeys" when talking about our close friends across the channel. Before you know it they'll be demanding lower taxes and heaven forbid that they might want to become the 55th member of the Commonwealth. Woe is me.
Tim.
Waiting with bated breath to see how this gets modded ;-)
But we don't have "healthy skepticism". We have unquestioning belief of opinion that people want to believe in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary.
Even here on Slashdot, that I thought would be mainly visited by science trained people, we get countless posts along the lines of "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe CO2 can cause global warming".
There was some confusion over the role of CO2 in our atmosphere. Around the turn of the 20th Century Arrhenius realized that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere would cause temperatures to rise. A few years later Angstrom did some unfortunate experiments that were misleading but compelling and the vast majority of scientists decided that Arrhenius was wrong. Around the 20s or 30s we had the understanding to realize that Arrhenius must have been right which would have caused people to redo and reevaluate Angstrom's experiments and find the flaw. Unfortuately, that didn't happen and it wasn't until the 1940s and high altitude bombers that there was experimental evidence to directly contradict Angstrom. Since then the role of CO2 in our atmosphere is settled and adding CO2 will cause temperatures to rise. All that is left is to determine what the sensitivity is. And yet, 60+ years later we still see the same tired old arguments "CO2 absorption bands are saturated" and "CO2 is a trace gas so cannot affect climate."
Repeating these soundbites and others isn't healthy scepticism, it's spouting nonsense from a base of ignorance.
There are valid arguments that "business as usual" is the best way forwards. I happen to disagree - IMO the costs of mitigation will be miniscule in comparison to the costs of adapting regardless of the precise value of climate sensitivity - but denying the facts of science isn't valid or even intelligent, let alone healthy scepticism.
Tim.
I've had to maintain code originally written by people with that attitude. To put it politely, I wish they'd switched careers to something besides computer programming; it would have saved everyone a lot of work, cost overruns, budget overruns, and pissed off a lot fewer customers.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
Amen to that.
http://clc-wiki.net/wiki/Portability_and_ANSI_C_Compliance
Tim.
It's slightly more than "daisy chaining". Both ends of the "daisy chain" connect to the same fuse in the fuse box. This is called a ring main.
The cable is rated 15A, the fuse is rated 30A
This is why a spur has to have a separate fuse.
Lighting similarly. 3A cable, 5A fuse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit
Tim.
Buses (at least in London, can't speak for the town in question) are almost exclusively on a "accelerate from the last stop" or "brake for the next stop" sort of ride.
The Pendolino trains on the West Coast Main Line are claimed to get a 17% reduction in energy use due to regenerative braking and that's an intercity line.
http://www.alycidon.com/ALYCIDON%20RAIL/INFORMED%20SOURCES%20ARCHIVE/INF%20SRCS%202007/Informed%20Sources%2007%202007.htm
(Scroll down to Technology)
I have no idea what sort of benefit regenerative braking would give for an urban bus but I'd be surprised if it was less than 30% and I could believe figures of 60%+.
Tim.
http://john-adams.co.uk/2007/01/04/seat-belt-legislation-and-the-isles-report/
Ok, I've done enough skim reading now to have a clue about what Bohm (and the subsequent theories) are about.
I don't accept that it's conceptually any simpler than the standard model. It has pilot wave/Quantum Field/Wavefunction/Whatever you want to call it propagating faster than light but that doesn't matter because we cannot measure it. I find that as uncomfortable as indeterminism in the standard model. But I can see how it can be made to work.
Everett had an interesting criticism of the Bohm model that resonates with me. The Bohm model elevates position to a special status (and momentum) since it is well defined and, IMO, therefore makes "particles" a core part of the theory. But Everett shows that the particles are completely unnecessary in the Bohm model and we still get the same results. (Extending that one step further - which Everett would not have agreed with - ISTM that we're then back to a non deterministic "probability field" problem. Everett, of course, stopped with the field and went down the many worlds path)
I might do some more reading around this subject in the future as it's certainly got possibilities to indicate new questions to ask that might not be so obvious when looking at the standard model (not that I'm going to be coming up with stuff like that) - for example it appears to be the importance of hidden variables in the Bohm model that drove Bell to produce his inequality and it's now obvious that non-locality is a requirement of any QM formulation. It also appears that the collapse of the wavefunction being an artifact of the interpretation rather than a requirement of the physics also wasn't appreciated - I hadn't realized that because the way I was taught QM emphasized from the start that the wavefunction was a mathematical model that could be used to do calculations and there was no known physical reality corresponding to it. (Which is also why I probably got no exposure to the Bohm model - people who think that the wavefunction is merely a model are hardly likely to have much truck with a theory that says that the wavefunction is a physical reality)
Tim.
the wave function doesn't collapse until it hits the screen!
It's even worse than that. The wave function doesn't collapse until it's hit the screen AND we've decided whether to check the reading about which slit it went through.
When you wire your two detectors up to the same output, put a very long "wire" between the detectors and the output. Then, sometime after the electron hits the screen but while the signal is still propagating along the "wires" cut one of them (or not, depending on how you feel). Obviously if you cut one of the wires then we can tell which detector triggered based on the output and we don't see a diffraction pattern. But if we don't cut the wire then we do see a diffraction pattern. (you cannot look at where the electron finally hits until you've decided about cutting/not cutting the wire)
Tim.