"... an electric car is emission free, it's a lie, it's a big, big lie.
Fine. Let's do an experiment. Ulrich (or you) can lock himself up in a garage with the non-electric car of his choice, I'll do the same (different garage) with the electric car of my choice. Then we'll let the motors run for a couple of hours. Winner is whoever walks away afterwards.
Now, electric power production may not be emission free (depending on the source), but the car itself is (not counting trivial vapors from lubrication etc). Ulrich shouldn't lie.
Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?
As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.
As OP alluded to, bee stings don't kill people, the anaphylactic shock reaction does.
All this does is get the public to curate their own data that is being mined. Instead, the FTC should allow you to intentionally corrupt the data.
This.
In fact, it's perfectly legal (or at least, it used to be; who knows these days) to give false information or a false name as long as you're not trying to commit fraud. (Or impede justice; don't lie to the cops, just remain silent.)
I say lets inject even more noise into them. That won't matter if you're using the data for statistical purposes, and it gives some (alas, not much) plausible deniability for everything else.
I would expect they use both md5 and sha1 hashes, both of which must match. That's what we did with voting systems, and if anything the security for gambling machines is tighter. (Sure, with some effort an md5 can be spoofed, but good luck creating a different file where both the md5 and sha1 sums match those of the target.)
(The other side of the systems testing/qa house where I worked on voting systems dealt with games. Not gambling machines, but console and PC games. Their security was tighter than ours.)
Not the GCC, but Ken Thompson's original C compiler. And it was Thompson who fessed up. The other thing that compiler (allegedly) did was insert a back door any time it compiled the "login" program.
Sometimes it's exactly the point of having the source code.
Take voting machines for example. I used to work for a company that certified same. This involved obtaining everything that the vendor didn't write (compilers, OS, libraries, etc) from the 3rd party vendors (Microsoft, etc) including Linux from Scratch for the linux-based systems, then compiling it all (thus creating a "trusted build") and comparing the binaries.
No exact match, no certification. (This was after the vendor's source code went through a line-by-line inspection -- and where necessary, correction -- for all kinds of crap.)
Larry Niven invented that back in, oh, late 1960s? I think it was his story "Flatlander". Unfortunately it relies on something we haven't invented yet... stepping disk technology.
When we will be able to glean useful information from the epigenetic portion of DNA, then we will be able to deal with identical twins.
Um, no.
Forensic DNA analysis already uses the epigenetic portion of DNA, since the useful stuff is far more likely to be identical between individuals. But the epigenetic stuff is still inherited (although somewhat less reliably) from parents, and is the same between identical twins. Said twins are, after all, clones.
And anyone whose had a transplant (especially a bone marrow transplant) or a recent transfusion or is one of the not-all-that-rare instances of a person who merged with a potential fraternal twin while still in utero will have cells with different DNA.
There are ways of creating totally unique identification markers.
But it's very, very difficult to keep them unique if somebody has an interest in copying them.
Most questions on a "classic intelligence test" (Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, etc) are ultimately pattern-recognition tests, albeit some classes of question (eg the verbal ones) require prior knowledge too. E.g., in the Wechsler tests, the "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed" subtests all include (or benefit from) some pattern extraction/recognition skill, only the "Verbal Comprehension" does not. Whether those tests actually measure those things, let alone "intelligence", is another question entirely. But if there's something in the brain's hardware or firmware that assists that visual processing, chances are it assists in the above tests too. (And yes, I recognize that with visual processing there's also a bunch that gets done in the hardware before the information ever gets to the higher levels.)
Although as the saying goes, IQ is that thing which is measured by IQ tests, and may or may not have any bearing on intelligence. From personal observation, it certainly has no correlation with common sense.
Are you sure? Neo takes a pill and becomes the chosen one and gets the girl. You sure he wasn't laboring under a delusion caused by the pill he took, with just a little grittiness thrown in to make it convincing?
Right, we know it has positive inertial mass. We haven't yet properly observed their gravitational mass. We assume the two are equivalent; they may not be.
Actually, physicists have antimatter all wrong. A positron actually does have a negative charge but also has negative inertial mass, so it will react to an electromagnetic field the opposite way an electron does. We just observe that as reversed charge.
(Yes, I did just make that up, tongue firmly in cheek.)
Much (most?) of the energy from an ordinary nuclear bomb comes off as gamma rays. Because the atmosphere happens to be relatively opaque to gamma, it absorbs them and superheats. That's what generates the fireball.
So, expect the same thing to happen with antimatter.
And actually pure gamma emission is what happens when electrons and positrons collide. Proton-antiproton collisions tend to produce gamma plus some secondary particles (pions (pi-mesons), if I remember right, but I may not).
From Wikipedia: "The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. [...] From 1973 to 1974, Cerf's networking research group at Stanford worked out details of the idea, resulting in the first TCP specification."
And then it took about 8 years to be blessed as a standard, which is about average.
Orbital has a history of using hardware from other sources. The main stage of their Taurus is based on the Peacekeeper missile, for example.
Nothing really wrong with that, except it means they don't have the same kind of cost control that SpaceX does, who design and build all their own systems.
Rockets are very complicated machines, and we have much still to learn.
They're complicated when the design criteria includes maximizing performance regardless of cost, which was the general design rule in the 1950s and 60s. (In the 70s and 80s, that morphed to maximizing NASA jobs and the number of congressional districts the work is done in, almost regardless of cost.)
As an above poster mentioned, the Saturn F1 (for example) has been redesigned as the F1-B with different design goals, reducing the parts count (hence complexity, at the same time simplifying manufacturability) by two orders of magnitude and increasing thrust (at a very slight drop in Isp -- performance).
Slashdot Mirror
A 79-cent plastic water pistol filled with cyanide* is even more lethal, and just as easy to get past security.
Sure, the assassin will likely die from the cyanide too, but what are the odds of him surviving long with a one-shot gun anyway?
*(and sealed to prevent premature leakage; substitute other poison of your choice)
"... an electric car is emission free, it's a lie, it's a big, big lie.
Fine. Let's do an experiment. Ulrich (or you) can lock himself up in a garage with the non-electric car of his choice, I'll do the same (different garage) with the electric car of my choice. Then we'll let the motors run for a couple of hours. Winner is whoever walks away afterwards.
Now, electric power production may not be emission free (depending on the source), but the car itself is (not counting trivial vapors from lubrication etc). Ulrich shouldn't lie.
Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?
As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.
As OP alluded to, bee stings don't kill people, the anaphylactic shock reaction does.
But Santa brings us presents. (Or, worst case, coal.) When was the last time NSA ever did anything nice for you?
All this does is get the public to curate their own data that is being mined. Instead, the FTC should allow you to intentionally corrupt the data.
This.
In fact, it's perfectly legal (or at least, it used to be; who knows these days) to give false information or a false name as long as you're not trying to commit fraud. (Or impede justice; don't lie to the cops, just remain silent.)
Why the hell would I want to do that?
I say lets inject even more noise into them. That won't matter if you're using the data for statistical purposes, and it gives some (alas, not much) plausible deniability for everything else.
I would expect they use both md5 and sha1 hashes, both of which must match. That's what we did with voting systems, and if anything the security for gambling machines is tighter. (Sure, with some effort an md5 can be spoofed, but good luck creating a different file where both the md5 and sha1 sums match those of the target.)
(The other side of the systems testing/qa house where I worked on voting systems dealt with games. Not gambling machines, but console and PC games. Their security was tighter than ours.)
Not the GCC, but Ken Thompson's original C compiler. And it was Thompson who fessed up. The other thing that compiler (allegedly) did was insert a back door any time it compiled the "login" program.
Sometimes it's exactly the point of having the source code.
Take voting machines for example. I used to work for a company that certified same. This involved obtaining everything that the vendor didn't write (compilers, OS, libraries, etc) from the 3rd party vendors (Microsoft, etc) including Linux from Scratch for the linux-based systems, then compiling it all (thus creating a "trusted build") and comparing the binaries.
No exact match, no certification. (This was after the vendor's source code went through a line-by-line inspection -- and where necessary, correction -- for all kinds of crap.)
Koresh and the Branch Davidians were hardly terrorists. The FBI shot first.
The idiots shooting up schools are just that, idiots. They're not doing it to terrorize for some political or religious end.
I'll give you McVeigh and Kaczynski.
I just want a glass that is always full. :)
Larry Niven invented that back in, oh, late 1960s? I think it was his story "Flatlander". Unfortunately it relies on something we haven't invented yet ... stepping disk technology.
When we will be able to glean useful information from the epigenetic portion of DNA, then we will be able to deal with identical twins.
Um, no.
Forensic DNA analysis already uses the epigenetic portion of DNA, since the useful stuff is far more likely to be identical between individuals. But the epigenetic stuff is still inherited (although somewhat less reliably) from parents, and is the same between identical twins. Said twins are, after all, clones.
And anyone whose had a transplant (especially a bone marrow transplant) or a recent transfusion or is one of the not-all-that-rare instances of a person who merged with a potential fraternal twin while still in utero will have cells with different DNA.
There are ways of creating totally unique identification markers.
But it's very, very difficult to keep them unique if somebody has an interest in copying them.
Most questions on a "classic intelligence test" (Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, etc) are ultimately pattern-recognition tests, albeit some classes of question (eg the verbal ones) require prior knowledge too. E.g., in the Wechsler tests, the "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed" subtests all include (or benefit from) some pattern extraction/recognition skill, only the "Verbal Comprehension" does not. Whether those tests actually measure those things, let alone "intelligence", is another question entirely. But if there's something in the brain's hardware or firmware that assists that visual processing, chances are it assists in the above tests too. (And yes, I recognize that with visual processing there's also a bunch that gets done in the hardware before the information ever gets to the higher levels.)
Although as the saying goes, IQ is that thing which is measured by IQ tests, and may or may not have any bearing on intelligence. From personal observation, it certainly has no correlation with common sense.
Yeah, most of the time the lawyer screws the client without actual sex.
"but we're not talking about letting monkeys run the place."
Wait, has he even seen the Steve Ballmer developers dance?
...to stick with my (antique?) flip phone.
Besides, a big slab of glass and plastic looks much less cool than the flipper when you want to call "beam me up, Scotty."
(Okay, granted, even the latter isn't cool anymore, but...)
Are you sure? Neo takes a pill and becomes the chosen one and gets the girl. You sure he wasn't laboring under a delusion caused by the pill he took, with just a little grittiness thrown in to make it convincing?
(See also: Total Recall)
How'd that work out? Oh right... Android (Linux based) is the most easily hackable mobile phone OS out there!
You say that like it's a bad thing.
No, mathematics is a kind of philosophy. It happens to have some real-world applications, but then so do some other branches of philosophy.
Right, we know it has positive inertial mass. We haven't yet properly observed their gravitational mass. We assume the two are equivalent; they may not be.
Actually, physicists have antimatter all wrong. A positron actually does have a negative charge but also has negative inertial mass, so it will react to an electromagnetic field the opposite way an electron does. We just observe that as reversed charge.
(Yes, I did just make that up, tongue firmly in cheek.)
Much (most?) of the energy from an ordinary nuclear bomb comes off as gamma rays. Because the atmosphere happens to be relatively opaque to gamma, it absorbs them and superheats. That's what generates the fireball.
So, expect the same thing to happen with antimatter.
And actually pure gamma emission is what happens when electrons and positrons collide. Proton-antiproton collisions tend to produce gamma plus some secondary particles (pions (pi-mesons), if I remember right, but I may not).
Will it blend?
From Wikipedia: "The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. [...] From 1973 to 1974, Cerf's networking research group at Stanford worked out details of the idea, resulting in the first TCP specification."
And then it took about 8 years to be blessed as a standard, which is about average.
I laugh, ha!, at your check mate.
Orbital has a history of using hardware from other sources. The main stage of their Taurus is based on the Peacekeeper missile, for example.
Nothing really wrong with that, except it means they don't have the same kind of cost control that SpaceX does, who design and build all their own systems.
Rockets are very complicated machines, and we have much still to learn.
They're complicated when the design criteria includes maximizing performance regardless of cost, which was the general design rule in the 1950s and 60s. (In the 70s and 80s, that morphed to maximizing NASA jobs and the number of congressional districts the work is done in, almost regardless of cost.)
As an above poster mentioned, the Saturn F1 (for example) has been redesigned as the F1-B with different design goals, reducing the parts count (hence complexity, at the same time simplifying manufacturability) by two orders of magnitude and increasing thrust (at a very slight drop in Isp -- performance).
So I'd say we're learning.