When you first get a self-replicating molecular structure that is sufficiently stable that some modifications don't destroy either its stability or its ability to replicate, that's where evolution begins. Until that point, you cannot have any evolution
Not exactly. Because self replication is not a requirement for evolution. Virus evolves without self-replication.
You're splitting hairs, badly. All organisms depend on environmental support for replication. The fact that viruses depend more heavily on their environment than others does not mean they don't self-replicate. The encoded information that defines their structure is replicated and evolves. That's sufficient.
In general if a set of structures can influence the factory that makes the individuals of the set, the set can evolve. Only the set needs to be stable along with the factory, not its individuals.
Such structures can evolve to be self-replicating without themselves satisfying many requirements of life. The whole system including the factory and the set of structures cannot be called "life" because it does not replicate at all.
To the degree that information encoded in the individuals alters the production of subsequent generations and affects the rate and fidelity of production of individuals with that information, that is evolution, in the modern sense (there's really no point in talking about some pre-Darwinian meaning of the word in this context, that just creates confusion; if you want to refer to some other notion pick another word). The fact that it may only operate in the context of some larger, less-changing context doesn't matter, though it may mean that the particular construct is an evolutionary dead end.
You're trying to introduce needless complications into something that is very simple. Evolution consists of sustainable replication with high but imperfect fidelity plus some selection process. Given that, the replicated individuals will evolve towards more effective replication, within the appropriate context. Note that this statement isn't even limited to chemicals, much less to life. In the context of biochemistry, "abiogenesis" is whatever happened to get the chemical structures to the point of evolution. There abiogenesis ended and evolution began. At some point those chemical structures evolved to become something we'd call "life" (which is a fuzzy term and that cutoff is arbitrary).
It very much does. Evolution as a whole deals with how species change from one to the next. You're just picking an arbitrary cutoff point of where nonliving matter becomes nonliving matter and saying "ok this isn't evolution", even though there's an evolutionary process to get there.
There's an utterly obvious cutoff point, and it's not at all arbitrary. When you first get a self-replicating molecular structure that is sufficiently stable that some modifications don't destroy either its stability or its ability to replicate, that's where evolution begins. Until that point, you cannot have any evolution. Abiogenesis is the question of how that first self-replicating structure arose and what it looked like.
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I didn't take the course myself, but the academic posters and articles I have seen were all open.
The posters and articles were open? Or the knots? By "closed" I mean that the "rope" has no ends; it's a loop. This means mathematical knots can't be "tied" or "untied".
I meant it was real knots with strings with two ends.
Cool. That's unusual, if that's what they were actually studying. Could also have been that someone just grabbed random pictures of knots to put on posters, etc.
Except for that pesky little document that reiterates that we have the right to move around the country. Why on earth do people enjoy dreaming up ways to whittle away at freedom?
Who is talking about restricting the right to move around the country?
I went to school in MS and our textbooks had a whole chapter on Evolution. Unfortunately my biology teacher refused to teach it or even talk about it, and acted as if Satan had printed those pages himself!
Well, in fairness, there is that sizzling sound and slight odor of brimstone that's detectable whenever you open that chapter. I'm not saying Satan personally printed those pages, but...
Abiogenesis is very difficult to study. It left no evidence, and all early forms of life have long since been consumed by their more-adapted descendants. There are hints here and there in the biochemistry, like ribosomes being composed largely of RNA, but not enough to reach any firm conclusions.
I wouldn't say "not enough to reach any firm conclusions", though it is difficult. The problem is that there may be a lot of clues in biochemistry that we don't yet know enough to recognize as clues, and won't know until we have some thoroughly-detailed and workable hypotheses for the process. It's possible that there really isn't enough evidence, but we just can't know yet.
Your an idiot. Evolution has been proved if you would only read a little
Be more precise, please.
Evolution has been observed to occur, in nature, within our observational timescales. There's absolutely no question that evolution happens.
In addition, evolution provides the best available explanation for vast numbers of detailed observations of what we see in the fossil record, the relationships between current living species and many, many other aspects of the living world around us. Further, the explanatory power of evolution has been used countless times to make predictions about ancient and modern life forms, and has never been contradicted. The scientific support for evolution as an explanation for the development of life is extraordinarily broad and deep.
That said, no scientific theory is every "proved" in the sense that, say, a mathematical theorem is proved. Evolution is one of the most powerful and compelling theories in modern science; it's right up there with Newtonian mechanics in terms of the level of evidence... but there are still corners we don't understand and there may well be ways in which it's wrong. I strongly suspect that if it is wrong, it's wrong in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is wrong: it doesn't account for the extreme cases where we need to add in relativity or quantum mechanics, or both. But it's not totally inconceivable that some dramatically better explanation could arise that replaces evolution entirely (though said explanation would have to predict outcomes that look pretty much exactly like evolution).
Agreed, it would require a serious restructuring of transportation in the US, something that couldn't happen quickly or cheaply.
At this point we're almost certainly better off just waiting for self-driving cars to become practical, then we can dramatically raise the requirements to get a license -- or just ban manual driving on public roads entirely.
If trained airline pilots can crash into the sea two minutes after their 'self-driving plane' hands control back to them, a driver has no chance of missing that kid when he runs out into the road and their 'self-driving car' hands control back them to avoid legal liability.
FWIW, as I understand it Google's position on legal liability is that it's on the maker of the driving system, so the car wouldn't hand control back for liability reasons. In that particular situation, the self-driving car is almost certainly going to be better able to avoid hitting the kid than a human driver could, even without the handoff delay. That doesn't invalidate your point, though. The example is a bad one, but the general notion that the car cannot rely on the driver to quickly handle things it cannot is completely correct.
Smart man (not that there are a lot of dumb gunnies around).
However, I think his position is a little too strong (perhaps deliberately, to make his point). If you are going to own firearms for self-defense, and especially if you're going to carry them, you definitely need to think this through and be sure of what you're doing. However, I don't think "I'll be traumatized" is a good reason not to shoot IF the alternative is even worse.
In my classes I point out that in the moment you'll have zero time to think about the pros and cons. You can improve your decisionmaking by thinking through many scenarios beforehand, and even more by being alert and constantly thinking about the situations you're entering as they're unfolding, including making preparatory shoot/no-shoot decisions, just in case ("Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet":P). But in spite of all that, at the moment of truth you'll have no time to think and your decision will be purely "gut". Emotional.
To prepare their emotional decision-making machine to make the right decision, I encourage my students to think about a "balance of fear": pick something that you really, really don't want to have happen to you as a result of defending yourself, but which is preferable to death. I suggest assuming that if you shoot you will go to prison for the rest of your life. Another good option is assuming that if you shoot you'll be severely traumatized for years. Whatever scares you more... as long as it scares you less than death. Then in the moment you just have to weigh your fear of what will happen if you don't shoot against your assumed terrible outcome if you do shoot. If the assumed terrible outcome is less terrifying, then shoot.
An electromechanical watch is a watch that uses electrical energy instead of a mainspring (so it uses a normal battery) and has a conventional mechanical timekeeping regulator system so it uses a swiss escapement lever for instance (instead of a quartz crystal). Companies stopped making them because they were the worst of the two worlds. It's like 8-track tapes, they're never coming back.
I don't think that's what's meant by "electromechanical" here. The video mentions that the watch has a microprocessor and keeps very accurate time, so it sounds to me like the microprocessor is the actual timekeeper (which means the time is ultimately based on a crystal oscillator). The mechanical part is the belts, pulleys and stepper motors.
Guns are irrelevant when you're not home. If you are home, then the alarm system is even more important; you can't use that shotgun if you don't know your home has been invaded.
You will get off scott free, your gun returned to you and a piece of shit was removed from the gene pool.
If you believe it's that easy, you're fooling yourself. Oh, it does go that way for some people. Many others are severely traumatized by having taken a life (and you can't know if you will be or not until after it happens), and others end up dealing with criminal investigations and lawsuits that drain their personal and financial resources. Some also deal with social stigma.
I'm a concealed weapons permit instructor. I'm all in favor of defending your life, and firearms are the best tools for that. But don't ever think that it's a good outcome. Killing an intruder is a better outcome than being killed by one, but it's still very bad.
If you're home, an alarm system (or a dog) is good because it will alert you. The right thing to do then, if possible, is to gather your family in a room with one entrance. Cover that entrance with your gun(s) and call the police. The best case scenario is that the police arrive and catch the perp(s). Second best is that the perps leave before the cops arrive. Any scenario which requires you to fire your gun is a bad one, even if all of the others are worse.
And further progress seems likely to continue using broader bands, including shorter wavelengths (up to and including visible light), cleverer encoding techniques, more encryption and lower transmission power. All of which will make it harder and harder to detect from interstellar ranges. I think the most likely scenario is that our civilization will only emit detectable radio waves for a couple of centuries, so if we assume a similar progression for other civilizations, what we're looking for with radio-band scanning is a short-term blip emitted by emerging technological civilizations. So we may as well look for the crudest, most easily detected forms, since looking for more advanced forms is harder and doesn't extend the window by all that much.
My house was broken into with the alarm blaring. It's happened to a couple of my neighbors too. Someone pulls up they smash in the front door. Then spend about 30 seconds rifling through the house looking for valuables and then get in their car and run. The security system did nothing but make noise, and yes the cops were called. So what. Even if they would have been able to react immediately they would never have been able to get here in time.
I'm not dismissing the value of your camera solution, but I think you're overlooking the value of the alarm system. It turned what could have been a thorough burglary into a 30-second smash and grab. That plus arranging for your most valuable stuff to be too hard to find and/or grab in 30 seconds means that your most valuable stuff is safe.
Good security (physical or electronic) doesn't have to be impenetrable to provide significant value. Mitigation strategies, approaches that just limit the risk and damage, still have significant value, and your alarm system did that. Deterrent strategies (like your cameras) are also good. Layered strategies that include deterrence, penetration resistance, damage mitigation and potential loss recovery are best of all.
I think the bottom line is that there is no perfect structure. Whatever you choose, there are problems, and people will point out that had the choice been different, those problems wouldn't have arisen... in complete ignorance of the other problems that would have arisen under the other choice. Note that I'm not arguing there aren't better and worse systems -- and some are clearly very bad indeed.
I'm also a fan of limiting the concentration of power, but there are practical limits to that as well. The only thing that works in the long run, I think, is a system that have enough flexibility to self-correct, but enough resistance to change that they don't slam from one extreme to another. That and keeping the ultimate power in the hands of the people as a whole. Both political power and the ability to do violence that backstops it.
But Patrick Henry was right in his analysis of the Constitution:
"I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."
The Constitution was not cynical ENOUGH towards government. Perhaps there should have been a direct ban on the federal government controlling any troops beyond the District of Columbia, and delegate that to the states. That would, of course, have drastically altered history from the 1860's onwards...and possibly as early as 1812.
And perhaps the drastic alterations would have resulted in a dissolution of the union, re-conquest by the British, or a third attempt at forming a workable system, which might have looked a lot like the constitution Patrick Henry opposed.
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I didn't take the course myself, but the academic posters and articles I have seen were all open.
The posters and articles were open? Or the knots? By "closed" I mean that the "rope" has no ends; it's a loop. This means mathematical knots can't be "tied" or "untied".
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I would argue that it is the other way around. While theories are great and covers more ground that empirical data they never have more importance than it.
Formal explanatory theories are how you move from generating empirical knowledge by slow, cumbersome trial and error to fast and efficient predictive analysis, and then on to greater capabilities that likely never would have been achievable without formal theory.
Note that the "formal" distinction is important here, because all knowledge is theory-laden. The knot-tier has many informal theories about what ropes are, how they work, how knots work, etc. that underlie any empirical knowledge of knot performance. The value of moving from such informal, imprecise theories to precisely defined and mathematically-modeled theories should never be underestimated. It's extremely common for people to see the first baby steps of formalization as pointless because they do nothing other than confirm existing knowledge, but that's only because such people are ignorant of what science is and how it works.
"However, one-time pads are also pointless. Oh, there are some very isolated contexts in which they can be usefully applied, but they're useless for nearly everything we use cryptography for today. The one-time pad scheme requires securely distributing the pad, which must be as large as the message to be sent. If you have some channel you can use to distribute the pad securely, why not just use that channel to send the message?"
One time pads are definitely not as practical as the other methods. However the issue of pad exchange is only as much of a problem as it is for symmetric key. Once the key or pad is beyond the realm of easy memorization it doesn't really matter whether it's 128 bits or many gigs, they both fit easily on a micro SD card.
No, they're not equally difficult. There are many cases where it's relatively easy to establish a small secure channel but not a large one. Using asymmetric crypto is an obvious one, and one that we use all the time. Another is pre-shared keys, such as keys embedded in devices at factories, or keys entered into different devices, possibly directly or by using a secure hash to stretch a shorter password. Or consider the case of a device with a small amount of secure storage and a large amount of unsecure or less-secure storage (like, say, a mobile phone, or a local collection of keys used to encrypt a large quantity of cloud-based data). There are many, many more.
In the classical theoretical world of Alice and Bob, an OTP works fine. But in the complex, multi-faceted ways we use crypto in the real world, it's almost never practicel.
Slashdot Mirror
First, there is no particular benefit to the rights holders to do so, nor did I note any penalty for a rights holder that does not.
The penalty is that rights holders who do not can be sued for damages, which is what's happening in this case.
When you first get a self-replicating molecular structure that is sufficiently stable that some modifications don't destroy either its stability or its ability to replicate, that's where evolution begins. Until that point, you cannot have any evolution
Not exactly. Because self replication is not a requirement for evolution. Virus evolves without self-replication.
You're splitting hairs, badly. All organisms depend on environmental support for replication. The fact that viruses depend more heavily on their environment than others does not mean they don't self-replicate. The encoded information that defines their structure is replicated and evolves. That's sufficient.
In general if a set of structures can influence the factory that makes the individuals of the set, the set can evolve. Only the set needs to be stable along with the factory, not its individuals.
Such structures can evolve to be self-replicating without themselves satisfying many requirements of life. The whole system including the factory and the set of structures cannot be called "life" because it does not replicate at all.
To the degree that information encoded in the individuals alters the production of subsequent generations and affects the rate and fidelity of production of individuals with that information, that is evolution, in the modern sense (there's really no point in talking about some pre-Darwinian meaning of the word in this context, that just creates confusion; if you want to refer to some other notion pick another word). The fact that it may only operate in the context of some larger, less-changing context doesn't matter, though it may mean that the particular construct is an evolutionary dead end.
You're trying to introduce needless complications into something that is very simple. Evolution consists of sustainable replication with high but imperfect fidelity plus some selection process. Given that, the replicated individuals will evolve towards more effective replication, within the appropriate context. Note that this statement isn't even limited to chemicals, much less to life. In the context of biochemistry, "abiogenesis" is whatever happened to get the chemical structures to the point of evolution. There abiogenesis ended and evolution began. At some point those chemical structures evolved to become something we'd call "life" (which is a fuzzy term and that cutoff is arbitrary).
It very much does. Evolution as a whole deals with how species change from one to the next. You're just picking an arbitrary cutoff point of where nonliving matter becomes nonliving matter and saying "ok this isn't evolution", even though there's an evolutionary process to get there.
There's an utterly obvious cutoff point, and it's not at all arbitrary. When you first get a self-replicating molecular structure that is sufficiently stable that some modifications don't destroy either its stability or its ability to replicate, that's where evolution begins. Until that point, you cannot have any evolution. Abiogenesis is the question of how that first self-replicating structure arose and what it looked like.
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I didn't take the course myself, but the academic posters and articles I have seen were all open.
The posters and articles were open? Or the knots? By "closed" I mean that the "rope" has no ends; it's a loop. This means mathematical knots can't be "tied" or "untied".
I meant it was real knots with strings with two ends.
Cool. That's unusual, if that's what they were actually studying. Could also have been that someone just grabbed random pictures of knots to put on posters, etc.
Except for that pesky little document that reiterates that we have the right to move around the country. Why on earth do people enjoy dreaming up ways to whittle away at freedom?
Who is talking about restricting the right to move around the country?
I went to school in MS and our textbooks had a whole chapter on Evolution. Unfortunately my biology teacher refused to teach it or even talk about it, and acted as if Satan had printed those pages himself!
Well, in fairness, there is that sizzling sound and slight odor of brimstone that's detectable whenever you open that chapter. I'm not saying Satan personally printed those pages, but...
Abiogenesis is very difficult to study. It left no evidence, and all early forms of life have long since been consumed by their more-adapted descendants. There are hints here and there in the biochemistry, like ribosomes being composed largely of RNA, but not enough to reach any firm conclusions.
I wouldn't say "not enough to reach any firm conclusions", though it is difficult. The problem is that there may be a lot of clues in biochemistry that we don't yet know enough to recognize as clues, and won't know until we have some thoroughly-detailed and workable hypotheses for the process. It's possible that there really isn't enough evidence, but we just can't know yet.
Tennessee and Georgia, evolution was taught, with the caveat "if you are offended by this, please wait out in the hallway until the end of class"
How many kids decided to be offended just so they could screw around in the hall?
Your an idiot. Evolution has been proved if you would only read a little
Be more precise, please.
Evolution has been observed to occur, in nature, within our observational timescales. There's absolutely no question that evolution happens.
In addition, evolution provides the best available explanation for vast numbers of detailed observations of what we see in the fossil record, the relationships between current living species and many, many other aspects of the living world around us. Further, the explanatory power of evolution has been used countless times to make predictions about ancient and modern life forms, and has never been contradicted. The scientific support for evolution as an explanation for the development of life is extraordinarily broad and deep.
That said, no scientific theory is every "proved" in the sense that, say, a mathematical theorem is proved. Evolution is one of the most powerful and compelling theories in modern science; it's right up there with Newtonian mechanics in terms of the level of evidence... but there are still corners we don't understand and there may well be ways in which it's wrong. I strongly suspect that if it is wrong, it's wrong in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is wrong: it doesn't account for the extreme cases where we need to add in relativity or quantum mechanics, or both. But it's not totally inconceivable that some dramatically better explanation could arise that replaces evolution entirely (though said explanation would have to predict outcomes that look pretty much exactly like evolution).
Agreed, it would require a serious restructuring of transportation in the US, something that couldn't happen quickly or cheaply.
At this point we're almost certainly better off just waiting for self-driving cars to become practical, then we can dramatically raise the requirements to get a license -- or just ban manual driving on public roads entirely.
With some things (like flying cars), maybe. With other things (like space stations and moon bases), no.
Sure, some problems are easier to understand. Well, unless you include the larger social context, which is why 2001 didn't happen :-)
If trained airline pilots can crash into the sea two minutes after their 'self-driving plane' hands control back to them, a driver has no chance of missing that kid when he runs out into the road and their 'self-driving car' hands control back them to avoid legal liability.
FWIW, as I understand it Google's position on legal liability is that it's on the maker of the driving system, so the car wouldn't hand control back for liability reasons. In that particular situation, the self-driving car is almost certainly going to be better able to avoid hitting the kid than a human driver could, even without the handoff delay. That doesn't invalidate your point, though. The example is a bad one, but the general notion that the car cannot rely on the driver to quickly handle things it cannot is completely correct.
If we held automobile and truck drivers to the standard we hold even private pilots, there would likely be many fewer drivers.
FTFY. Not that fewer drivers would be a bad thing.
I recall seeing an old illustration of a father and son playing chess while the car drives them to their destination on the freeway.
I recall seeing something similar in Popular Mechanics . . . except that the car was flying, not driving.
I guess our technological development took a wrong turn at Albuquerque somewhere.
Not a wrong turn. It was just bad prognostication. It's very hard to predict the difficulty of problems you don't yet thoroughly understand.
Smart man (not that there are a lot of dumb gunnies around).
However, I think his position is a little too strong (perhaps deliberately, to make his point). If you are going to own firearms for self-defense, and especially if you're going to carry them, you definitely need to think this through and be sure of what you're doing. However, I don't think "I'll be traumatized" is a good reason not to shoot IF the alternative is even worse.
In my classes I point out that in the moment you'll have zero time to think about the pros and cons. You can improve your decisionmaking by thinking through many scenarios beforehand, and even more by being alert and constantly thinking about the situations you're entering as they're unfolding, including making preparatory shoot/no-shoot decisions, just in case ("Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet" :P). But in spite of all that, at the moment of truth you'll have no time to think and your decision will be purely "gut". Emotional.
To prepare their emotional decision-making machine to make the right decision, I encourage my students to think about a "balance of fear": pick something that you really, really don't want to have happen to you as a result of defending yourself, but which is preferable to death. I suggest assuming that if you shoot you will go to prison for the rest of your life. Another good option is assuming that if you shoot you'll be severely traumatized for years. Whatever scares you more... as long as it scares you less than death. Then in the moment you just have to weigh your fear of what will happen if you don't shoot against your assumed terrible outcome if you do shoot. If the assumed terrible outcome is less terrifying, then shoot.
An electromechanical watch is a watch that uses electrical energy instead of a mainspring (so it uses a normal battery) and has a conventional mechanical timekeeping regulator system so it uses a swiss escapement lever for instance (instead of a quartz crystal). Companies stopped making them because they were the worst of the two worlds. It's like 8-track tapes, they're never coming back.
I don't think that's what's meant by "electromechanical" here. The video mentions that the watch has a microprocessor and keeps very accurate time, so it sounds to me like the microprocessor is the actual timekeeper (which means the time is ultimately based on a crystal oscillator). The mechanical part is the belts, pulleys and stepper motors.
Guns are irrelevant when you're not home. If you are home, then the alarm system is even more important; you can't use that shotgun if you don't know your home has been invaded.
You will get off scott free, your gun returned to you and a piece of shit was removed from the gene pool.
If you believe it's that easy, you're fooling yourself. Oh, it does go that way for some people. Many others are severely traumatized by having taken a life (and you can't know if you will be or not until after it happens), and others end up dealing with criminal investigations and lawsuits that drain their personal and financial resources. Some also deal with social stigma.
I'm a concealed weapons permit instructor. I'm all in favor of defending your life, and firearms are the best tools for that. But don't ever think that it's a good outcome. Killing an intruder is a better outcome than being killed by one, but it's still very bad.
If you're home, an alarm system (or a dog) is good because it will alert you. The right thing to do then, if possible, is to gather your family in a room with one entrance. Cover that entrance with your gun(s) and call the police. The best case scenario is that the police arrive and catch the perp(s). Second best is that the perps leave before the cops arrive. Any scenario which requires you to fire your gun is a bad one, even if all of the others are worse.
And further progress seems likely to continue using broader bands, including shorter wavelengths (up to and including visible light), cleverer encoding techniques, more encryption and lower transmission power. All of which will make it harder and harder to detect from interstellar ranges. I think the most likely scenario is that our civilization will only emit detectable radio waves for a couple of centuries, so if we assume a similar progression for other civilizations, what we're looking for with radio-band scanning is a short-term blip emitted by emerging technological civilizations. So we may as well look for the crudest, most easily detected forms, since looking for more advanced forms is harder and doesn't extend the window by all that much.
My house was broken into with the alarm blaring. It's happened to a couple of my neighbors too. Someone pulls up they smash in the front door. Then spend about 30 seconds rifling through the house looking for valuables and then get in their car and run. The security system did nothing but make noise, and yes the cops were called. So what. Even if they would have been able to react immediately they would never have been able to get here in time.
I'm not dismissing the value of your camera solution, but I think you're overlooking the value of the alarm system. It turned what could have been a thorough burglary into a 30-second smash and grab. That plus arranging for your most valuable stuff to be too hard to find and/or grab in 30 seconds means that your most valuable stuff is safe.
Good security (physical or electronic) doesn't have to be impenetrable to provide significant value. Mitigation strategies, approaches that just limit the risk and damage, still have significant value, and your alarm system did that. Deterrent strategies (like your cameras) are also good. Layered strategies that include deterrence, penetration resistance, damage mitigation and potential loss recovery are best of all.
I think the bottom line is that there is no perfect structure. Whatever you choose, there are problems, and people will point out that had the choice been different, those problems wouldn't have arisen... in complete ignorance of the other problems that would have arisen under the other choice. Note that I'm not arguing there aren't better and worse systems -- and some are clearly very bad indeed.
I'm also a fan of limiting the concentration of power, but there are practical limits to that as well. The only thing that works in the long run, I think, is a system that have enough flexibility to self-correct, but enough resistance to change that they don't slam from one extreme to another. That and keeping the ultimate power in the hands of the people as a whole. Both political power and the ability to do violence that backstops it.
But Patrick Henry was right in his analysis of the Constitution: "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."
The Constitution was not cynical ENOUGH towards government. Perhaps there should have been a direct ban on the federal government controlling any troops beyond the District of Columbia, and delegate that to the states. That would, of course, have drastically altered history from the 1860's onwards...and possibly as early as 1812.
And perhaps the drastic alterations would have resulted in a dissolution of the union, re-conquest by the British, or a third attempt at forming a workable system, which might have looked a lot like the constitution Patrick Henry opposed.
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I didn't take the course myself, but the academic posters and articles I have seen were all open.
The posters and articles were open? Or the knots? By "closed" I mean that the "rope" has no ends; it's a loop. This means mathematical knots can't be "tied" or "untied".
It is well understood in math, because it is not physics or engineering, but knot theory is a mathematically field.. Seriously.
Topological knots are closed and not generally useful for understanding characteristics of physical knots. For one thing, it's impossible even to talk about the strength of a closed knot because there are no ends to pull on. This work is mathematical modeling of physical, open, knots and their useful characteristics.
I would argue that it is the other way around. While theories are great and covers more ground that empirical data they never have more importance than it.
Formal explanatory theories are how you move from generating empirical knowledge by slow, cumbersome trial and error to fast and efficient predictive analysis, and then on to greater capabilities that likely never would have been achievable without formal theory.
Note that the "formal" distinction is important here, because all knowledge is theory-laden. The knot-tier has many informal theories about what ropes are, how they work, how knots work, etc. that underlie any empirical knowledge of knot performance. The value of moving from such informal, imprecise theories to precisely defined and mathematically-modeled theories should never be underestimated. It's extremely common for people to see the first baby steps of formalization as pointless because they do nothing other than confirm existing knowledge, but that's only because such people are ignorant of what science is and how it works.
"However, one-time pads are also pointless. Oh, there are some very isolated contexts in which they can be usefully applied, but they're useless for nearly everything we use cryptography for today. The one-time pad scheme requires securely distributing the pad, which must be as large as the message to be sent. If you have some channel you can use to distribute the pad securely, why not just use that channel to send the message?"
One time pads are definitely not as practical as the other methods. However the issue of pad exchange is only as much of a problem as it is for symmetric key. Once the key or pad is beyond the realm of easy memorization it doesn't really matter whether it's 128 bits or many gigs, they both fit easily on a micro SD card.
No, they're not equally difficult. There are many cases where it's relatively easy to establish a small secure channel but not a large one. Using asymmetric crypto is an obvious one, and one that we use all the time. Another is pre-shared keys, such as keys embedded in devices at factories, or keys entered into different devices, possibly directly or by using a secure hash to stretch a shorter password. Or consider the case of a device with a small amount of secure storage and a large amount of unsecure or less-secure storage (like, say, a mobile phone, or a local collection of keys used to encrypt a large quantity of cloud-based data). There are many, many more.
In the classical theoretical world of Alice and Bob, an OTP works fine. But in the complex, multi-faceted ways we use crypto in the real world, it's almost never practicel.