No, to my knowledge, there is no education about religions, with the exception of side mentions in history classes, in most U.S. schools. My personal guess would be that parents don't want their children exposed to other religions.:p
I'm glad to see that some people understand that science doesn't answer ethical questions. This has been abused in the past (e.g., social Darwinism and eugenics) and even when not overtly abused, muddies the image of science.
Scientists may have ethical opinions. They may even have well-reasoned logical arguments for their ethical opinions. That in no way makes those opinions science.
Their suggestions for potential causes indicate they've already thought about this. They mention a potential cause is neutrino flux from the sun. Neutrinos are not stopped significantly by the Earth and certainly not by a box of lead (or any other material), but the neutrino flux drops off as 1/r^2 as you increase the distance r from the source.
In cases where www.foo.com is not cached, DNS resolvers are vulnerable to the much more trivial attack of simply forging the answer www.foo.com IN A 66.6.66.6. Of course, they have to hope to guess the proper transaction ID in the first query, because if they fail, the proper answer will be cached.
Poisoning an uncached name is fairly easy and doesn't require Kaminsky's trick. Kaminsky's trick relies on caching the answers to questions you didn't ask, rather than not caching them or using the cached answer over the uncached answer. I think you called this the "elephant in the room" at Usenix Security, even.:-)
You don't need to put any expenses on a credit card and pay it off to have a good credit rating. All you need is two such lines of credit that remain active. While "remain active" varies from one credit card company to another, most cards will not be closed even if you never use them.
This occurs in the modern day. Malnutrition restricts intellectual and physical development. In areas where nutrition is significantly improved, there are developmental booms.
No, but close. The barn is a measure of area. So it's barn as in "the broad side of a barn" (the classic measure for a large area).
In this case, it's a very small barn.
Physics is rife with stupid jokes. Dirac called vectors bra and ket since combined (as they're often seen) they form a bracket (which is how they're written).
What they're trying to point out is that while it may be rare that anyone is out to steal your personal information, people stealing personal information in general is quite common.
While this may bear a passing resemblance to the birthday paradox, it isn't the birthday paradox. It's like when people claim that X has something to do with relativity. They're almost always wrong. The birthday paradox is a very particular statistical error, and this isn't it.:-)
It's actually easier, anyway, to point out that someone trying to specifically steal "your" credentials just isn't the way it's done. That's a rare attack, because the investment is high compared to the reward. It's far easier to, say, run a credential-harvesting script in a local Starbucks with free wireless every day for a couple of weeks. (It's also rare, though more devastating, to just grab the personal information off of their server.)
Things like "all passwords in the system must use strong encryption" and "backups of the data cannot be stored on personal laptops" and the like.
Sadly, that sounds about accurate for the results if such a code was written.
Passwords don't use encryption of any sort, and data backups shouldn't be stored on any laptop, personal or not (nor on an individual user's work desktop, nor on any personal machine...).
"Din't you find it strange that they could identify the teorists as fast as they did, when identifying other victims took months."
Forgive me if it doesn't fit in with your conspiracy theory, but certainly if I was in the business of performing the forensic analysis, I'd start with "who were the guys that caused this" and not "what are the names of all these other dead people".
There are actually very good explanations, and they have been put forth. The fact that you have not seen it shows that you're not looking. It's hard to overlook enormous engineering reports if you're looking for them (though they are terribly boring once you find them).
I don't know about WTC7 specifically, but most of these larger buildings in densely-populated areas are designed to fail in very particular ways in different building-destroying situations.
Controlled demolitions seek to cause those failure modes as ideally as possible. While uncontrolled destruction is often non-ideal, it still bears a particular resemblance to the same failure modes.
You presumably mean "engineering", not "math", and their collapse was investigated, determined, and documented about a year ago. There are a number of papers in engineering determining the reasons, even. (I should know; I've sat through a fair number of the colloquia.)
Like many, you seem to think that because nobody has shoved these analyses and models in your face, they must not exist.
The exact function of lots of people using encryption (or buying things in cash, or using anonymizers, etc.) is that an attacker (in this case, the FBI) can extract no information from the fact that you're using encryption (or whatever). They don't need to spread themselves thin, but it's no longer a useful "hey, this person might be up to trouble" flag.
I'm just saying that "everyone" isn't the appropriate word to use. There's basically no capacity to conduct investigation of that scale, yet people react as if the FBI will be tracking everything they do.
They could do it for anyone they want (where "anyone" means, in practice, a relatively small number of people at once) without oversight.
That's not "big brother", that's more like "brother without oversight". It's still a very significant problem, but a different problem than how many interpret it.
It's relevant to remember that they're going to be allowed to conduct warrantless investigations. This doesn't automatically mean they're going to go about investigating anyone and everyone on a whim.
No, most of the functions are not going to be simple polynomials. Complex feedback systems are rarely, if ever, expressible as polynomials. Often codependent functions will prevent you from even doing something as seemingly simple as writing down a single equation to tell you average temperature. (That's not to say average temperature can't be computed, but you can't extract a simple, single function for it.)
You can (always, in fact) construct a linearized function that's approximately correct close to a particular set of parameters so that you can say "if I increase the sun's output a little bit X, what's the linear effect on the Earth's temperature", but these are only locally and approximately linear.
Congratulations for being a banner example of what I mean. You're clearly not a scientist and have probably not worked with any feedback models or you wouldn't even make these claims. You're just egotistical enough to think you know better than "those so-called climatologists".
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Oh, you're a scientist? What field?
It seems reading and writing papers would be a real challenge with how poorly you're able to parse the English language.
No, to my knowledge, there is no education about religions, with the exception of side mentions in history classes, in most U.S. schools. My personal guess would be that parents don't want their children exposed to other religions. :p
I'm glad to see that some people understand that science doesn't answer ethical questions. This has been abused in the past (e.g., social Darwinism and eugenics) and even when not overtly abused, muddies the image of science.
Scientists may have ethical opinions. They may even have well-reasoned logical arguments for their ethical opinions. That in no way makes those opinions science.
Everything described as an "inverse-square" law is field-like, but there are certainly other ways that r^2 variation is possible.
Their suggestions for potential causes indicate they've already thought about this. They mention a potential cause is neutrino flux from the sun. Neutrinos are not stopped significantly by the Earth and certainly not by a box of lead (or any other material), but the neutrino flux drops off as 1/r^2 as you increase the distance r from the source.
It seems more likely that an r^2 variation indicates that it's a field-like effect, which drops off as 1/r^2 (e.g., neutrino flux).
Exactly -- and this patch causes you to prefer cached data over data supplied in glue records, yes?
It's easier just to figure out what the $/gal is he's quoting. $4/gal for water? No.
In cases where www.foo.com is not cached, DNS resolvers are vulnerable to the much more trivial attack of simply forging the answer www.foo.com IN A 66.6.66.6. Of course, they have to hope to guess the proper transaction ID in the first query, because if they fail, the proper answer will be cached.
Poisoning an uncached name is fairly easy and doesn't require Kaminsky's trick. Kaminsky's trick relies on caching the answers to questions you didn't ask, rather than not caching them or using the cached answer over the uncached answer. I think you called this the "elephant in the room" at Usenix Security, even. :-)
You don't need to put any expenses on a credit card and pay it off to have a good credit rating. All you need is two such lines of credit that remain active. While "remain active" varies from one credit card company to another, most cards will not be closed even if you never use them.
If the police can reliably access it, then it takes only a slightly non-casual user to access it.
I much prefer the "guest account" feature of Mac OS X, where data only exists until logout.
This occurs in the modern day. Malnutrition restricts intellectual and physical development. In areas where nutrition is significantly improved, there are developmental booms.
No, but close. The barn is a measure of area. So it's barn as in "the broad side of a barn" (the classic measure for a large area).
In this case, it's a very small barn.
Physics is rife with stupid jokes. Dirac called vectors bra and ket since combined (as they're often seen) they form a bracket (which is how they're written).
What they're trying to point out is that while it may be rare that anyone is out to steal your personal information, people stealing personal information in general is quite common.
While this may bear a passing resemblance to the birthday paradox, it isn't the birthday paradox. It's like when people claim that X has something to do with relativity. They're almost always wrong. The birthday paradox is a very particular statistical error, and this isn't it. :-)
It's actually easier, anyway, to point out that someone trying to specifically steal "your" credentials just isn't the way it's done. That's a rare attack, because the investment is high compared to the reward. It's far easier to, say, run a credential-harvesting script in a local Starbucks with free wireless every day for a couple of weeks. (It's also rare, though more devastating, to just grab the personal information off of their server.)
That's not at all the birthday paradox.
Things like "all passwords in the system must use strong encryption" and "backups of the data cannot be stored on personal laptops" and the like.
Sadly, that sounds about accurate for the results if such a code was written.
Passwords don't use encryption of any sort, and data backups shouldn't be stored on any laptop, personal or not (nor on an individual user's work desktop, nor on any personal machine...).
"Din't you find it strange that they could identify the teorists as fast as they did,
when identifying other victims took months."
Forgive me if it doesn't fit in with your conspiracy theory, but certainly if I was in the business of performing the forensic analysis, I'd start with "who were the guys that caused this" and not "what are the names of all these other dead people".
Apparently "we asked a guy in an interview" counts as good documentation.
There are actually very good explanations, and they have been put forth. The fact that you have not seen it shows that you're not looking. It's hard to overlook enormous engineering reports if you're looking for them (though they are terribly boring once you find them).
I don't know about WTC7 specifically, but most of these larger buildings in densely-populated areas are designed to fail in very particular ways in different building-destroying situations.
Controlled demolitions seek to cause those failure modes as ideally as possible. While uncontrolled destruction is often non-ideal, it still bears a particular resemblance to the same failure modes.
You presumably mean "engineering", not "math", and their collapse was investigated, determined, and documented about a year ago. There are a number of papers in engineering determining the reasons, even. (I should know; I've sat through a fair number of the colloquia.)
Like many, you seem to think that because nobody has shoved these analyses and models in your face, they must not exist.
The exact function of lots of people using encryption (or buying things in cash, or using anonymizers, etc.) is that an attacker (in this case, the FBI) can extract no information from the fact that you're using encryption (or whatever). They don't need to spread themselves thin, but it's no longer a useful "hey, this person might be up to trouble" flag.
I agree that this is good.
Look, I don't agree with it at all.
I'm just saying that "everyone" isn't the appropriate word to use. There's basically no capacity to conduct investigation of that scale, yet people react as if the FBI will be tracking everything they do.
They could do it for anyone they want (where "anyone" means, in practice, a relatively small number of people at once) without oversight.
That's not "big brother", that's more like "brother without oversight". It's still a very significant problem, but a different problem than how many interpret it.
It's relevant to remember that they're going to be allowed to conduct warrantless investigations. This doesn't automatically mean they're going to go about investigating anyone and everyone on a whim.
No, most of the functions are not going to be simple polynomials. Complex feedback systems are rarely, if ever, expressible as polynomials. Often codependent functions will prevent you from even doing something as seemingly simple as writing down a single equation to tell you average temperature. (That's not to say average temperature can't be computed, but you can't extract a simple, single function for it.)
You can (always, in fact) construct a linearized function that's approximately correct close to a particular set of parameters so that you can say "if I increase the sun's output a little bit X, what's the linear effect on the Earth's temperature", but these are only locally and approximately linear.
Congratulations for being a banner example of what I mean. You're clearly not a scientist and have probably not worked with any feedback models or you wouldn't even make these claims. You're just egotistical enough to think you know better than "those so-called climatologists".