Outside of science, and even in fields outside their own, many scientists turn out not to be terribly clever. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a number of them were taking drugs that they felt enhanced their performance (or just made them feel better), even if there is no actual evidence of performance enhancement.
That's actually a fairly inaccurate view of current science. Global warming certainly did not start as a theory, with data being taken to confirm it. The research began quite a while ago, though, out of most people's view of the situation.
In my experience, these claims that "X data doesn't fit the theories, they should falsify them" tend to be driven out of a desire to falsify the theories. Rarely does the person take into account actual scientific reasoning. If a scientific model makes predictions that are backed by data in dozens of instances, with measurements made of reasonable independent phenomena, then it's quite robust. If it then makes a prediction that conflicts with the data, there is clearly something amiss. Determining what is amiss is certainly of interest to scientists. (I've seen dozens of presentations and papers based on research aimed at determining why data and a particular climatological model disagree, and a lot of interesting findings have come out of those.) However, it doesn't necessarily simply invalidate the theory or its other findings. It's a common tactic of climate-change-deniers to point to a single study, lump all of climate-change-related climatological data and models under a single umbrella of "global warming", and make the claim "global warming theory doesn't account for this data, so the theory is wrong".
It's remarkably similar to tactics employed by evolution-deniers. It is no more valid when applied to climate change.
Wait, no it's not. You brought up a lot of items that have nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. Nobody has ever claimed all climate change is anthropogenic. Faced with the difficulty of separating anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic influences, they reverted to the time-honored method of taking data. Some loud, belligerent skeptics remain unconvinced. (Biologists snicker knowingly.)
I'm sure you don't want to be educated, but it's called "climate change" because otherwise warming of tenths of degrees doesn't seem particularly problematic to anyone but a scientist. The problem, of course, isn't directly higher temperatures, but the climatological effects caused by them.
Kids are gullible on the Interwebs primarily because they don't have as much exposure to being conned and lied to. It usually doesn't dawn on them at all that the person behind a 15-year-old girl's MySpace profile is a 35-year-old man.
Most of the Internet education classes I've seen pitched are fairly short and mostly focus on the fact that everyone on the Internet is probably lying through their teeth to you in every possible way. (It may not be accurate, but it's closer than assuming that they're not.)
No, Evil requires that your motivation is personal gain, and that things like others' well-being are immaterial to your quest for personal gain. What House has is personal motivation, which is different. (That is, "I do things because I want to" rather than "I do things because it gets me what I want".) While characters in the show are convinced he doesn't care about patients (and the show tries to back that up), I don't buy it. I claim Chaotic Good, bordering on Chaotic Neutral.
You're comparing an encrypted connection, which protects against traffic analysis, against encrypted data files. With encrypted connections, anyone using the same protocol (I'm sure the FBI can find a BitTorrent client) can simply connect to the tracker and download the unencrypted data; the encryption is there to stop the prying eyes of third parties, but anyone who uses BitTorrent can simply download it themselves.
If you're sharing information with people you know well enough to share an encryption key with, there are plenty of better ways to share it than BitTorrent.
If you publicized the location of the BitTorrent tracker, it'd be fairly trivial to download pieces of every torrent on that tracker (noting file hashes and peer IPs), determine if they indicate an encrypted file, and then go about finding out a bit more about this encrypted file, like who is responsible for it being tracked and what else they've been up to online. Only a small fraction of torrents are encrypted.
That's not true -- proper encryption products don't use seeded PRNGs, they use real random sources. (You can quibble about whether something is "really" random, but they're certainly unpredictable.)
Whether or not the NSA can crack proper cryptographic protocols is a matter of contention. Usually there are weaker points in security than encryption.
Child porn possession is a focus of the FBI (as well as state and local law enforcement) -- but as far as press releases go, it's because child porn is fairly common, it's fairly easy to secure arrests and convictions, and people like to hear about it.
Your theory incorrectly assumes that such a concerted attack is both reasonably possible and deemed a worthwhile expenditure of the time, effort, and money necessary to succeed. While it's entirely true that government agencies have the power to tap and record all kinds of communications, it's far from true that all communications *are* listened to and analyzed. Not all of the organizations combined have nearly the capacity to handle even a fraction of that data, they don't have the software necessary to analyze it, and they don't have the computing power necessary to run that software if it existed.
It's the distinction between "if the NSA suspects you of being a terrorist, they can listen to your conversations" and "the NSA is listening to all our conversations".
Depends on possible defenses. If you're running a Freenet node for weeks or months, unknown to you, and there are no signs of being hacked, that lends credence to the theory that you downloaded those images intentionally. Just copying the images there, on the other hand, leaves timestamps, allowing you to refute that you were present at the computer at the time, and no corroborating evidence that you intentionally downloaded the images (which is fairly important in securing a good conviction).
A clever attacker won't just make sure the cops arrest the guy for child porn -- they'll make sure they convict him, too.
I'm going to guess that you: * don't have a real view of the risks * don't know what view of the risks the designers have * don't have a real view of the precautions they're taking
Unless you are a collaborator with CERN, there's no need to use the pronoun "we".
This is quite misrepresenting the situation: they have very, very good ideas of what will happen, but they've been unable to test some of the crucial border cases for lack of a giant supercollider. It's not as if they're just building a machine with no idea of what will happen. (If they didn't have any idea of what would happen, they wouldn't have enough information to properly build the machine or detectors.)
Blizzard does exactly this, but unfortunately, users don't tell Blizzard if they're using bots or not. Sufficiently advanced bots can circumvent any anti-bot mechanism.
Blizzard does exactly this, and is quite successful. There are ways to counter this, though. (In fact, given that the World of Warcraft is running on your hardware, it's theoretically impossible for Blizzard to catch a sufficiently advanced bot.) WoW Glider has apparently been fairly successful at circumventing their anti-cheating measures, so they're taking an additional approach.
It depends on who you ask. Terrorists might settle for scaring people with phantom threats, but the real purpose of a dirty bomb is to make an area uninhabitable, and it's certainly possible to construct one that does just that.
These detectors aren't there to catch things that might possibly concern the public -- they're there to catch potential nuclear hazards, which depleted uranium isn't. Materials as dangerous and potentially panic-causing as DU are easy to come by without the additional work of sprinkling depleted uranium dust at border crossings to smuggle in a material that probably can be smuggled in without that additional work.
A "dirty bomb" of depleted uranium would be a reasonable hazard, though. It's pyrophoric, and the reacted dust can readily cause heavy-metal poisoning. Of course, so would plenty of other readily-constructed devices.
Yes, but you can't make a nuclear weapon from depleted uranium. Depleted uranium dust is a chemical hazard, though not a very exciting one, and there are plenty of materials for chemical hazards readily available within the U.S. Why would a station designed to prevent smuggling in radioactive materials care if you smuggle in depleted uranium?
Depleted uranium isn't radioactive enough to be detectable in any reasonable quantity. U-238 is all alpha particles, which nobody would make a detector for (the box you put nuclear material in would stop them). The tiny quantities of U-235 in depleted uranium is a weak gamma source. You'd need to distribute quite a lot of depleted uranium.
Radioactive material is enough of a pain to get that for such an attack, they have good chances at an investigation. (It's fairly likely they'd just shut down the border crossings rather than let people through freely -- or hand-search everything, despite how slow it is -- so it's more effective as a denial-of-service and fear attack than a method of smuggling nuclear material.) It'd be quite tricky to spread detectable amounts of radioactive material on a reasonable number of people, do it more than once, and not get caught.
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Outside of science, and even in fields outside their own, many scientists turn out not to be terribly clever. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a number of them were taking drugs that they felt enhanced their performance (or just made them feel better), even if there is no actual evidence of performance enhancement.
That's actually a fairly inaccurate view of current science. Global warming certainly did not start as a theory, with data being taken to confirm it. The research began quite a while ago, though, out of most people's view of the situation.
In my experience, these claims that "X data doesn't fit the theories, they should falsify them" tend to be driven out of a desire to falsify the theories. Rarely does the person take into account actual scientific reasoning. If a scientific model makes predictions that are backed by data in dozens of instances, with measurements made of reasonable independent phenomena, then it's quite robust. If it then makes a prediction that conflicts with the data, there is clearly something amiss. Determining what is amiss is certainly of interest to scientists. (I've seen dozens of presentations and papers based on research aimed at determining why data and a particular climatological model disagree, and a lot of interesting findings have come out of those.) However, it doesn't necessarily simply invalidate the theory or its other findings. It's a common tactic of climate-change-deniers to point to a single study, lump all of climate-change-related climatological data and models under a single umbrella of "global warming", and make the claim "global warming theory doesn't account for this data, so the theory is wrong".
It's remarkably similar to tactics employed by evolution-deniers. It is no more valid when applied to climate change.
That's a well-reasoned argument backed by fact.
Wait, no it's not. You brought up a lot of items that have nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. Nobody has ever claimed all climate change is anthropogenic. Faced with the difficulty of separating anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic influences, they reverted to the time-honored method of taking data. Some loud, belligerent skeptics remain unconvinced. (Biologists snicker knowingly.)
I'm sure you don't want to be educated, but it's called "climate change" because otherwise warming of tenths of degrees doesn't seem particularly problematic to anyone but a scientist. The problem, of course, isn't directly higher temperatures, but the climatological effects caused by them.
Kids are gullible on the Interwebs primarily because they don't have as much exposure to being conned and lied to. It usually doesn't dawn on them at all that the person behind a 15-year-old girl's MySpace profile is a 35-year-old man.
Most of the Internet education classes I've seen pitched are fairly short and mostly focus on the fact that everyone on the Internet is probably lying through their teeth to you in every possible way. (It may not be accurate, but it's closer than assuming that they're not.)
No, Evil requires that your motivation is personal gain, and that things like others' well-being are immaterial to your quest for personal gain. What House has is personal motivation, which is different. (That is, "I do things because I want to" rather than "I do things because it gets me what I want".) While characters in the show are convinced he doesn't care about patients (and the show tries to back that up), I don't buy it. I claim Chaotic Good, bordering on Chaotic Neutral.
You're comparing an encrypted connection, which protects against traffic analysis, against encrypted data files. With encrypted connections, anyone using the same protocol (I'm sure the FBI can find a BitTorrent client) can simply connect to the tracker and download the unencrypted data; the encryption is there to stop the prying eyes of third parties, but anyone who uses BitTorrent can simply download it themselves.
No, but the Internet makes for a pretty good way of catching pedophiles.
If you're sharing information with people you know well enough to share an encryption key with, there are plenty of better ways to share it than BitTorrent.
If you publicized the location of the BitTorrent tracker, it'd be fairly trivial to download pieces of every torrent on that tracker (noting file hashes and peer IPs), determine if they indicate an encrypted file, and then go about finding out a bit more about this encrypted file, like who is responsible for it being tracked and what else they've been up to online. Only a small fraction of torrents are encrypted.
That's not true -- proper encryption products don't use seeded PRNGs, they use real random sources. (You can quibble about whether something is "really" random, but they're certainly unpredictable.)
Whether or not the NSA can crack proper cryptographic protocols is a matter of contention. Usually there are weaker points in security than encryption.
Child porn possession is a focus of the FBI (as well as state and local law enforcement) -- but as far as press releases go, it's because child porn is fairly common, it's fairly easy to secure arrests and convictions, and people like to hear about it.
Your theory incorrectly assumes that such a concerted attack is both reasonably possible and deemed a worthwhile expenditure of the time, effort, and money necessary to succeed. While it's entirely true that government agencies have the power to tap and record all kinds of communications, it's far from true that all communications *are* listened to and analyzed. Not all of the organizations combined have nearly the capacity to handle even a fraction of that data, they don't have the software necessary to analyze it, and they don't have the computing power necessary to run that software if it existed.
It's the distinction between "if the NSA suspects you of being a terrorist, they can listen to your conversations" and "the NSA is listening to all our conversations".
Depends on possible defenses. If you're running a Freenet node for weeks or months, unknown to you, and there are no signs of being hacked, that lends credence to the theory that you downloaded those images intentionally. Just copying the images there, on the other hand, leaves timestamps, allowing you to refute that you were present at the computer at the time, and no corroborating evidence that you intentionally downloaded the images (which is fairly important in securing a good conviction).
A clever attacker won't just make sure the cops arrest the guy for child porn -- they'll make sure they convict him, too.
I'm going to guess that you:
* don't have a real view of the risks
* don't know what view of the risks the designers have
* don't have a real view of the precautions they're taking
Unless you are a collaborator with CERN, there's no need to use the pronoun "we".
Not being believed is hardly a qualification for being right.
This is quite misrepresenting the situation: they have very, very good ideas of what will happen, but they've been unable to test some of the crucial border cases for lack of a giant supercollider. It's not as if they're just building a machine with no idea of what will happen. (If they didn't have any idea of what would happen, they wouldn't have enough information to properly build the machine or detectors.)
By your logic, you're perfectly safe from microscopic black holes: they only exist in theory, they've never been observed.
Also, I'm fairly certain I've seen experiments showing evidence of Hawking radiation.
Blizzard does exactly this, but unfortunately, users don't tell Blizzard if they're using bots or not. Sufficiently advanced bots can circumvent any anti-bot mechanism.
Blizzard does exactly this, and is quite successful. There are ways to counter this, though. (In fact, given that the World of Warcraft is running on your hardware, it's theoretically impossible for Blizzard to catch a sufficiently advanced bot.) WoW Glider has apparently been fairly successful at circumventing their anti-cheating measures, so they're taking an additional approach.
It depends on who you ask. Terrorists might settle for scaring people with phantom threats, but the real purpose of a dirty bomb is to make an area uninhabitable, and it's certainly possible to construct one that does just that.
These 1000-bullet belts are 250 kg, then?
Seems like you wouldn't spend a lot of time in contact with them. Natural uranium doesn't pose much of a radiological threat, either.
These detectors aren't there to catch things that might possibly concern the public -- they're there to catch potential nuclear hazards, which depleted uranium isn't. Materials as dangerous and potentially panic-causing as DU are easy to come by without the additional work of sprinkling depleted uranium dust at border crossings to smuggle in a material that probably can be smuggled in without that additional work.
A "dirty bomb" of depleted uranium would be a reasonable hazard, though. It's pyrophoric, and the reacted dust can readily cause heavy-metal poisoning. Of course, so would plenty of other readily-constructed devices.
Yes, but you can't make a nuclear weapon from depleted uranium. Depleted uranium dust is a chemical hazard, though not a very exciting one, and there are plenty of materials for chemical hazards readily available within the U.S. Why would a station designed to prevent smuggling in radioactive materials care if you smuggle in depleted uranium?
Depleted uranium isn't radioactive enough to be detectable in any reasonable quantity. U-238 is all alpha particles, which nobody would make a detector for (the box you put nuclear material in would stop them). The tiny quantities of U-235 in depleted uranium is a weak gamma source. You'd need to distribute quite a lot of depleted uranium.
Radioactive material is enough of a pain to get that for such an attack, they have good chances at an investigation. (It's fairly likely they'd just shut down the border crossings rather than let people through freely -- or hand-search everything, despite how slow it is -- so it's more effective as a denial-of-service and fear attack than a method of smuggling nuclear material.) It'd be quite tricky to spread detectable amounts of radioactive material on a reasonable number of people, do it more than once, and not get caught.