Strontium 90 decays by beta emission, Cesium 137 by beta and gamma. Both will go right through the paint to the detector you're holding near the painting.
Can a nuclear light bulb design have enough thrust/weight ratio to lift itself and a vehicle and a payload out of a gravity well? The solid-core designs like NERVA were meant to start from orbit because the thrust-to-weight ratios were so bad. A gas-core reactor will have a way better specific impulse, but that's not the same thing as generating a lot of thrust for a given mass of engine.
The touchstones to use to make sure you're not getting bamboozled by an inappropriate appeal to authority ("I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV") are:
o Is the person genuinely an expert in the field? o Is the statement within the person's expertise? o Do the experts generally agree on the subject of the statement? o Is the person decently unbiased? o Is the field itself a sound, knowledge-based one? o Is the expert identified?
>But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age.
1421 was after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, into the Little Ice Age.
>No idea how many SUVs were on the road back then
There's no claim that the earth's temperature was a perfect flat line before humans. The worry is that we've forced it off trend and are heading for climate conditions which haven't appeared since we started trying to feed six billion humans.
That's consistent. A lot of the ice we have is thin, the result of only one season of accumulation. The observation that it's covering more area than last year is consistent with the observation that it's melting fast and the extrapolation that it could be gone by September.
Well, a link where I read >the Church of Al Gore/IPCC >so-called Global Warming >chicken-little screams doesn't meet my standards for objective analysis, especially when their first sentence is factually incorrect: climate models do explain growth in ice sheets, because higher temperatures lead to more evaporation, more precipitation, and therefore more snow in places that are still below freezing.
"They" is Newsweek, and a Reader's Digest editor named Lowell Ponte who wrote a 1976 book called "The Cooling".
As far as scientific literature goes, nothing. The climate science of the time was busy saying that there wasn't enough data and that the next Ice Age might begin within a few hundred years. That's it.
>there is no massive coastal flooding already taking place
Which doesn't disprove the climate models. IPCC estimates are for a sea level rise of 110 to 770 mm by 2100.
>the fact that the middle ages saw hotter weather than we are seeing now
Only in the North Atlantic area. The global average was lower: Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Henry F. Diaz (2003). "Climate in Medieval Time". Science 302 (5644): 404-405
>the Sun has caused these fluctuations before, is now, and will likely do so again.
>If this is done, they did all their part according to the existing law.
Sounds like a good defense to me, possibly even grounds for a summary judgment. In which case immunity doesn't buy them anything they don't already have. So why do they want it so badly?
>Fingerprints are a terrible idea because you leave a copy of your private key on everything you touch.
A private key authenticates you because, and only because, you keep it secret. Fingerprints don't have to be secret. They authenticate you because they're attached to you. If someone replays your fingerprint or your voice, the security failure is not a secrecy breach but the fact that the biometric system is accepting a recording instead of an organism.
The measures that keep biometrics secure are humans watching the reader being used to make sure nobody's holding up a photo of a retina or a severed finger, and to the extent they can work, technical measures to detect live bodies.
There's been an argument that the British Navy was successful because of mechanisms for monitoring captains. Lieutenants, for example, kept their own logs which could be reviewed by the captain's superiors.
Barbara Tuchman's book, _The First Salute_, has lots of anecdotes of captains getting court-martialed for not following orders, even when the orders were internally contradictory.
And to anyone uncomfortable with that idea, remember that some of your fellow citizens are at least equally uncomfortable with sex education, and that both are matters of life and death.
Yes, the currently available evidence points to Mars having a liquid core.
>Unless they were coming from very opposite directions and just barely nicked each other, they should have become one.
Consider off-center impacts and conservation of momentum. If the impactor is much bigger than a mere dinosaur killer, then something's going to keep going.
Exactly. The thing that caught my eye is that the memo was from 2003. Are problems like that a thing of the past today?
This may be proof that providing a good user experience is way harder than it looks (not that I think it looks easy). Here you've got a powerful executive, highly respected within the company, roasting a bunch of bright people (yes, I mean it, the ones I've known have had plenty of brains and drive), and not getting the result he wanted.
>no single person at Microsoft who has the final say on how all of there stuff interacts together.
That may be the key insight. Apple has Jobs. Who has that job at Microsoft? Who could possibly have the bandwidth to handle it?
Over the phone is probably adequate. You already know your bank's phone number. Incidents of phone numbers being rerouted are rare, though there are rumors of escort services in Las Vegas redirecting traffic meant for their competitors, and Florida's probation department once had their phone number remapped to a phone sex service in New York.
Over the phone, you'd just have the website operator read you the thumbprint for their cert. You could check it against the value shown in your browser.
Someone more mischievous than me should call up a bank and say "I'd like to verify the SHA1 hash of your X.509 certificate" and report on the results.
A realistic compromise is to note the thumbprint the first time you visit a site, hope it wasn't taken over at that instant, and then make sure it's the same next month when you visit again.
Would you know that the certificate had been revoked?
Last time I looked, one popular browser didn't even check for certificate revocation by default, and in the one I'm using now I can't even find the configuration setting to control that.
Someone else could be in control of the certificate, but they would have to jump over the hurdle of compromising the confidentiality of a private key. Not impossible, but at least there are known defenses.
SSL replaces the insoluble problem of proving identity over HTTP by the multiple problems of o Appropriate diligence by the CA o Homophones and lookalike names [Search for "Mountain America Credit Union"] o Good faith conduct by the CA (*) o Protection of the CA's root signing key o Due diligence by the browser vendor in setting up the list of trusted root certs o Protecting the integrity of the list of trusted root certs on the client machine (**) o Alertness by the end user o Appropriate decision-making by the end user
That's just the short list I can come up with in the time it takes to write a Slashdot post. But even with all that, SSL identity verification is still better than nothing.
Isn't security fun?
(*) Bruce Schneier and someone from Verisign once worked out how much it would cost to compromise their master signing key. They figured that organized crime could take over the company in a leveraged buyout for someone in the low eight figures. (**) It's terrifyingly easy to add a new trusted cert, and at least one piece of "marketing research" software installs its own cert and does a man-in-the-middle on SSL transactions.
It takes seconds and accomplishes way more than posting on Slashdot. You're already taking a break from work to read the web: pick up the phone. I had to explain that HR 6034 was the FISA amendment, so make sure it's clear what you're calling about.
Staffers know all about callin campaigns, so your call will have more power if you mention your own reasons for opposition (*briefly*) so it's clear you're not part of a political botnet. I said it was about the rule of law, you might point out that without judicial oversight there's nothing to stop some future government from wiretapping opposition headquarters. Or that the telcos weren't acting out of patriotism, since they turned off wiretaps when they didn't get paid. Or that the original FISA that got violated passed by a big bipartisan majority, got us through the Cold War, and deserves to be enforced. Or that mass spying without evidence isn't going to help national security (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin).
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it be destructive?
Strontium 90 decays by beta emission, Cesium 137 by beta and gamma. Both will go right through the paint to the detector you're holding near the painting.
Can a nuclear light bulb design have enough thrust/weight ratio to lift itself and a vehicle and a payload out of a gravity well? The solid-core designs like NERVA were meant to start from orbit because the thrust-to-weight ratios were so bad. A gas-core reactor will have a way better specific impulse, but that's not the same thing as generating a lot of thrust for a given mass of engine.
The touchstones to use to make sure you're not getting bamboozled by an inappropriate appeal to authority ("I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV") are:
o Is the person genuinely an expert in the field?
o Is the statement within the person's expertise?
o Do the experts generally agree on the subject of the statement?
o Is the person decently unbiased?
o Is the field itself a sound, knowledge-based one?
o Is the expert identified?
>But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age.
That argument can be made, but only by ignoring the actual literature on climate from the last generation.
>scientific communities whose funding is dependent on the support of those political interests
The science on this began with Arrhenius in 1896. It has continued with people whose paychecks come from the Bush Administration.
1421 was after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, into the Little Ice Age.
>No idea how many SUVs were on the road back then
There's no claim that the earth's temperature was a perfect flat line before humans. The worry is that we've forced it off trend and are heading for climate conditions which haven't appeared since we started trying to feed six billion humans.
That's consistent. A lot of the ice we have is thin, the result of only one season of accumulation. The observation that it's covering more area than last year is consistent with the observation that it's melting fast and the extrapolation that it could be gone by September.
Well, a link where I read
>the Church of Al Gore/IPCC
>so-called Global Warming
>chicken-little screams
doesn't meet my standards for objective analysis, especially when their first sentence is factually incorrect: climate models do explain growth in ice sheets, because higher temperatures lead to more evaporation, more precipitation, and therefore more snow in places that are still below freezing.
"They" is Newsweek, and a Reader's Digest editor named Lowell Ponte who wrote a 1976 book called "The Cooling".
As far as scientific literature goes, nothing. The climate science of the time was busy saying that there wasn't enough data and that the next Ice Age might begin within a few hundred years. That's it.
>30 years ago when my parents were in school they were saying we're headed to another Ice age.
See the bibliography of climate forecast literature from the 70s.
>there is no massive coastal flooding already taking place
Which doesn't disprove the climate models. IPCC estimates are for a sea level rise of 110 to 770 mm by 2100.
>the fact that the middle ages saw hotter weather than we are seeing now
Only in the North Atlantic area. The global average was lower:
Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Henry F. Diaz (2003). "Climate in Medieval Time". Science 302 (5644): 404-405
>the Sun has caused these fluctuations before, is now, and will likely do so again.
Compare the temperature trend over the last thirty years to the direct satellite measurements of solar irradiance at the Earth's orbit.
>If this is done, they did all their part according to the existing law.
Sounds like a good defense to me, possibly even grounds for a summary judgment. In which case immunity doesn't buy them anything they don't already have. So why do they want it so badly?
>Fingerprints are a terrible idea because you leave a copy of your private key on everything you touch.
A private key authenticates you because, and only because, you keep it secret. Fingerprints don't have to be secret. They authenticate you because they're attached to you. If someone replays your fingerprint or your voice, the security failure is not a secrecy breach but the fact that the biometric system is accepting a recording instead of an organism.
The measures that keep biometrics secure are humans watching the reader being used to make sure nobody's holding up a photo of a retina or a severed finger, and to the extent they can work, technical measures to detect live bodies.
There's been an argument that the British Navy was successful because of mechanisms for monitoring captains. Lieutenants, for example, kept their own logs which could be reviewed by the captain's superiors.
Barbara Tuchman's book, _The First Salute_, has lots of anecdotes of captains getting court-martialed for not following orders, even when the orders were internally contradictory.
And to anyone uncomfortable with that idea, remember that some of your fellow citizens are at least equally uncomfortable with sex education, and that both are matters of life and death.
Yes, the currently available evidence points to Mars having a liquid core.
>Unless they were coming from very opposite directions and just barely nicked each other, they should have become one.
Consider off-center impacts and conservation of momentum. If the impactor is much bigger than a mere dinosaur killer, then something's going to keep going.
http://xkcd.com/307/
Exactly. The thing that caught my eye is that the memo was from 2003. Are problems like that a thing of the past today?
This may be proof that providing a good user experience is way harder than it looks (not that I think it looks easy). Here you've got a powerful executive, highly respected within the company, roasting a bunch of bright people (yes, I mean it, the ones I've known have had plenty of brains and drive), and not getting the result he wanted.
>no single person at Microsoft who has the final say on how all of there stuff interacts together.
That may be the key insight. Apple has Jobs. Who has that job at Microsoft? Who could possibly have the bandwidth to handle it?
>personally verified key signatures face-to-face.
Over the phone is probably adequate. You already know your bank's phone number. Incidents of phone numbers being rerouted are rare, though there are rumors of escort services in Las Vegas redirecting traffic meant for their competitors, and Florida's probation department once had their phone number remapped to a phone sex service in New York.
Over the phone, you'd just have the website operator read you the thumbprint for their cert. You could check it against the value shown in your browser.
Someone more mischievous than me should call up a bank and say "I'd like to verify the SHA1 hash of your X.509 certificate" and report on the results.
A realistic compromise is to note the thumbprint the first time you visit a site, hope it wasn't taken over at that instant, and then make sure it's the same next month when you visit again.
Would you know that the certificate had been revoked?
Last time I looked, one popular browser didn't even check for certificate revocation by default, and in the one I'm using now I can't even find the configuration setting to control that.
Security is analog, not digital.
Someone else could be in control of the certificate, but they would have to jump over the hurdle of compromising the confidentiality of a private key. Not impossible, but at least there are known defenses.
SSL replaces the insoluble problem of proving identity over HTTP by the multiple problems of
o Appropriate diligence by the CA
o Homophones and lookalike names [Search for "Mountain America Credit Union"]
o Good faith conduct by the CA (*)
o Protection of the CA's root signing key
o Due diligence by the browser vendor in setting up the list of trusted root certs
o Protecting the integrity of the list of trusted root certs on the client machine (**)
o Alertness by the end user
o Appropriate decision-making by the end user
That's just the short list I can come up with in the time it takes to write a Slashdot post. But even with all that, SSL identity verification is still better than nothing.
Isn't security fun?
(*) Bruce Schneier and someone from Verisign once worked out how much it would cost to compromise their master signing key. They figured that organized crime could take over the company in a leveraged buyout for someone in the low eight figures.
(**) It's terrifyingly easy to add a new trusted cert, and at least one piece of "marketing research" software installs its own cert and does a man-in-the-middle on SSL transactions.
How would it interfere with emergency services?
BPL carriers are in the 10-30 MHz range, and public safety is typically in the 800 MHz band.
Way lower, here, can be as much as a factor of ten million.
Here's a nerdy but popular account of an extreme high energy cosmic ray detected at the Fly's Eye II. And that's just what we've detected in a few decades of running small detectors. What the planet has intercepted in the last few billion years must be even more staggering.
Ask the man who was there. Nixon's White House counsel says the current situation is worse than Watergate.
It takes seconds and accomplishes way more than posting on Slashdot. You're already taking a break from work to read the web: pick up the phone. I had to explain that HR 6034 was the FISA amendment, so make sure it's clear what you're calling about.
Staffers know all about callin campaigns, so your call will have more power if you mention your own reasons for opposition (*briefly*) so it's clear you're not part of a political botnet. I said it was about the rule of law, you might point out that without judicial oversight there's nothing to stop some future government from wiretapping opposition headquarters. Or that the telcos weren't acting out of patriotism, since they turned off wiretaps when they didn't get paid. Or that the original FISA that got violated passed by a big bipartisan majority, got us through the Cold War, and deserves to be enforced. Or that mass spying without evidence isn't going to help national security (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin).