I'd presumed that Watson refered to the assistant of Bell who first understood electric speech. Probably a wink to the quirky and confounding associations Jeapordy delights in.
I seriously doubt that this could be made to work, since General Relativity denies the very notion of simultinaity required to coordinate signals. And this results from two monkey wrenches - the various velocities and accelerations of the pulsars, and the varying and unknown distribution of gravitational fields between the objects. Space across galactic distances is not Euclidean, and the degree of curvature is not constant from one place to another on large scales.
Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but I'd be surprised if this scheme is valid even in principle. See sig.
The real implication to me, is that it will be possible to have machines capable of running the same 'software' that runs in our own minds. To be able to 'back up' people's states and memories, and all the implications behind that. That presumes you can understand how human thought is made. It presumes real human intelligence can be modeled and implemented by a digital process, which may not be possible. I doubt that even quantum digital computers could do it. It might be possible in the future to simulate our neural machinery without realy knowing how it works, a high-fidelity digital form of a completely analog process, but then you couldn't know what to expect as the result. The way the program was coded and the inputs given it would have no predicitive value. After all, as far as we know a fool's brain is made up just like a genuis's. Of course, I'd be impressed if they could artificially recreate even very foolish human intelligence. I fear that may be the only kind we will ever do. remember, nothing is more frightening than ignorance in action.
An object travelling at, say, 50,000 miles per hour spends 7.2 seconds traversing 100 miles of atmosphere, and for most of that time it's moving through pretty thin air. During that time, the surface will heat up considerably, but it's not much time for the heat to conduct to the interior. So oevrall, I'd say the object could be considered cold when it hits the ground.
An instant after impact it'll be vapor. Plus a fair bit of the stuff that used to be in the crator will become vapor. It's unlikely any of this is actually healthy to breath.
How about if the teacher's pay per subject is based on how society actually values that subject. How much of GDP is based on science, how much on art and music, how much on athletics, etc? If, say, 40% of GDP is based on science and 50% comes from sports, and 10 % comes from art, then clearly athletics are more valuable to society than anything else and should be emphacised accordingly, with art frankly not worth that much in general. Now take a standard average teacher's salary, and add or subtract from that a bit based on subject. So athletics teachers would get 5% above the average, science teachers 1% below average, and art teachers 4% below average. The expenditure on teacher's salary is unchanged, and better teachers are drawn to the more valuable subjects.
Hey, I make music (actually, I don't, but let's play along here). How can I register as an artist that gets a slice of this pie?
What's that? The artists don't get paid directly, only the big companies do? Indie musicians aren't appreciated or compensated? Doesn't seem right, does it?
It's not always the same stuff, even if the brand packaging is nearly identical. Read the ingredient list and you'll find differences. Wal-Mart makes it's suppliers cut corners to keep the price down or be locked out of the largest potential customer base. A few suppliers have refused to deal with Wal-Mart rather than to compromise their quality.
The presumption that the items sold in Wal-Mart are the same because they look the same is often incorrect. Check it out and see for yourself.
There's no reason this code should ever be closed. In the computers that run casino games, the government regulatory agencies requires all source code be provided for scrutiny, as well as mandating registered CRCs and digital signatures to prove that the code executing is the code that was inspected. There's all sorts of inspections and reliability tests done on initial submittal and also throughout the lifetime of the computer's use. They do this because those computers affect money, and everyone knows money is important.
If the public/government doesn't require similar validation and reliability for electronic voting machines, it's because your votes aren't considered important or valuable. I don't see any way to escape that conclusion, given the way things are.
Re:Not so sure about the visit count being useful.
on
Dealing with Phishing
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, customizable interfaces would probably help a lot, but that's a lot of work, and you're going to have to half-force people to do customizations if you want it to work, because most people would just stick with the default. Perhaps randomize (within reason) some of the customization parameters? Sure, it'll add support load, but so does phishing, so you'd have to do a careful analysis to see if you come out ahead; it could go either way.
I'm not even so sure about that. Customizable skins are only useful if the same customization characteristics can be applied to all the sites I use. My online activity includes several banks, a few credit card companies, two phone companies, three utilities, many retail stores, etc, etc. If I can make all these sites look reasonably similar, say by using a similar shade of my favorite blue color, then I would be suspicious of sites in any different color. But without such across the board similarities, I'm going to lose track of who has what skin and who provides or doesn't provide such a skin. In the long run, absent it's universal application, all this would add is more noise into the presentation, and would provide minimal benefit.
For the record, this idea isn't new. Bank of America has been letting users select a personalized image on their login page for a while now. If the image on the login page doesn't match yours, it didn't come from your bank and you shouldn't enter your password there.
Do they let you upload your own picture, or do you select from a list of what they provide? If the latter, then the phishers know what the stock photos are. Say there are twenty of them. The phisher picks one. He may have eliminated 95% of the people he sends his bogus pages to, but he's just gained a ton of credibility with the remaining 5%. That might be worthwhile for him.
how much intelligence and technology has to be applied to reduce the effects of people's stupidity. The more stupid/gullible/apathetic/lazy people are, the more sophisticated/integrated/processor-and-storage-int ensive applications have to become. Maybe we're just enabling people's stupidity by doing this. Eventually, as people's intelligence goes to zero, the number of processor cycles to protect them from themselves will become infinite.
What are the alternative models if gravity waves simply don't exist?
There are already alternative theories, such as bosons named gravitons. That might just be a variation in interpretation of wave-particle duality, but since quantum gravity isn't the same thing as general relativity it passes muster. There are other gravitational alternatives proposed, usually flawed and/or not well accepted by the scientific community. And what impact this experiment wil have on the Higgs particle question, one way or another?
Your post seems to imply this is an all or nothing experiment. But GR wouldn't be challenged only by a null result. If the magnitude of any detected gravity waves is significantly different from expectations, the discrepancy will have to be explained. Often, these differences are more challenging to a theory. Unexpected behavior of a newly detected but predicted phenomena is also a major challenge to existing theories. I can't wait to see what kind of information can be obtained by some analog of Zeeman splitting in gravity wave spectroscopy, if such a thing exists. That will be far more revealing than any "Yup, that's a gravity wave" result.
That doesn't mean that your idea is not valid, because what they have done is violate their oath of office to serve the interests of The People and uphold the Constitution.
I would like to see a general principle that says that anything a public official does in their capacity as a public official, they do under oath. Isn't that what an oath of office is for? Otherwise, what does such an oath mean?
When Bush lies to the public about matters of government policy, such as the reasons for war or the violations of civil liberties, he should be held accountable as having violated his oath. Note that the oath the President takes does not assure competence or ability, but it does require upholding the Constitution. The Presidential oath is one of the less stringent oaths of office there is -- the oaths other officials take are more stringent.
By the way, Presidential signing statements do NOT have the force of law. The Supreme Court may use them in their considerations, but that's optional and cannot be in contradiction of established law or past rulings. The President cannot exempt himself from any or all parts of the bills he signs -- a signing statement does not give him a line item veto over provisions in a bill. In fact, such a line item veto has been officially declared unconstitutional at the federal level.
So let's start taking oaths of office seriously, and make those who take them take it seriously too.
Could it not simply mean that it changes in size? I'd be surprised if it *didn't* change in size, based on all the variable energy in the solar system. The sun changes, the planets change place, etc.
What variability? The sun is pretty constant on short time scales. The sun is being observed in detail by other spacecraft specifically designed for that task, like Helios. These spacecraft directly measure the solar wind and track the effects of solar. I'm sure the people at NASA have included that data into their analysis. They are rocket scientists, after all. The planets exert essentially zero influence over the heliosphere. So it's not like they have no idea about what's going without the Voyager data.
But those things don't *stop* gamma... and... *knocks on the reactor shielding* it's not getting through anyway...
Don't knock too hard. Isn't neutron embrittlement still a difficulty that needs to be overcome? While the present report does show a significant breakthrough and is excellenet progress, there are several other difficult problems that still need to be addressed and overcome.
Not that I'm downplaying the promise of fusion research. It's absolutely essential and one of the best hopes for the long term future we have. If anything, it's long past time we should fund fusion research aggressively, instead of the shoestring funding it's been receiving over the last quarter century.
A professor at the University of Pisa, Sr. Gallillo Gallile, has determined a new theory of mechanics. According to one of his students, it is based on a framework of an obscure subject known as mathematics, in particular the difficult subject of geometry, known only to a few specialists. Claims are that it will improve efficency and accuracy of artillary. Despite tests on an unrealistically small scale agreeing with the theory, practical applications over distances in a real battleground proved grossly deficient. According to Sr. Gallile, "There is much about how the world works we still don't know. Until we have a more complete understanding, practical applications will be limited." Translation: Vaporware.
"That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation," he {Gonzales} continued. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."
With the bunch of crooks we have currently in the administration, this statement deserves nomination for hypocracy of the week,maybe even hypocracy of the month. Too much competition for hypocracy of the year.
Anyways, this creates a very unstable situation, since the Administration can leak [newsmax.com] (I mean, "selectively declassify") information any old time they feel like it in order to make political points.
While that's true in principal, there are formal procedures regarding declassification, and an obligatory approval cycle. Tprocedures were not followed in the Palme case. Therefore the "declassification" by presidential whim was invalid and illegal.
Let's see. Bush claims we are in a war. He has illegally revealed military secrets during wartime. I believe the technical term for that is "treason." Treason is given as a primary justification for impeachment. Impeachment is only a removal from public office, it does not supercede criminal prosecution. What's the technical penalty for treason during wartime? Is it still the death penalty? Since I'm completely opposed to the death penalty, I think life imprisonment is appropriate.
I haven't seen this question asked elsewhere, and IANAL, so I'll ask it here. Is it really possible to classify an illegal program? If the program is in fact illegal, then it seems to me it cannot legally be classified. If that's true, and I'd love to see the governemt justify disagreement, then the leak of the NSA domestic syping program can't be a crime. Even in wartime and under extreme circumstances, the law of the land is still valid.
Let's say the goverment had a super secret program, like the development of the stealth in the eighties. Then let's say that as a test, the DoD decided to bomb a real civilian town in New Jersey, clearly an illegal program. It would not, should not, be illegal to report that the town was bombed by a secret DoD aircraft. Granted, that situation is far more henious in detail than the NSA wiretapping, but the principal is the same.
Military secrets do not grant a license to kill, steal, or otherwise disregard the law of the land, whose ultimate definition is the Constitution. Those who violate the Constitution, especially those who have sworn a public oath to to uphold the Constitution, must be held accountable.
Yeah, that [wikipedia.org] approach [wikipedia.org] carries [wikipedia.org] no [wikipedia.org] risks [wikipedia.org].
I notice that all of the issue you linked to (Methyl_tertbutyl_ether, Tetraethyl_lead, acid rain, and ozone depletion) do fall under the jurisdiction of the EPA. That seems an appropriate existing agency to handle future broad based concerns regarding nanotechnology policy. However, the current administration seems to think the EPA is only half a step away from a hostile foreign power, and wouldn't do anything to strengthen it.
That said, I agree with other posters that a separate agency like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might be the best approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd presumed that Watson refered to the assistant of Bell who first understood electric speech. Probably a wink to the quirky and confounding associations Jeapordy delights in.
I seriously doubt that this could be made to work, since General Relativity denies the very notion of simultinaity required to coordinate signals. And this results from two monkey wrenches - the various velocities and accelerations of the pulsars, and the varying and unknown distribution of gravitational fields between the objects. Space across galactic distances is not Euclidean, and the degree of curvature is not constant from one place to another on large scales.
Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but I'd be surprised if this scheme is valid even in principle. See sig.
An object travelling at, say, 50,000 miles per hour spends 7.2 seconds traversing 100 miles of atmosphere, and for most of that time it's moving through pretty thin air. During that time, the surface will heat up considerably, but it's not much time for the heat to conduct to the interior. So oevrall, I'd say the object could be considered cold when it hits the ground.
An instant after impact it'll be vapor. Plus a fair bit of the stuff that used to be in the crator will become vapor. It's unlikely any of this is actually healthy to breath.
How about if the teacher's pay per subject is based on how society actually values that subject. How much of GDP is based on science, how much on art and music, how much on athletics, etc? If, say, 40% of GDP is based on science and 50% comes from sports, and 10 % comes from art, then clearly athletics are more valuable to society than anything else and should be emphacised accordingly, with art frankly not worth that much in general. Now take a standard average teacher's salary, and add or subtract from that a bit based on subject. So athletics teachers would get 5% above the average, science teachers 1% below average, and art teachers 4% below average. The expenditure on teacher's salary is unchanged, and better teachers are drawn to the more valuable subjects.
Hey, I make music (actually, I don't, but let's play along here). How can I register as an artist that gets a slice of this pie?
What's that? The artists don't get paid directly, only the big companies do? Indie musicians aren't appreciated or compensated? Doesn't seem right, does it?
It's not always the same stuff, even if the brand packaging is nearly identical. Read the ingredient list and you'll find differences. Wal-Mart makes it's suppliers cut corners to keep the price down or be locked out of the largest potential customer base. A few suppliers have refused to deal with Wal-Mart rather than to compromise their quality.
The presumption that the items sold in Wal-Mart are the same because they look the same is often incorrect. Check it out and see for yourself.
There's no reason this code should ever be closed. In the computers that run casino games, the government regulatory agencies requires all source code be provided for scrutiny, as well as mandating registered CRCs and digital signatures to prove that the code executing is the code that was inspected. There's all sorts of inspections and reliability tests done on initial submittal and also throughout the lifetime of the computer's use. They do this because those computers affect money, and everyone knows money is important.
If the public/government doesn't require similar validation and reliability for electronic voting machines, it's because your votes aren't considered important or valuable. I don't see any way to escape that conclusion, given the way things are.
On the other hand, customizable interfaces would probably help a lot, but that's a lot of work, and you're going to have to half-force people to do customizations if you want it to work, because most people would just stick with the default. Perhaps randomize (within reason) some of the customization parameters? Sure, it'll add support load, but so does phishing, so you'd have to do a careful analysis to see if you come out ahead; it could go either way.
I'm not even so sure about that. Customizable skins are only useful if the same customization characteristics can be applied to all the sites I use. My online activity includes several banks, a few credit card companies, two phone companies, three utilities, many retail stores, etc, etc. If I can make all these sites look reasonably similar, say by using a similar shade of my favorite blue color, then I would be suspicious of sites in any different color. But without such across the board similarities, I'm going to lose track of who has what skin and who provides or doesn't provide such a skin. In the long run, absent it's universal application, all this would add is more noise into the presentation, and would provide minimal benefit.
For the record, this idea isn't new. Bank of America has been letting users select a personalized image on their login page for a while now. If the image on the login page doesn't match yours, it didn't come from your bank and you shouldn't enter your password there.
Do they let you upload your own picture, or do you select from a list of what they provide? If the latter, then the phishers know what the stock photos are. Say there are twenty of them. The phisher picks one. He may have eliminated 95% of the people he sends his bogus pages to, but he's just gained a ton of credibility with the remaining 5%. That might be worthwhile for him.
how much intelligence and technology has to be applied to reduce the effects of people's stupidity. The more stupid/gullible/apathetic/lazy people are, the more sophisticated/integrated/processor-and-storage-int ensive applications have to become. Maybe we're just enabling people's stupidity by doing this. Eventually, as people's intelligence goes to zero, the number of processor cycles to protect them from themselves will become infinite.
I for one really want to know what updates there were,
For every one who really wants to know, there are a hundred who don't care/wouldn't understand anyway.
What are the alternative models if gravity waves simply don't exist?
There are already alternative theories, such as bosons named gravitons. That might just be a variation in interpretation of wave-particle duality, but since quantum gravity isn't the same thing as general relativity it passes muster. There are other gravitational alternatives proposed, usually flawed and/or not well accepted by the scientific community. And what impact this experiment wil have on the Higgs particle question, one way or another?
Your post seems to imply this is an all or nothing experiment. But GR wouldn't be challenged only by a null result. If the magnitude of any detected gravity waves is significantly different from expectations, the discrepancy will have to be explained. Often, these differences are more challenging to a theory. Unexpected behavior of a newly detected but predicted phenomena is also a major challenge to existing theories. I can't wait to see what kind of information can be obtained by some analog of Zeeman splitting in gravity wave spectroscopy, if such a thing exists. That will be far more revealing than any "Yup, that's a gravity wave" result.
I'd have to setup & manage everything for my Mum's iMac (from a different contentment)
I know that was a typo, but it was too appropos to pass up!
That doesn't mean that your idea is not valid, because what they have done is violate their oath of office to serve the interests of The People and uphold the Constitution.
I would like to see a general principle that says that anything a public official does in their capacity as a public official, they do under oath. Isn't that what an oath of office is for? Otherwise, what does such an oath mean?
When Bush lies to the public about matters of government policy, such as the reasons for war or the violations of civil liberties, he should be held accountable as having violated his oath. Note that the oath the President takes does not assure competence or ability, but it does require upholding the Constitution. The Presidential oath is one of the less stringent oaths of office there is -- the oaths other officials take are more stringent.
By the way, Presidential signing statements do NOT have the force of law. The Supreme Court may use them in their considerations, but that's optional and cannot be in contradiction of established law or past rulings. The President cannot exempt himself from any or all parts of the bills he signs -- a signing statement does not give him a line item veto over provisions in a bill. In fact, such a line item veto has been officially declared unconstitutional at the federal level.
So let's start taking oaths of office seriously, and make those who take them take it seriously too.
I've been to the heliopause and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!
Could it not simply mean that it changes in size? I'd be surprised if it *didn't* change in size, based on all the variable energy in the solar system. The sun changes, the planets change place, etc.
What variability? The sun is pretty constant on short time scales. The sun is being observed in detail by other spacecraft specifically designed for that task, like Helios. These spacecraft directly measure the solar wind and track the effects of solar. I'm sure the people at NASA have included that data into their analysis. They are rocket scientists, after all. The planets exert essentially zero influence over the heliosphere. So it's not like they have no idea about what's going without the Voyager data.
Couldn't they have done this in some place a little less populated? Like North Dakota or in the area near Area 51?
What, and endanger the aliens we're holding captive?
But those things don't *stop* gamma... and ... *knocks on the reactor shielding* it's not getting through anyway...
Don't knock too hard. Isn't neutron embrittlement still a difficulty that needs to be overcome? While the present report does show a significant breakthrough and is excellenet progress, there are several other difficult problems that still need to be addressed and overcome.
Not that I'm downplaying the promise of fusion research. It's absolutely essential and one of the best hopes for the long term future we have. If anything, it's long past time we should fund fusion research aggressively, instead of the shoestring funding it's been receiving over the last quarter century.
The Vatican Press, Rome, 1506
A professor at the University of Pisa, Sr. Gallillo Gallile, has determined a new theory of mechanics. According to one of his students, it is based on a framework of an obscure subject known as mathematics, in particular the difficult subject of geometry, known only to a few specialists. Claims are that it will improve efficency and accuracy of artillary. Despite tests on an unrealistically small scale agreeing with the theory, practical applications over distances in a real battleground proved grossly deficient. According to Sr. Gallile, "There is much about how the world works we still don't know. Until we have a more complete understanding, practical applications will be limited." Translation: Vaporware.
Here I was thinking the bigger problem was returning enough net energy to make it worthwhile relative to the astronomical upfront costs. Silly me.
If you can get enough energy out of the deal to prevent just one war for oil, then it'll be worth it.
The true cost of the oil economy ignores these little details.
"That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation," he {Gonzales} continued. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."
With the bunch of crooks we have currently in the administration, this statement deserves nomination for hypocracy of the week,maybe even hypocracy of the month. Too much competition for hypocracy of the year.
Anyways, this creates a very unstable situation, since the Administration can leak [newsmax.com] (I mean, "selectively declassify") information any old time they feel like it in order to make political points.
While that's true in principal, there are formal procedures regarding declassification, and an obligatory approval cycle. Tprocedures were not followed in the Palme case. Therefore the "declassification" by presidential whim was invalid and illegal.
Let's see. Bush claims we are in a war. He has illegally revealed military secrets during wartime. I believe the technical term for that is "treason." Treason is given as a primary justification for impeachment. Impeachment is only a removal from public office, it does not supercede criminal prosecution. What's the technical penalty for treason during wartime? Is it still the death penalty? Since I'm completely opposed to the death penalty, I think life imprisonment is appropriate.
I haven't seen this question asked elsewhere, and IANAL, so I'll ask it here. Is it really possible to classify an illegal program? If the program is in fact illegal, then it seems to me it cannot legally be classified. If that's true, and I'd love to see the governemt justify disagreement, then the leak of the NSA domestic syping program can't be a crime. Even in wartime and under extreme circumstances, the law of the land is still valid.
Let's say the goverment had a super secret program, like the development of the stealth in the eighties. Then let's say that as a test, the DoD decided to bomb a real civilian town in New Jersey, clearly an illegal program. It would not, should not, be illegal to report that the town was bombed by a secret DoD aircraft. Granted, that situation is far more henious in detail than the NSA wiretapping, but the principal is the same.
Military secrets do not grant a license to kill, steal, or otherwise disregard the law of the land, whose ultimate definition is the Constitution. Those who violate the Constitution, especially those who have sworn a public oath to to uphold the Constitution, must be held accountable.
Yeah, that [wikipedia.org] approach [wikipedia.org] carries [wikipedia.org] no [wikipedia.org] risks [wikipedia.org].
I notice that all of the issue you linked to (Methyl_tertbutyl_ether, Tetraethyl_lead, acid rain, and ozone depletion) do fall under the jurisdiction of the EPA. That seems an appropriate existing agency to handle future broad based concerns regarding nanotechnology policy. However, the current administration seems to think the EPA is only half a step away from a hostile foreign power, and wouldn't do anything to strengthen it.
That said, I agree with other posters that a separate agency like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might be the best approach.
Looks like the links didn't copy. Oh well.