"The disclosure that Hillary Rodham Clinton parlayed $1,000 into nearly $100,000 through highly speculative commodities trading may create political embarrassment for the Clintons, who have sharply criticized a national culture of greed during the Reagan and Bush years in the White House."
tl;dr version: We waste shitloads of money on all sorts of things, why not waste it on this?
(Which is a pretty weak justification for massive spending of public money...)
I think the reasons the/. posters are frothing so much about this is in direct relation to how FUNDAMENTALLY stupid it is, and this is a technically oriented crowd that reacts viscerally to technical ignorance: you know, like make a public roadway surface of GLASS (with all of it's obvious shortcomings*), expecting that glass to remain light-transmissive despite the use by millions of cars (tires carry things like, you know, stones?), etc.
* 1) strength, obviously. Trucks weigh upwards of 50t. Add the compressive forces of braking, etc...yikes. 2) fragility to temperature: one of the reasons asphalt is so widely used is that it's FLEXIBLE at a wide range of temperatures, resisting cracking. Glass is notoriously bad at this - as you can see pouring hot liquid into a glass that's at 0 c.. 3) repair costs: (also related to #2) - asphalt is used as a patcher because it's super cheap. 4) friction is pretty important to a road surface, particularly wet friction. While a glass surface can certainly be 'rough textured' this would directly impede its ability to transmit light for the solar power function.
The real answer to the (stupid) OP question is economics. As much as liberals like to assume that they are the 'mainstream' the fact is that the country is much closer to 50/50. Twitter, not stupid, recognizes this.
If they silence Trump (again, as you say, for whatever reason they want because they're private) a few things happen: 1) they lose half their customer base; I strongly suspect that this really wouldn't matter economically because a) they make no $ and b) I'm guessing that 99.9% of Trump voters don't 'tweet' as a lifestyle-communication thing; and 2) he gets a bully pulpit and even more press as it 'looks' like the establishment is trying to censor him; and 3) suddenly Twitter would be seen to be taking sides. For a purported neutral third party carrier of messages, they would be taking the stance that they ARE now responsible for the messages they carry - that would impose HUGE liability on them, not to mention opening a massive can of worms in terms of potential litigation regarding their common-carrier stance.
Pretty much anyone who's dropped a few $million on a shoreline estate (eg Kennedys, Walter Cronkite, David McCollough, etc) has fought against offshore wind farms on the exact same basis.
Hilly started her public career coming out of college and working (I believe as an intern) on the commission investigating Watergate, yet nobody (as far as I'm aware) has drawn the obvious parallel to her release of 50000 emails (which we all know have been pre-culled; the "top secret" emails being mentioned here are the ones that slipped through that process) and the release of Nixon's Watergate tapes with 18 minutes missing.
A comment system from this century (ie that can fundamentally accept cut'n'paste text without choking like a cat on a hairball) would be a better friend, I'm thinking.
I'm probably one of the few people in this country that found out about the Challenger explosion with a sigh of relief.
I was a senior in HS, and was taking classes offsite at a local college in the mornings. I had a tape deck in my car, so I rarely listened to news in the morning, and I think that day I'd even decided to skip class, sleep in, and screw around. So I'm minding my own business every morning.
I had to check in to my HS for the afternoon, though. When I walked into school, it was quiet. Like, CREEPY quiet...there were something like 2500 students in my highschool, it was lunchtime, and nearly completely silent. As I came into the commons, I could see that everyone - hundreds of kids and teachers alike - was just shocked, gobsmacked.
This was the 1980s. The era of Red Dawn, Reagan, The Day After, and 50,000 nuclear warheads. I genuinely feared that nuclear war had been announced.
When my g/f told me that the Challenger blew up, I may have even said aloud "Oh? Is that all?"
To this day, what I remember of that moment was my feeling of tremendous relief.
So when these companies tell you "ok you have to take our DSL modem/router" do they tell the customers that they're offering their bandwidth publicly? Do you as a customer get a discount?
Is there a security issue, say, if you have a home LAN with people publicly accessing your router?
Personally, unless there's a substantial discount, I'll do everything in my power from pringles-can antenna to simply removing the antennas and running cables to low-power WAPs (deep in the center of my home, far from my property boundaries) to make my 'public availability' as negligible as possible).
...is our brain's ability to portray simultaneity.
If you touch a person's toe and nose at the same time, the speed-of-travel for that signal and significantly different distances that signal travels SHOULD result in a noticeable lag between the two, but doesn't; even when blindfolded, a person feels them at the same time.
How is this possible?
At first glance, one might assume the brain is 'pausing' the nose-signal to wait for the toe-signal. But how does it know to DO this, when it doesn't know that a toe signal is even coming? The best theory I've heard so far is that EVERY sensory input is delayed for the amount of time it would take the furthest signal to reach the brain, and then assembled into a coherent stream-of-time order as if time-stamped (but AFAIK there's no trace of a time-stamp signal in nerve signals).
Reading this, I really feel like I'm living in the future: "The automatic monitoring system of a hydrogen maser atomic clock triggered an alarm which reported a deviation of 13.7 microseconds."
I believe it was mentioned in the Economist that US localities issue something like $6 billion in moving violations every year. With driverless cars, this drops to nearly zero.
Granted: a) with a fully-implemented driverless system, logically then you probably need fewer officers because you're not policing the roads so much. Less ground to cover; and b) we all despise the blink-and-you-miss-it towns squatting alongside the interstate, with their 70mph-to-35mph speed limits for 2 blocks, with one lazy-ass cop writing speeding tickets all day long to more or less fund the entire city budget.
But that latter caricature glosses over an important point: that cop sitting there is, in fact, on duty and available for emergency roles. They're not going to (or bloody well better not) sit and write you a ticket when a store gets robbed or someone gets shot. Essentially, the traffic-ticket revenue is an opportunistic and pretty-straightfoward user tax, filling the hours and hours of "nothing happening" so that when something important does happen, that officer is available.
Without that $6bn in revenue, police budgets will be distinctly pinched, and likely cause localities to raise taxes to pay for the level of police coverage to which they've become accustomed. Essentially that, or driverless cars will come with a HOST of user-based surcharges to prevent this (effective) tax from falling back on the locality.
I doubt the new system will ultimately be cheaper than the old.
As much as it's more 'validating' to assume something malignant, the fact is that more people are carrying concealed and even a 1kg chunk of metal on your belt is forgettable if you wear it regularly enough.
I should know, I regularly carry a jackknife and the TSA has collected many from me simply because I forget to dump my pocket crap before leaving the car at the airport (and airport security is so ridiculously slow, nobody has time to go back to their car).
Notice that article even says "...it was a game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of fantasy "Lord of the Rings"."
DID PATT PROPERLY ATTRIBUTE *HIS* RULES TO THE TOLKIEN PROPERTIES?/sarcasm
First, the entire world of 'gaming' back then was syncretic and collaborative. Chainmail was never (by anyone knowledgeable) considered to have sprung wholly formed from the forehead of Gygax.
Further, attribution wasn't anywhere near the priority then that it would be once these actually took shape as commercial products and an industry began to grow. Nobody familiar with the personalities of the early role-playing game world would be at all surprised that Gygax in particular would fail to credit someone else; just ask Dave Arneson.
I think your supposition that it has to do with population density is only indirectly true. Does it have *something* to do with density? Sure...in a very basic sense: if it takes 3 weeks to search out and find someone to fight, yeah, not many hunter/gatherer tribes are going to have the 'leisure' to do so. And it's certainly likely that the frequency of such incidents would be directly related to the density of such groups. But (as it seems you were implying) is it that organized conflict is a consequence of density in the sense of competition for scarce resources? Not at all; relatively organized murderous raids have been observed in primate groups that have no apparent resource issues and are simply young males looking for mates or just on a violent bender.
The propensity for non-defensive violence is seemingly inherent in primates; the growth of that concept to raids and war to me is a consequence of intelligence. Once you start to conceptualize cause and effect, it's more likely you'll survive such an act if you get 10 of your fellows to join you.
"When all else fails, watch the way the parties debate and assess their credibility from their actions."
I agree.
Watch anyone who dares suggest AGW is still open to question get savaged in ANY public forum - from how the OP phrased the question, I believe he/she's seen that. Google Bjorn Lomborg - someone who says "Global warming IS happening, there are just many many other things that are more imperative" - and see how he's been raked across the coals.
We've had 15+ years of prediction of doom from the Global Warming camp (a partial list at https://anotherslownewsday.wor... ), which are continually proven wrong, desperately quickly rationalized, explained away, then buried under the NEXT "forecast of doom".
Let's also review all the things that have been blamed on global warming: http://whatreallyhappened.com/... (it's hilarious, and fully linked)
I don't know if warming is happening. I don't believe anyone anymore either. I used to try to find raw sources, but I've been told dozens of times that I can't be expected to understand temp data and hell, it's probably been tweaked anyway. It's hard to imagine that 7 billion people busily generating heat and burning hydrocarbons wouldn't have SOME impact. All I know is that the paleotemps seem to indicate very quick spikes of temperature and CO2 every 120k years or so for the last 2+ million years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg) The current spike looks EXACTLY like the others, and is coming pretty much right on time.
For me, the AGW crowd has failed to explain in broad terms why something that's happened periodically, and is happening again, is somehow "THIS TIME" characteristically different than all the previous instances.
From TFA: "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete."
OK I get the point of the breathless marketing quote, but I think any reasonable extrapolation of the whole Plutonian controversy (and I'm still in the "it's a planet" camp) would be that lacking a bright, clear definition of a planet* then, the census of "planetary bodies" "in" the "solar system" was as much as guaranteed to increase. Hell we not only can't define a planet, we can't even define SOLAR SYSTEM.
We haven't really much begun to count/classify the bodies whose orbital focus is the sun - that region called the Oort cloud stretches out as much as a light year, by some arguments. (http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews-files-2013-03-Voyager-1-Finds-Mayhem-in-the-Heliopause-2-jpg.jpg) I am absolutely certain that there are going to be other 'planet'-class bodies out there. This one at 600 au is stated to have an orbital period of 15000 years. Nemesis, @ 95000 AU (which astronomers have poo-poo'd) was postulated to have a period of 26 million years. At a certain point, one even has to start wondering if the search for such planets could even rely on periodicity, as their passage around this system may not even have stabilized since the early formation of the system itself.
In any case, there are likely many bodies out in the extra-Plutonian reaches of our system. Almost certainly.
*the IAUs 2006 vague rules are nearly meaningless: 1) is in orbit around the Sun, 2) has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and 3) has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit...could, arguably, apply to Pluto (or if it doesn't apply to Pluto because it crosses Neptune's orbit, then wouldn't that ipso facto also remove Neptune (which would be ridiculous)?
Scientific progress may provide the big new threats to humanity, but it's also provided more or less all the ADVANCEMENTS enjoyed by humanity as well, such as most of your kids not dying before age 2, or being able to survive that paper-cut infection. Dentistry.
I have no doubt that if you could mass the ongoing, sustained (and really compounding) science benefits to humanity vs the new dangers it's created, the benefits win handily.
In fact, taking the population as a handy shorthand, just now benefits outweigh risks globally by 7.125 billion points.
I think it's hilarious that you turn a discussion about Anne Frank into a an anti-Republican diatribe.
Quick: do you know the party of the president during WW2, the one that REJECTED refuge-seeking peoples of Europe, including a ship full of children?
BTW there's a pretty huge gulf between "refugee family with children" and the "single, healthy, male 20-something" 'refugee' that is the individual most reasonable people are rejecting.
Great points - thanks for the explanation. Obviously, while these signals crawl around our brains, EITHER: a) they're of trivial importance, if any, to brain function, or b) we've evolved ways of filtering the natural EMF we regularly encounter.
The abstract seems to suggest to me that the signals are by-products of other processes anyway, and thus have me leaning toward a), above.
Slashdot Mirror
She did. And....she won the equivalent to 6 of 6. Somehow.
http://community.seattletimes....
"The disclosure that Hillary Rodham Clinton parlayed $1,000 into nearly $100,000 through highly speculative commodities trading may create political embarrassment for the Clintons, who have sharply criticized a national culture of greed during the Reagan and Bush years in the White House."
France, like most western democracies:
Politicians > Engineers.
And like any situation where big $ are involved, there are enough tame engineers that want government favor that they'll cheerfully vet any project.
tl;dr version: We waste shitloads of money on all sorts of things, why not waste it on this?
(Which is a pretty weak justification for massive spending of public money...)
I think the reasons the /. posters are frothing so much about this is in direct relation to how FUNDAMENTALLY stupid it is, and this is a technically oriented crowd that reacts viscerally to technical ignorance: you know, like make a public roadway surface of GLASS (with all of it's obvious shortcomings*), expecting that glass to remain light-transmissive despite the use by millions of cars (tires carry things like, you know, stones?), etc.
*
1) strength, obviously. Trucks weigh upwards of 50t. Add the compressive forces of braking, etc...yikes.
2) fragility to temperature: one of the reasons asphalt is so widely used is that it's FLEXIBLE at a wide range of temperatures, resisting cracking. Glass is notoriously bad at this - as you can see pouring hot liquid into a glass that's at 0 c..
3) repair costs: (also related to #2) - asphalt is used as a patcher because it's super cheap.
4) friction is pretty important to a road surface, particularly wet friction. While a glass surface can certainly be 'rough textured' this would directly impede its ability to transmit light for the solar power function.
Sure they are.
The real answer to the (stupid) OP question is economics. As much as liberals like to assume that they are the 'mainstream' the fact is that the country is much closer to 50/50.
Twitter, not stupid, recognizes this.
If they silence Trump (again, as you say, for whatever reason they want because they're private) a few things happen:
1) they lose half their customer base; I strongly suspect that this really wouldn't matter economically because a) they make no $ and b) I'm guessing that 99.9% of Trump voters don't 'tweet' as a lifestyle-communication thing; and
2) he gets a bully pulpit and even more press as it 'looks' like the establishment is trying to censor him; and
3) suddenly Twitter would be seen to be taking sides. For a purported neutral third party carrier of messages, they would be taking the stance that they ARE now responsible for the messages they carry - that would impose HUGE liability on them, not to mention opening a massive can of worms in terms of potential litigation regarding their common-carrier stance.
Not really exclusive to Trump.
Pretty much anyone who's dropped a few $million on a shoreline estate (eg Kennedys, Walter Cronkite, David McCollough, etc) has fought against offshore wind farms on the exact same basis.
Hilly started her public career coming out of college and working (I believe as an intern) on the commission investigating Watergate, yet nobody (as far as I'm aware) has drawn the obvious parallel to her release of 50000 emails (which we all know have been pre-culled; the "top secret" emails being mentioned here are the ones that slipped through that process) and the release of Nixon's Watergate tapes with 18 minutes missing.
I'm sad that I can't post the picture of Ted Knight in a nautical suit here.
I know it's not old-slashdotty to be posting pictures and such, but it would just fit so neatly.
A comment system from this century (ie that can fundamentally accept cut'n'paste text without choking like a cat on a hairball) would be a better friend, I'm thinking.
I'm probably one of the few people in this country that found out about the Challenger explosion with a sigh of relief.
I was a senior in HS, and was taking classes offsite at a local college in the mornings. I had a tape deck in my car, so I rarely listened to news in the morning, and I think that day I'd even decided to skip class, sleep in, and screw around. So I'm minding my own business every morning.
I had to check in to my HS for the afternoon, though. When I walked into school, it was quiet. Like, CREEPY quiet...there were something like 2500 students in my highschool, it was lunchtime, and nearly completely silent. As I came into the commons, I could see that everyone - hundreds of kids and teachers alike - was just shocked, gobsmacked.
This was the 1980s. The era of Red Dawn, Reagan, The Day After, and 50,000 nuclear warheads. I genuinely feared that nuclear war had been announced.
When my g/f told me that the Challenger blew up, I may have even said aloud "Oh? Is that all?"
To this day, what I remember of that moment was my feeling of tremendous relief.
So when these companies tell you "ok you have to take our DSL modem/router" do they tell the customers that they're offering their bandwidth publicly? Do you as a customer get a discount?
Is there a security issue, say, if you have a home LAN with people publicly accessing your router?
Personally, unless there's a substantial discount, I'll do everything in my power from pringles-can antenna to simply removing the antennas and running cables to low-power WAPs (deep in the center of my home, far from my property boundaries) to make my 'public availability' as negligible as possible).
Seriously: "strong" != "good" in the context of a currency, depending on how you define good.
Science news seems to believe we can tell the difference of tens of milliseconds.
https://www.sciencenews.org/ar...
...is our brain's ability to portray simultaneity.
If you touch a person's toe and nose at the same time, the speed-of-travel for that signal and significantly different distances that signal travels SHOULD result in a noticeable lag between the two, but doesn't; even when blindfolded, a person feels them at the same time.
How is this possible?
At first glance, one might assume the brain is 'pausing' the nose-signal to wait for the toe-signal. But how does it know to DO this, when it doesn't know that a toe signal is even coming?
The best theory I've heard so far is that EVERY sensory input is delayed for the amount of time it would take the furthest signal to reach the brain, and then assembled into a coherent stream-of-time order as if time-stamped (but AFAIK there's no trace of a time-stamp signal in nerve signals).
Reading this, I really feel like I'm living in the future:
"The automatic monitoring system of a hydrogen maser atomic clock triggered an alarm which reported a deviation of 13.7 microseconds."
The reported "thousands of results" are thousands of exposed printers, not necessarily thousands of files so hosted.
I believe it was mentioned in the Economist that US localities issue something like $6 billion in moving violations every year.
With driverless cars, this drops to nearly zero.
Granted:
a) with a fully-implemented driverless system, logically then you probably need fewer officers because you're not policing the roads so much. Less ground to cover; and
b) we all despise the blink-and-you-miss-it towns squatting alongside the interstate, with their 70mph-to-35mph speed limits for 2 blocks, with one lazy-ass cop writing speeding tickets all day long to more or less fund the entire city budget.
But that latter caricature glosses over an important point: that cop sitting there is, in fact, on duty and available for emergency roles. They're not going to (or bloody well better not) sit and write you a ticket when a store gets robbed or someone gets shot. Essentially, the traffic-ticket revenue is an opportunistic and pretty-straightfoward user tax, filling the hours and hours of "nothing happening" so that when something important does happen, that officer is available.
Without that $6bn in revenue, police budgets will be distinctly pinched, and likely cause localities to raise taxes to pay for the level of police coverage to which they've become accustomed. Essentially that, or driverless cars will come with a HOST of user-based surcharges to prevent this (effective) tax from falling back on the locality.
I doubt the new system will ultimately be cheaper than the old.
As much as it's more 'validating' to assume something malignant, the fact is that more people are carrying concealed and even a 1kg chunk of metal on your belt is forgettable if you wear it regularly enough.
I should know, I regularly carry a jackknife and the TSA has collected many from me simply because I forget to dump my pocket crap before leaving the car at the airport (and airport security is so ridiculously slow, nobody has time to go back to their car).
Notice that article even says "...it was a game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of fantasy "Lord of the Rings"."
DID PATT PROPERLY ATTRIBUTE *HIS* RULES TO THE TOLKIEN PROPERTIES? /sarcasm
First, the entire world of 'gaming' back then was syncretic and collaborative. Chainmail was never (by anyone knowledgeable) considered to have sprung wholly formed from the forehead of Gygax.
Further, attribution wasn't anywhere near the priority then that it would be once these actually took shape as commercial products and an industry began to grow. Nobody familiar with the personalities of the early role-playing game world would be at all surprised that Gygax in particular would fail to credit someone else; just ask Dave Arneson.
I think your supposition that it has to do with population density is only indirectly true.
Does it have *something* to do with density? Sure...in a very basic sense: if it takes 3 weeks to search out and find someone to fight, yeah, not many hunter/gatherer tribes are going to have the 'leisure' to do so. And it's certainly likely that the frequency of such incidents would be directly related to the density of such groups.
But (as it seems you were implying) is it that organized conflict is a consequence of density in the sense of competition for scarce resources? Not at all; relatively organized murderous raids have been observed in primate groups that have no apparent resource issues and are simply young males looking for mates or just on a violent bender.
The propensity for non-defensive violence is seemingly inherent in primates; the growth of that concept to raids and war to me is a consequence of intelligence. Once you start to conceptualize cause and effect, it's more likely you'll survive such an act if you get 10 of your fellows to join you.
Thanks for confirming PRECISELY what the OP was saying: look at the tone of the various replies.
Plus, really, a stoner calling me dumb is...unconvincing.
"When all else fails, watch the way the parties debate and assess their credibility from their actions."
I agree.
Watch anyone who dares suggest AGW is still open to question get savaged in ANY public forum - from how the OP phrased the question, I believe he/she's seen that.
Google Bjorn Lomborg - someone who says "Global warming IS happening, there are just many many other things that are more imperative" - and see how he's been raked across the coals.
We've had 15+ years of prediction of doom from the Global Warming camp (a partial list at https://anotherslownewsday.wor... ), which are continually proven wrong, desperately quickly rationalized, explained away, then buried under the NEXT "forecast of doom".
Let's also review all the things that have been blamed on global warming: http://whatreallyhappened.com/... (it's hilarious, and fully linked)
I don't know if warming is happening. I don't believe anyone anymore either. I used to try to find raw sources, but I've been told dozens of times that I can't be expected to understand temp data and hell, it's probably been tweaked anyway. It's hard to imagine that 7 billion people busily generating heat and burning hydrocarbons wouldn't have SOME impact.
All I know is that the paleotemps seem to indicate very quick spikes of temperature and CO2 every 120k years or so for the last 2+ million years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg)
The current spike looks EXACTLY like the others, and is coming pretty much right on time.
For me, the AGW crowd has failed to explain in broad terms why something that's happened periodically, and is happening again, is somehow "THIS TIME" characteristically different than all the previous instances.
From TFA: "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete."
OK I get the point of the breathless marketing quote, but I think any reasonable extrapolation of the whole Plutonian controversy (and I'm still in the "it's a planet" camp) would be that lacking a bright, clear definition of a planet* then, the census of "planetary bodies" "in" the "solar system" was as much as guaranteed to increase. Hell we not only can't define a planet, we can't even define SOLAR SYSTEM.
We haven't really much begun to count/classify the bodies whose orbital focus is the sun - that region called the Oort cloud stretches out as much as a light year, by some arguments. (http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews-files-2013-03-Voyager-1-Finds-Mayhem-in-the-Heliopause-2-jpg.jpg)
I am absolutely certain that there are going to be other 'planet'-class bodies out there. This one at 600 au is stated to have an orbital period of 15000 years. Nemesis, @ 95000 AU (which astronomers have poo-poo'd) was postulated to have a period of 26 million years. At a certain point, one even has to start wondering if the search for such planets could even rely on periodicity, as their passage around this system may not even have stabilized since the early formation of the system itself.
In any case, there are likely many bodies out in the extra-Plutonian reaches of our system. Almost certainly.
*the IAUs 2006 vague rules are nearly meaningless: ...could, arguably, apply to Pluto (or if it doesn't apply to Pluto because it crosses Neptune's orbit, then wouldn't that ipso facto also remove Neptune (which would be ridiculous)?
1) is in orbit around the Sun,
2) has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
3) has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit
Scientific progress may provide the big new threats to humanity, but it's also provided more or less all the ADVANCEMENTS enjoyed by humanity as well, such as most of your kids not dying before age 2, or being able to survive that paper-cut infection. Dentistry.
I have no doubt that if you could mass the ongoing, sustained (and really compounding) science benefits to humanity vs the new dangers it's created, the benefits win handily.
In fact, taking the population as a handy shorthand, just now benefits outweigh risks globally by 7.125 billion points.
I think it's hilarious that you turn a discussion about Anne Frank into a an anti-Republican diatribe.
Quick: do you know the party of the president during WW2, the one that REJECTED refuge-seeking peoples of Europe, including a ship full of children?
BTW there's a pretty huge gulf between "refugee family with children" and the "single, healthy, male 20-something" 'refugee' that is the individual most reasonable people are rejecting.
Great points - thanks for the explanation. Obviously, while these signals crawl around our brains, EITHER:
a) they're of trivial importance, if any, to brain function, or
b) we've evolved ways of filtering the natural EMF we regularly encounter.
The abstract seems to suggest to me that the signals are by-products of other processes anyway, and thus have me leaning toward a), above.