There are arguments against evolution, most certainly. I never said they were solid arguments, but they do exist. One can produce an argument for virtually anything: arguments do not have to proceed demonstratively or according to strict logical structures (this does not invalidate the argumentative method in any way, it just puts limits on it's ability to establish certitude).
For example, one could argue against evolution that there is no satisfactorily established hypothesis for the origin of life. While evolution itself strictly speaking doesn't deal with that field, it does require some means of life originating from non-life (note that, strictly speaking, evolution doesn't care what that origin is: it could be, insofar as evolution itself is concerned, some supernatural means. Not to say that it is a good explanation, but that it is one). So, if science cannot explain the existence of life naturally, then how can it claim that life evolves naturally as well?
Never said it was a good argument: it is actually full of holes (for example, even if the origin of life is supernatural, it could still evolve according to natural rules). Finding those holes is an extremely useful intellectual exercise. To simply deny such arguments exist, instead of addressing them directly, is only to add more fuel to the anti-evolution fire. True, some people cannot actually be reasoned with and will deny it no matter what. But not everyone, and if you actually address the former people, and show others how they are wrong, you can bring all the reasonable people to your side (especially those who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to reasonable ideas), and really that is all your need. Not universal agreement (certainly not by some sort of imperial decree to stop all argument on a subject), but the agreement of all rational people. Like I said, probably not how this bill will turn out, but one can hope.
Students who are unable to argue against those who attempt to oppose evolution on an argumentative basis are unlikely to ever go anywhere in the scientific community anyways. In other words, if the bill allows teachers to point out the arguments against evolution, and allows the students the freedom to argue against the teacher for those arguments freely, then I do not see it as being a problem. However, in reality most teachers will just fail or severely down-grade students who disagree with them, and if the bill does not include provisions to prevent that (which I doubt it does) then it is a terrible idea.
Fill disclosure: I am religious, and I do believe evolution is a valid and highly probably scientific hypothesis (I don't want to say I "believe in" it, because it isn't a matter of faith, it is a matter of reason). The two things in no way contradict each other and anyone who claims they do doesn't know what they're talking about (most probably, doesn't know anything about either religion or science and their respective fields).
Once you get to the point where you are installing ferromagnetic ink under a person's skin, there are much, much easier ways to inflict pain. Even if you want a permanent, can trigger remotely system.
Now hackers, on the other hand, they could have a sadistic field day with this. Really, the embedded ink sound like a really really bad idea from a practical standpoint (MRI machines as others have mentioned, but there are tons of sources of magnetic fields that could be extremely painful, dangerous, or inconvenient). The wearable material, on the other hand, has extreme potential.
Flat wrong. Russia asked to be part of the shield and buy anti-missile missiles direct from the U.S. just like the Europeans are doing. But the U.S. turned them down (President Obama said "nyet"). So your theory doesn't fly.
Not relevant. What Russia/China want to sell (and in fact have a long history of doing exactly that) is not a ballistic-missile shield (which they don't possess) but ballistic missile systems (which they do) and which are rendered considerably less valuable if there is a semi-universal anti-ballistic system. Of course, it won't impact China or Russia's ability to blow up the planet: thousand of missiles with thousands of warheads assures no ABM system in existence right now could do that (not to mention the radioactive fallout from their destruction alone would be rather terrifying).
AV software can scan memory in order to find active malware, yes, but it cannot do so constantly. For example, in order to make sure that your browser isn't getting owned, or that malware isn't otherwise being attached to an active process, it would have to scan every change to memory, which would be prohibitive in terms of processing overhead. Instead, they generally scan whenever files are written to the hard drive. Since any permanent virus needs to do that at some point (and most malware works by downloading a file then executing that), that will usually catch and stop most malware at the very beginning. And since writing is comparatively slow (next to RAM), the overhead is minimal.
What this seems to do is run exclusively in RAM, which can be caught by AV doing a RAM sweep, but not by most resident AV systems which don't do regular RAM sweeps (again, because of the performance impact that would cause). It will either have to download a permanent program to the harddrive later (ideally, after getting "trusted" status to bypass AV software) or simply steal info while resident. Either way, most AV software will have trouble detecting it. I think if the malware gets written to swap, the AV will detect it than, but I could be wrong.
And of course the shock-wave itself causes some major control issues as you pass through the barrier itself, at least as I understand it, as well as creating a huge amount of drag. That is a large reason they had so much trouble breaking the barrier in the first place: the planes would lose control as they passed through it and crash. How much eliminating the "boom" itself will help with these problems, I don't know.
There are certain characteristics to the way C++ behaves (the manner in which you pass parameters, etc). Mainly, through having looked at lots and lots of code samples, they can say what they expect the compiled code to look like. If they know C++ compiled code looks like x, regular C looks like y, and this looked like z, it can't be C. Essentially, the code did things you simply can't do in C++ or C (even Objective C) by itself. The problem is, that method only allows you to compare to known languages. More details here.
It's basically like identifying an animal by footprint. Once you know a deer leaves a certain kind of footprint, you can identify more deer by examining footprints. But you can't identify an unknown animal that way: if you haven't seen a given footprint before, you won't know what animal it is, only what general characteristics it has (weight, etc.)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration collects reports from pilots of incidents related to electronic devices. Of 50 incidents in the most recent report check from last year, few had anything to do with cockpit interference. Mostly it was reports of people who simply didn’t turn off their device or laptop batteries overheating, not of any kind of interference from those devices.
Those incidents that were related to the plane’s avionics were purely speculation. For example, in one report, a fuel gauge on a Boeing 757 was not working properly during takeoff, but began working again when the plane was landing. The report says the pilot “suspects” a possible electronic device on the plane caused the interference. The pilot admitted he did not do any testing.
In other words, there is absolutely zero evidence that the device is a cause of interference. There are, of course, numerous examples of pilots claiming they caused interference, with no scientific evidence ever backing up those claims (I am, in fact, not aware of any such scientific results whatsoever.) Remember, correlation != causation... and every all the instances of interference is anecdotal and correlative at best. If the devices cause interference, than you should be able to replicate it scientifically. Until someone does, I'm calling it BS.
Uhh, dude, Avast is free for non-commercial use. All you have to do is register it once a year, which takes about ~30 seconds. I've used it for ~2 years now. And you can set it so the box doesn't pop-up when you have a full-screen app running (don't recall how, I haven't touched the settings on it in over a year now).
I've also found it to be the most lightweight unobtrusive AV out there. I tried Avira once: never again. Practically hosed my friend's system and ran like shit on my netbook (that one did pop-up constant notifications, and I mean CONSTANT). By contrast, Avast isn't even noticeable on the netbook at all (original generation 1.6ghz, I was impressed), and I have never once seen it interrupt a full-screen program in my two years of using it. In case you cannot tell, I recommend it. Only issue I've had is that it wants to sandbox most Steam games when they first run (but when set to open them normally and not ask again, it works just fine).
"Publicly announced" does not equal "started working on". Again, from that same Wikipedia article, it is stated that intelligence agencies probably knew about the existence of the enrichment facilities before they announced them publicly. In other words, it is entirely possible Bush's speech (remember, he would have had access to those intelligence reports of Iran nuclear facilities) was a consequence of the Iranian nuclear program, not the other way around. Bush made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think you can blame him for the Iranian nuclear program which they had been aspiring to for years before he was ever elected.
Statistics for burglaries per 100,000 people, using the most recent figures I could find (2006):
USA: 714.4
Holland: 427.5
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
On the other hand, in the UK whith some of the strictest gun laws in the world, there were 1,157.7 burglaries per 100,000 people (also, conveniently, in 2006 statistics). It's almost as if two data points are insufficient to establish a causative or even correlative relation of any kind.
But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings.
Assuming he is telling the truth, it is absolutely nothing like your comparison at all.
"BS" may have been a slightly poor choice of words (although appropriate for a politician). I meant you can continue expanding on one idea more, or seem to, without actually saying anything of any real significance (which can be difficult on the spot), until you come up with something actually relevant to say.
If would have the benefit of doubling as an "e-/i-(something)" pun in addition to its numerical quality. And no, don't say it. I'm aware that my suggestions tend to be irrational.
It isn't the irrationality of your suggestion that is the problem, it's that it is too complex.
So you can attest that government code quality is _SLIGHTLY_ more buggy than commercial code?? Notice the percentages, the wast majority of commercial code is complete crap too, the percentage is just _slightly_ higher for the government.
Financial web applications are 50% more likely than government one to be secure, and commercial software is almost double the government stuff. That isn't _slightly_ that is significantly. Yes, the vast majority of code everywhere sucks, the government just sucks considerably (not slightly) worse than regular business software.
"Uh" is natural for any human being not speaking from a prompter.
Which is why the very on of the first things anyone trained in any kind of public speaking whatsoever learns is how not to do that. Seriously, it isn't even that hard to learn. Find a friend willing to help, start making an improvised speech to them, everytime you say any filler words have them note it and point it out (you can start by having them record the number, than later interrupt when you use them). If you find yourself tempted to say "umm", don't say anything at all. Make it a pause instead. You can even practice it by yourself in a mirror (same thing: just start talking, refuse to use filler words like "Uh").
Once you start being able to go 4-5 minutes without using fillers, it will make your public speaking look ten times better. Plus, you will learn to think faster to fill the dead air (at least how to think up BS, if not actual content). Trust me, it is worth it to learn how to speak without using "uh" and "um." Granted, doing it in front of people is somewhat harder, but the basic idea is the exact same.
The only problem with that system is it makes all of those sites unaccessible from literally any other computer in the world, unless you carry the KeePass file around with you.
While probably not quite as secure, LastPass offers two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator, so even if someone keylogs my pass-phrase they still won't be able to get my passwords without also getting access to my Android device (which isn't a phone, so hacking it would be tricky too). Keep in mind unless you have enemies or do sensitive work, you only need enough security to stop automated attacks.
Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.
Really? My understanding was the efficiency limit of commercially practical models was still in the 10-15% range, while many of the research cells (from a quick check on Wikipedia) have already gotten to the 40%+ range (the absolute upper limit being 93%). Yes, that's "within an order of magnitude", but making panels with 2-3 times the efficiency would be a huge step forward. If those become commercially practical to build, solar technology would see a massive gain in practicality, since you wouldn't need huge fields to produce acceptable power. I could be wrong about those efficiency numbers, though (haven't looked into the matter all that extensively).
Now, the best solution I've heard of is solar-heated molten-salt heatsinks, which can generate power continuously (even at night) using stored energy. Even that is limited to areas where sunlight is pretty much 365 days a year (the Mojave desert, for one). But the simple fact is solar is too fickle to be practical for an Earth-based solution. If we ever get wireless power transmission or a space-elevator finished, orbital solar panels could potentially offer an amazing source of power, but short of that solar just isn't good enough to replace most of our energy needs (in my opinion, of course).
Because the story comes out when the technology is still in fairly early stages of development, and then it takes 5-10 years from that point for people to work out the engineering difficulties to actually bring it to full-scale production (or it turns out not to be practical).
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies.
I wouldn't call ~$1 billion USD a "small" cost by any measure whatsoever. Primary source (PDF Warning), secondary Wikipedia source. Note that these costs do not include post-launch (which I think it is safe to assume "marketing" falls under) costs, only that of the R&D to get to market approval. And while it depends on the circumstances, a lot of drug research at academic institutions is actually funded by corporations, not the government. Drug research is prohibitively expensive and requires 10+ years in most cases for the drug to reach market. You can't get investment for that from tiny startup companies.
Even the lowest boundary for drug development costs is $55 million: nowhere near something a small biotech company could afford (not by my definition of "small" anyways) out-of-pocket with no ROI for 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, take this (print version)
There are arguments against evolution, most certainly. I never said they were solid arguments, but they do exist. One can produce an argument for virtually anything: arguments do not have to proceed demonstratively or according to strict logical structures (this does not invalidate the argumentative method in any way, it just puts limits on it's ability to establish certitude).
For example, one could argue against evolution that there is no satisfactorily established hypothesis for the origin of life. While evolution itself strictly speaking doesn't deal with that field, it does require some means of life originating from non-life (note that, strictly speaking, evolution doesn't care what that origin is: it could be, insofar as evolution itself is concerned, some supernatural means. Not to say that it is a good explanation, but that it is one). So, if science cannot explain the existence of life naturally, then how can it claim that life evolves naturally as well?
Never said it was a good argument: it is actually full of holes (for example, even if the origin of life is supernatural, it could still evolve according to natural rules). Finding those holes is an extremely useful intellectual exercise. To simply deny such arguments exist, instead of addressing them directly, is only to add more fuel to the anti-evolution fire. True, some people cannot actually be reasoned with and will deny it no matter what. But not everyone, and if you actually address the former people, and show others how they are wrong, you can bring all the reasonable people to your side (especially those who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to reasonable ideas), and really that is all your need. Not universal agreement (certainly not by some sort of imperial decree to stop all argument on a subject), but the agreement of all rational people. Like I said, probably not how this bill will turn out, but one can hope.
Students who are unable to argue against those who attempt to oppose evolution on an argumentative basis are unlikely to ever go anywhere in the scientific community anyways. In other words, if the bill allows teachers to point out the arguments against evolution, and allows the students the freedom to argue against the teacher for those arguments freely, then I do not see it as being a problem. However, in reality most teachers will just fail or severely down-grade students who disagree with them, and if the bill does not include provisions to prevent that (which I doubt it does) then it is a terrible idea.
Fill disclosure: I am religious, and I do believe evolution is a valid and highly probably scientific hypothesis (I don't want to say I "believe in" it, because it isn't a matter of faith, it is a matter of reason). The two things in no way contradict each other and anyone who claims they do doesn't know what they're talking about (most probably, doesn't know anything about either religion or science and their respective fields).
Patents* don't cover ideas. Patents cover inventions. Call me up when having the idea for a warp drive means you know how to build one.
*Real, valid, how-they-are-meant-to-be-used patents. Software and design patents (such as the iPad/Galaxy Tablet thing) are just stupid.
Once you get to the point where you are installing ferromagnetic ink under a person's skin, there are much, much easier ways to inflict pain. Even if you want a permanent, can trigger remotely system.
Now hackers, on the other hand, they could have a sadistic field day with this. Really, the embedded ink sound like a really really bad idea from a practical standpoint (MRI machines as others have mentioned, but there are tons of sources of magnetic fields that could be extremely painful, dangerous, or inconvenient). The wearable material, on the other hand, has extreme potential.
Flat wrong. Russia asked to be part of the shield and buy anti-missile missiles direct from the U.S. just like the Europeans are doing. But the U.S. turned them down (President Obama said "nyet"). So your theory doesn't fly.
Not relevant. What Russia/China want to sell (and in fact have a long history of doing exactly that) is not a ballistic-missile shield (which they don't possess) but ballistic missile systems (which they do) and which are rendered considerably less valuable if there is a semi-universal anti-ballistic system. Of course, it won't impact China or Russia's ability to blow up the planet: thousand of missiles with thousands of warheads assures no ABM system in existence right now could do that (not to mention the radioactive fallout from their destruction alone would be rather terrifying).
AV software can scan memory in order to find active malware, yes, but it cannot do so constantly. For example, in order to make sure that your browser isn't getting owned, or that malware isn't otherwise being attached to an active process, it would have to scan every change to memory, which would be prohibitive in terms of processing overhead. Instead, they generally scan whenever files are written to the hard drive. Since any permanent virus needs to do that at some point (and most malware works by downloading a file then executing that), that will usually catch and stop most malware at the very beginning. And since writing is comparatively slow (next to RAM), the overhead is minimal.
What this seems to do is run exclusively in RAM, which can be caught by AV doing a RAM sweep, but not by most resident AV systems which don't do regular RAM sweeps (again, because of the performance impact that would cause). It will either have to download a permanent program to the harddrive later (ideally, after getting "trusted" status to bypass AV software) or simply steal info while resident. Either way, most AV software will have trouble detecting it. I think if the malware gets written to swap, the AV will detect it than, but I could be wrong.
And of course the shock-wave itself causes some major control issues as you pass through the barrier itself, at least as I understand it, as well as creating a huge amount of drag. That is a large reason they had so much trouble breaking the barrier in the first place: the planes would lose control as they passed through it and crash. How much eliminating the "boom" itself will help with these problems, I don't know.
There are certain characteristics to the way C++ behaves (the manner in which you pass parameters, etc). Mainly, through having looked at lots and lots of code samples, they can say what they expect the compiled code to look like. If they know C++ compiled code looks like x, regular C looks like y, and this looked like z, it can't be C. Essentially, the code did things you simply can't do in C++ or C (even Objective C) by itself. The problem is, that method only allows you to compare to known languages. More details here.
It's basically like identifying an animal by footprint. Once you know a deer leaves a certain kind of footprint, you can identify more deer by examining footprints. But you can't identify an unknown animal that way: if you haven't seen a given footprint before, you won't know what animal it is, only what general characteristics it has (weight, etc.)
Here you go: http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration collects reports from pilots of incidents related to electronic devices. Of 50 incidents in the most recent report check from last year, few had anything to do with cockpit interference. Mostly it was reports of people who simply didn’t turn off their device or laptop batteries overheating, not of any kind of interference from those devices.
Those incidents that were related to the plane’s avionics were purely speculation. For example, in one report, a fuel gauge on a Boeing 757 was not working properly during takeoff, but began working again when the plane was landing. The report says the pilot “suspects” a possible electronic device on the plane caused the interference. The pilot admitted he did not do any testing.
In other words, there is absolutely zero evidence that the device is a cause of interference. There are, of course, numerous examples of pilots claiming they caused interference, with no scientific evidence ever backing up those claims (I am, in fact, not aware of any such scientific results whatsoever.) Remember, correlation != causation... and every all the instances of interference is anecdotal and correlative at best. If the devices cause interference, than you should be able to replicate it scientifically. Until someone does, I'm calling it BS.
Uhh, dude, Avast is free for non-commercial use. All you have to do is register it once a year, which takes about ~30 seconds. I've used it for ~2 years now. And you can set it so the box doesn't pop-up when you have a full-screen app running (don't recall how, I haven't touched the settings on it in over a year now).
I've also found it to be the most lightweight unobtrusive AV out there. I tried Avira once: never again. Practically hosed my friend's system and ran like shit on my netbook (that one did pop-up constant notifications, and I mean CONSTANT). By contrast, Avast isn't even noticeable on the netbook at all (original generation 1.6ghz, I was impressed), and I have never once seen it interrupt a full-screen program in my two years of using it. In case you cannot tell, I recommend it. Only issue I've had is that it wants to sandbox most Steam games when they first run (but when set to open them normally and not ask again, it works just fine).
"Publicly announced" does not equal "started working on". Again, from that same Wikipedia article, it is stated that intelligence agencies probably knew about the existence of the enrichment facilities before they announced them publicly. In other words, it is entirely possible Bush's speech (remember, he would have had access to those intelligence reports of Iran nuclear facilities) was a consequence of the Iranian nuclear program, not the other way around. Bush made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think you can blame him for the Iranian nuclear program which they had been aspiring to for years before he was ever elected.
Statistics for burglaries per 100,000 people, using the most recent figures I could find (2006):
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
On the other hand, in the UK whith some of the strictest gun laws in the world, there were 1,157.7 burglaries per 100,000 people (also, conveniently, in 2006 statistics). It's almost as if two data points are insufficient to establish a causative or even correlative relation of any kind.
But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings.
Assuming he is telling the truth, it is absolutely nothing like your comparison at all.
"BS" may have been a slightly poor choice of words (although appropriate for a politician). I meant you can continue expanding on one idea more, or seem to, without actually saying anything of any real significance (which can be difficult on the spot), until you come up with something actually relevant to say.
If would have the benefit of doubling as an "e-/i-(something)" pun in addition to its numerical quality. And no, don't say it. I'm aware that my suggestions tend to be irrational.
It isn't the irrationality of your suggestion that is the problem, it's that it is too complex.
So you can attest that government code quality is _SLIGHTLY_ more buggy than commercial code?? Notice the percentages, the wast majority of commercial code is complete crap too, the percentage is just _slightly_ higher for the government.
Financial web applications are 50% more likely than government one to be secure, and commercial software is almost double the government stuff. That isn't _slightly_ that is significantly. Yes, the vast majority of code everywhere sucks, the government just sucks considerably (not slightly) worse than regular business software.
"Uh" is natural for any human being not speaking from a prompter.
Which is why the very on of the first things anyone trained in any kind of public speaking whatsoever learns is how not to do that. Seriously, it isn't even that hard to learn. Find a friend willing to help, start making an improvised speech to them, everytime you say any filler words have them note it and point it out (you can start by having them record the number, than later interrupt when you use them). If you find yourself tempted to say "umm", don't say anything at all. Make it a pause instead. You can even practice it by yourself in a mirror (same thing: just start talking, refuse to use filler words like "Uh").
Once you start being able to go 4-5 minutes without using fillers, it will make your public speaking look ten times better. Plus, you will learn to think faster to fill the dead air (at least how to think up BS, if not actual content). Trust me, it is worth it to learn how to speak without using "uh" and "um." Granted, doing it in front of people is somewhat harder, but the basic idea is the exact same.
The only problem with that system is it makes all of those sites unaccessible from literally any other computer in the world, unless you carry the KeePass file around with you.
While probably not quite as secure, LastPass offers two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator, so even if someone keylogs my pass-phrase they still won't be able to get my passwords without also getting access to my Android device (which isn't a phone, so hacking it would be tricky too). Keep in mind unless you have enemies or do sensitive work, you only need enough security to stop automated attacks.
Really? Because this graph shows research efficiencies having been achieved of over 40%.
Sounds more like evidence that the US needs to sit down, shut up, and take a chill pill. Just mellow out.
His story was about California, not the US.
I'm only partly joking: California is insanely paranoid about guns, far more than most parts of the US.
Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.
Really? My understanding was the efficiency limit of commercially practical models was still in the 10-15% range, while many of the research cells (from a quick check on Wikipedia) have already gotten to the 40%+ range (the absolute upper limit being 93%). Yes, that's "within an order of magnitude", but making panels with 2-3 times the efficiency would be a huge step forward. If those become commercially practical to build, solar technology would see a massive gain in practicality, since you wouldn't need huge fields to produce acceptable power. I could be wrong about those efficiency numbers, though (haven't looked into the matter all that extensively).
Now, the best solution I've heard of is solar-heated molten-salt heatsinks, which can generate power continuously (even at night) using stored energy. Even that is limited to areas where sunlight is pretty much 365 days a year (the Mojave desert, for one). But the simple fact is solar is too fickle to be practical for an Earth-based solution. If we ever get wireless power transmission or a space-elevator finished, orbital solar panels could potentially offer an amazing source of power, but short of that solar just isn't good enough to replace most of our energy needs (in my opinion, of course).
Because the story comes out when the technology is still in fairly early stages of development, and then it takes 5-10 years from that point for people to work out the engineering difficulties to actually bring it to full-scale production (or it turns out not to be practical).
Also, oblig xkcd.
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies.
I wouldn't call ~$1 billion USD a "small" cost by any measure whatsoever. Primary source (PDF Warning), secondary Wikipedia source. Note that these costs do not include post-launch (which I think it is safe to assume "marketing" falls under) costs, only that of the R&D to get to market approval. And while it depends on the circumstances, a lot of drug research at academic institutions is actually funded by corporations, not the government. Drug research is prohibitively expensive and requires 10+ years in most cases for the drug to reach market. You can't get investment for that from tiny startup companies.
Even the lowest boundary for drug development costs is $55 million: nowhere near something a small biotech company could afford (not by my definition of "small" anyways) out-of-pocket with no ROI for 10 years.