But do the amber alerts do anything if there are too many of them?
Of course they do. Crying wolf desensitizes people, but the sheer amount justifies larger appropriations to certain departments.
And direct-to-phone communicaton like this alert system allows the phone companies and law enforcement agencies a pretext for a pen register of the IMEIs of phone capable devices that don't even have a subscription, as long as they're powered.
Sad but true. American culture has a very strong need to quantize and pigeon hole everything, with a goal of reducing everything to binary decisions. It's either or. Gradients must not be allowed to exist, and "sound judgement" is to be avoided - it opens up for lawsuits. Follow the letter, even if stupid, and you're safe.
> driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.
Just like gun control.
Just like gun rights, you mean. Gun control proponents are quite often objective, looking at statistics like data from other Western countries that tightened control like the UK and Australia, instead of appeals to feelings and heritage. Sure, there are knee-jerk reactions for gun control too, but those are fewer, and not nearly as pervasive as the irrational feelings-based "from my cold dead hands" crowd.
Even in my day I'd say the longest period out of touch between dinner and supper would be 3-4 hours at the most, if I didn't show up for school or didn't get home from school the panic would start much sooner.
Different cultures and times have different norms, I think. As long as I were home by the time matching my age, it didn't matter whether I was out the entire day without giving notice. There were Rules, like no swimming without at least one person staying ashore, or no getting into cars unless driven by parents of friends, and if there were an Event like a family dinner, I'd be home in time to clean up before then, but by and large, we kids were allowed to go missing for the day, and expected to be able to take care of ourselves from reaching school age. That's when we received a key to the house. It was expected that we'd often come home with cuts and bruises, or scared by an experience, or deserved a scalding if we did something stupid.
There's also the problem that SMS can only reach those who have a SIM card and a phone number. If you have a data-only plan without a phone number, or no plan at all, or have removed the SIM card, you don't get SMS. The emergency alert system operates separately to this, and can push an alert as long as you are within range of a tower.
(And it gives a pretext for law enforcement and politicians to pen register devices without a phone number...)
If you're going to be pedantic, you should take into account the expansion of the universe.
Variable and currently increasing expansion, even. It sure complicates calculations quite a bit. And makes the size of the observable universe in any direction bigger in light years than the age of the universe.
However, be that as it may, it doesn't change that it's always wrong to think of light from X light years away as something that happened X years ago. The "ago" is meaningless because you're dealing with different reference frames with wildly varying time.
In the Earth frame of reference, the light that we see today began its journey around 12 billion years ago.
No, it didn't. The Earth's frame of reference does not include the remote location, and the word "ago" is meaningless. Rewind the universe to 12 billion years earlier in Earth's (or what was "here" before) reference frame, and you do not rewind 12 billion years everywhere else too. There is no master clock that ticks for the entire universe. Time is a local phenomenon only.
It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us,
No, that is not what it means. It took no time for the light at all to reach us. Time passes slower and distances become shorter the faster you go. Travelling at c, the Lorenz factor for the light itself is infinite, and no time passed for it.
What it means is that if light had been governed by Newtonian physics, it would have taken light 12 billion years to get from there to here. But Newtonian physics turned out to be only an approximation for low speeds, and was overturned a century ago. Einstein discovered that time is a local phenomenon, and that it is meaningless to use phrases like "ago" for relativistic speeds and distances - no two clocks will ever agree, and may disagree by billions of years.
Could the common cold and influenza be eradicated if everyone on earth just spent a week quarantining themselves?
Or do the viruses move among animal populations as well?
That a couple of the biggest flu strains are called "bird flu", what do you think?
A big problem is that many viral diseases are endemic to animal populations, and require minimal mutations that happen all the time[*] to jump to humans. They never survive long in humans, because they are too aggressive - both killing the host and being killed by the host is bad from the virus' perspective. Being able to infect and spread without doing much damage to the host is a much better survival mechanism, and what happens with most endemic diseases. For the host, it can even be beneficial to have an infection that doesn't cause harm, but out-competes similar infections that would.
[*]: In part due to the rapid reproduction cycle, and in part because viruses lack the DNA repair mechanisms that more advanced species have.
"A drug like this could be extremely beneficial if given early in infection, and we are working on making a version that could be inhaled, so that it gets to the lungs quickly."
Just spray all the big cities with crop dusters. What could possibly go wrong?
You kinda forgot an important detail for your readers:
IS THIS A REMOTE EXPLOIT?
The summary is pretty clear: they didn't exploit physical access, but had to be "running with kernel-level privileges". So it's obviously not a remote exploit in itself, although other vulnerabilities in an OS and app that allows a remote user to run bespoke code with kernel-level privileges would open up for remote attacks. But if you have that big holes in your system to start with, you're already fucked three ways over from Sunday.
The main risk here, as I see it, is that it may be used to gain access to encryption keys and similar that don't reside in memory that a superuser normally has access to.
Except that quite often, vulnerabilities are introduced in the form of patches. A well-designed unpatched system can be far more secure than one that receives frequent patches - a certain number of those patches are going to be to "improve user experience", not fix vulnerabilities, and released for marketing purposes to sell more, not to better protect people who have already handed over the money. The development teams are often not the same either - the engineers that created a fairly safe product are generally no longer involved once a system hits maintenance phase, and can't raise their hand and say "wait a minute" when someone proposes something stupid. Patching in UPnP and other autoconfiguration may add convenience and increase sales, but are security risks in themselves. And increased reporting capabilities or adding a backdoor for technical support convenience are other vectors to exploit. To say nothing about badly verified new code for other "improvements".
... which means the router has firewall capabilities.
In the same way as a shoe has mallet capabilities. If you route UDP packets to 192.42.112.1/21 to a sink, or don't allow protocol 9 packets to traverse between internal and external networks, that adds security, but it does not make it a firewall.
Correct. It might be that those with a lower life expectancy for other reasons, like poverty during childhood, more often end up in physically demanding jobs.
Are you one of those people who reply to HTML with plain text, and who use *stars* and _underscore_ to emphasize things since bold and italic are unavailable in plain text?
Those are not stars. I take it you're visually inclined, and that reading and writing isn't your strength?
There is a universal clock. It's the speed of light.
That is not a clock. The speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s for all reference frames, but that's a ratio. As distance (m) shortens, time (s) contracts so the ratio remains the same. But time changes.
If you travel at 99.5% of light speed, you might insist that you travelled one light year in a little over a year, yet someone watching your travel from the sideline might say you travelled ten light years in over ten years. Both of you are correct, because both distance and time changes depending on viewpoint.
Your question does not make sense. It's like thinking that the Schroedinger's cat box would have twice the mass because there would be one instance with a live cat and one with a dead cat. That's the case for neither the Copenhagen nor the Everett interpretation.
According to the common accepted theories, the laws of physics work in both directions. That's the null hypothesis. That the arrow of time can only point one way is the anomaly here, and the extraordinary claim.
It may be that we can only observe in one direction, but as of yet, there's really not much except subjective observations that support the claim that time and entropy can only work in one direction. Measuring data objectively might be impossible without begging the question.
That doesn't mean we cannot safely assume that we won't be able to travel backwards in time, just like we can safely assume there was no "before" the universe. At present levels of understanding, it can neither be proven nor disproven, but what we observe tells us that from our point of view, it's a safe assumption that we can't. That doesn't imply that our point of view is the only valid one. If anything, the null hypothesis should be that it isn't. But it's our point of view, and seems valid for us.
Going back in time and killing your ancestor, an alleged paradox, isn't. You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
You're assuming a single universe and the Copenhagen interpretation. If, as some think, the universe branches at every possible probability because they're all true, there's nothing that logically prevents you from going back in time to kill your grandfather without violating the law of causality, because there will be countless universe branches where you didn't.
"That means time should also slow down for the astronauts relative to people on the surface. You'd think that might even out, but actually their velocity time dilation has a bigger effect than their gravitational time dilation, so astronauts end up aging slower than people on Earth."
That's drawing the wrong conclusion. They age at the same speed; it's time itself that is elastic and dependent on the observer. If ten years passed on an astronaut's clock while your clock shows twelve years, he didn't age slower.
Being able to grasp how time is a local phenomenon only with no universal clock ticking time away for everyone is the great hurdle that separates those who understand relativity from those who don't. Use of words like "slower", "before" and "ago" in relativistic or big bang contexts should always be viewed with suspicion that someone is imposing a particular reference frame when they shouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
But do the amber alerts do anything if there are too many of them?
Of course they do. Crying wolf desensitizes people, but the sheer amount justifies larger appropriations to certain departments.
And direct-to-phone communicaton like this alert system allows the phone companies and law enforcement agencies a pretext for a pen register of the IMEIs of phone capable devices that don't even have a subscription, as long as they're powered.
Yes.
You are beginning to understand American culture.
Sad but true.
American culture has a very strong need to quantize and pigeon hole everything, with a goal of reducing everything to binary decisions. It's either or. Gradients must not be allowed to exist, and "sound judgement" is to be avoided - it opens up for lawsuits.
Follow the letter, even if stupid, and you're safe.
> driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.
Just like gun control.
Just like gun rights, you mean.
Gun control proponents are quite often objective, looking at statistics like data from other Western countries that tightened control like the UK and Australia, instead of appeals to feelings and heritage. Sure, there are knee-jerk reactions for gun control too, but those are fewer, and not nearly as pervasive as the irrational feelings-based "from my cold dead hands" crowd.
Even in my day I'd say the longest period out of touch between dinner and supper would be 3-4 hours at the most, if I didn't show up for school or didn't get home from school the panic would start much sooner.
Different cultures and times have different norms, I think. As long as I were home by the time matching my age, it didn't matter whether I was out the entire day without giving notice.
There were Rules, like no swimming without at least one person staying ashore, or no getting into cars unless driven by parents of friends, and if there were an Event like a family dinner, I'd be home in time to clean up before then, but by and large, we kids were allowed to go missing for the day, and expected to be able to take care of ourselves from reaching school age. That's when we received a key to the house. It was expected that we'd often come home with cuts and bruises, or scared by an experience, or deserved a scalding if we did something stupid.
There's also the problem that SMS can only reach those who have a SIM card and a phone number. If you have a data-only plan without a phone number, or no plan at all, or have removed the SIM card, you don't get SMS.
The emergency alert system operates separately to this, and can push an alert as long as you are within range of a tower.
(And it gives a pretext for law enforcement and politicians to pen register devices without a phone number...)
But sometimes asking the question leads to a better question. How about, "If we can create the (or a) technology, do we have to?"
The tragedy of the commons say that if you don't, someone else will, and you will suffer for it.
If you're going to be pedantic, you should take into account the expansion of the universe.
Variable and currently increasing expansion, even. It sure complicates calculations quite a bit. And makes the size of the observable universe in any direction bigger in light years than the age of the universe.
However, be that as it may, it doesn't change that it's always wrong to think of light from X light years away as something that happened X years ago. The "ago" is meaningless because you're dealing with different reference frames with wildly varying time.
In the Earth frame of reference, the light that we see today began its journey around 12 billion years ago.
No, it didn't. The Earth's frame of reference does not include the remote location, and the word "ago" is meaningless. Rewind the universe to 12 billion years earlier in Earth's (or what was "here" before) reference frame, and you do not rewind 12 billion years everywhere else too.
There is no master clock that ticks for the entire universe. Time is a local phenomenon only.
It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us,
No, that is not what it means. It took no time for the light at all to reach us. Time passes slower and distances become shorter the faster you go. Travelling at c, the Lorenz factor for the light itself is infinite, and no time passed for it.
What it means is that if light had been governed by Newtonian physics, it would have taken light 12 billion years to get from there to here.
But Newtonian physics turned out to be only an approximation for low speeds, and was overturned a century ago. Einstein discovered that time is a local phenomenon, and that it is meaningless to use phrases like "ago" for relativistic speeds and distances - no two clocks will ever agree, and may disagree by billions of years.
Could the common cold and influenza be eradicated if everyone on earth just spent a week quarantining themselves?
Or do the viruses move among animal populations as well?
That a couple of the biggest flu strains are called "bird flu", what do you think?
A big problem is that many viral diseases are endemic to animal populations, and require minimal mutations that happen all the time[*] to jump to humans. They never survive long in humans, because they are too aggressive - both killing the host and being killed by the host is bad from the virus' perspective. Being able to infect and spread without doing much damage to the host is a much better survival mechanism, and what happens with most endemic diseases. For the host, it can even be beneficial to have an infection that doesn't cause harm, but out-competes similar infections that would.
[*]: In part due to the rapid reproduction cycle, and in part because viruses lack the DNA repair mechanisms that more advanced species have.
"A drug like this could be extremely beneficial if given early in infection, and we are working on making a version that could be inhaled, so that it gets to the lungs quickly."
Just spray all the big cities with crop dusters. What could possibly go wrong?
You kinda forgot an important detail for your readers:
IS THIS A REMOTE EXPLOIT?
The summary is pretty clear: they didn't exploit physical access, but had to be "running with kernel-level privileges". So it's obviously not a remote exploit in itself, although other vulnerabilities in an OS and app that allows a remote user to run bespoke code with kernel-level privileges would open up for remote attacks. But if you have that big holes in your system to start with, you're already fucked three ways over from Sunday.
The main risk here, as I see it, is that it may be used to gain access to encryption keys and similar that don't reside in memory that a superuser normally has access to.
Except that quite often, vulnerabilities are introduced in the form of patches. A well-designed unpatched system can be far more secure than one that receives frequent patches - a certain number of those patches are going to be to "improve user experience", not fix vulnerabilities, and released for marketing purposes to sell more, not to better protect people who have already handed over the money. The development teams are often not the same either - the engineers that created a fairly safe product are generally no longer involved once a system hits maintenance phase, and can't raise their hand and say "wait a minute" when someone proposes something stupid.
Patching in UPnP and other autoconfiguration may add convenience and increase sales, but are security risks in themselves. And increased reporting capabilities or adding a backdoor for technical support convenience are other vectors to exploit. To say nothing about badly verified new code for other "improvements".
... which means the router has firewall capabilities.
In the same way as a shoe has mallet capabilities.
If you route UDP packets to 192.42.112.1/21 to a sink, or don't allow protocol 9 packets to traverse between internal and external networks, that adds security, but it does not make it a firewall.
Many routers let you add rules for various packet types and features, which can add security.
Correlation isn't causation.
Correct. It might be that those with a lower life expectancy for other reasons, like poverty during childhood, more often end up in physically demanding jobs.
Interestingly, the system is only able to support up to 10 bumper stickers.
Per car, or is that the total for the entire system?
begin 644 -
;22!T;W1A;&QY(&%G<F5E('=I=&@@=&AA="X*
`
end
Are you one of those people who reply to HTML with plain text, and who use *stars* and _underscore_ to emphasize things since bold and italic are unavailable in plain text?
Those are not stars. I take it you're visually inclined, and that reading and writing isn't your strength?
Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.
Yes, but they all lack a decent editor...
There is a universal clock. It's the speed of light.
That is not a clock.
The speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s for all reference frames, but that's a ratio. As distance (m) shortens, time (s) contracts so the ratio remains the same. But time changes.
If you travel at 99.5% of light speed, you might insist that you travelled one light year in a little over a year, yet someone watching your travel from the sideline might say you travelled ten light years in over ten years. Both of you are correct, because both distance and time changes depending on viewpoint.
Where is the mass of these other universes?
Your question does not make sense.
It's like thinking that the Schroedinger's cat box would have twice the mass because there would be one instance with a live cat and one with a dead cat. That's the case for neither the Copenhagen nor the Everett interpretation.
According to the common accepted theories, the laws of physics work in both directions. That's the null hypothesis. That the arrow of time can only point one way is the anomaly here, and the extraordinary claim.
It may be that we can only observe in one direction, but as of yet, there's really not much except subjective observations that support the claim that time and entropy can only work in one direction. Measuring data objectively might be impossible without begging the question.
That doesn't mean we cannot safely assume that we won't be able to travel backwards in time, just like we can safely assume there was no "before" the universe. At present levels of understanding, it can neither be proven nor disproven, but what we observe tells us that from our point of view, it's a safe assumption that we can't. That doesn't imply that our point of view is the only valid one. If anything, the null hypothesis should be that it isn't. But it's our point of view, and seems valid for us.
Going back in time and killing your ancestor, an alleged paradox, isn't. You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
You're assuming a single universe and the Copenhagen interpretation. If, as some think, the universe branches at every possible probability because they're all true, there's nothing that logically prevents you from going back in time to kill your grandfather without violating the law of causality, because there will be countless universe branches where you didn't.
"That means time should also slow down for the astronauts relative to people on the surface. You'd think that might even out, but actually their velocity time dilation has a bigger effect than their gravitational time dilation, so astronauts end up aging slower than people on Earth."
That's drawing the wrong conclusion. They age at the same speed; it's time itself that is elastic and dependent on the observer. If ten years passed on an astronaut's clock while your clock shows twelve years, he didn't age slower.
Being able to grasp how time is a local phenomenon only with no universal clock ticking time away for everyone is the great hurdle that separates those who understand relativity from those who don't. Use of words like "slower", "before" and "ago" in relativistic or big bang contexts should always be viewed with suspicion that someone is imposing a particular reference frame when they shouldn't.