There are a number of things that seem a little dubious in this story, possibly because of plain old sensationalism or translation problems. The idea of a remote detonator isn't really one of them though. For one thing, it allows someone observing, say from a window somewhere, to set off the bomb for maximum effect. Also, it gets around the problem of a sudden attack of nerves or conscience on the part of the bomber at the last minute if they don't actually know when the last minute is.
I should also point out that, with all of the vilification of suicide bombers, people very seldom consider their motivations. While, undoubtedly, some of them are committed zealots, entirely ready to kill and die, others are maybe not so much. Many of them are going to be recruited and essentially brainwashed, manipulated, or even threatened. Let's not forget that pretty much all terrorist organizations are heavily mixed up with organized crime. I remember talking to some Irish college students back in the early 90's about the IRA. The IRA they were mostly familiar with wasn't chiefly concerned with bombings and politics, they were chiefly concerned with running protection rackets, money lending (with dire penalties for people who couldn't pay up), "solving problems" (ie, beating people up and possibly killing them) and settling disputes for a fee, and also, to some degree, charity. Most terrorist organizations are like that, acting as violent parallel governments, court systems and banking systems. Therefore, there are plenty of people who end up owing debts they can't pay back to some part of the organization or being obligated in some other way. It's not inconceivable that some of those people end up "volunteering" to blow themselves up essentially under pain of death for themselves and their relatives if they refuse. Suicide bombers like that will probably end up being held very closely, right up to the point where it's too late for them. Therefore they're going to end up in a "suicide" belt that they can't take off or disarm and detonated by someone else, because they can't be relied on to do it themselves by their handlers.
In the end, it's really hard to tell. The authorities probably dig up all kinds of evidence and produce a timeline and detailed information on the motivations of a suicide bomber. The chances of the public ever getting any of that information, especially any information that makes the bomber look more like a misguided human being, or even a victim, than a monster, is very slim.
Is it a war zone? I thought it was still at the level of protests. Although snipers shooting demonstrators seems like a great way to turn it into a civil war.
It also describes people who have been traveling and haven't had an opportunity to change and clean up before hurrying to an appointment they're already a day late for.
I'm not rally much of a gamer these days. I'm actually turned off by all this on-line gaming community stuff with achievements, rankings, and blah de blah. Stay off my lawn! Nevertheless, I'm going to weigh in on this.
I can see how it could certainly be possible to detect cheating in a number of ways via achievements. For example, have an achievement for collecting all of the weebles in a level, but hide one of the weebles in a part of the map that's inaccessible, then conclude that anyone who actually gets that achievement is using a hack that lets them fly or walk through walls, or collect weebles without actually getting close to them, etc. Or there might be some that you can't get at the same time, as you point out. Those seem to be pretty obvious proof of cheating.
Except that we've all seen, I hope, speed runs of various games. People using in game mechanics in ways that completely confound the expectations of the designers. Anyone remember the hidden areas you could reach in Metroid back in the day by trapping yourself in a door, then collapsing to a ball and standing up again really fast to climb upwards? You could also use that trick to get to places you weren't supposed to be able to get to yet. There were plenty of old games where you could use collision detection tricks to access areas prematurely without having collected the 7 magic keys yet, etc. There were also plenty of glitches that let you get stuck in a wall without any real advantage to you. Think of all the tricks you could pull rocket jumping in various games. The designers set up worlds with certain rules and sometimes you could find glitches in those rules. Sometimes it wasn't even a glitch, sometimes it's because they simply hadn't planned for all the possible consequences of their rules.
So, there's all sorts of things that can be done. You might be able to hurl your in-game avatar the entire length of a map and drop grenades as you go, simultaneously blowing up groups of enemies that you shouldn't be able to engage simultaneously and earning achievements for both. You might be able to reach the skybox and glide along one of the seams to places that are otherwise unreachable. You might be able to let the impact of an enemies weapon throw you through a wall to a place you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach yet and thereby perform actions out of order of the game logic. You might discover that you can bounce off an enemies head and go higher each time. You might discover that you can push the last remaining enemy of one type into a room with the last remaining enemy of another type and kill them together, earning two achievements at the same time, etc. etc.
Some of those things, the game company might look at and conclude that, even though you're using the in game physics, they're still cheating, and you should know that, for example, once you've been knocked through a solid wall by an enemy that you're in a place you shouldn't be yet and should stop playing. If you really know it's a glitch and you're deliberately exploiting it, they have a point, maybe. On the other hand, if you've been playing for hours, then a glitch occurs to your advantage, are you supposed to just stop playing? Kill yourself and restart the level? The entire game? Reroll your character? What about when it's not a glitch? What about when it's something that the game creators just didn't think of like the example of getting together two of the last type of each enemy. Maybe there's a barrier to the door of the room that you need to push them through that they can't pass, but the designers never thought to do that for the window? Or maybe they forgot to consider all the consequences of their ricocheting grenade that also does damage to whatever it ricochets off of and you bounce it off one enemies head, through a door, down a hall, up a shaft and blow up the second enemy all in the same second?
The point is, I don't automatically believe them on a simple statement where they declare that they double checked and he was cheating. I've spent lon
Not literally, no, but they do it virtually. The casinos all talk to each other and they blacklist people. So, once labeled a cheater by one casino, someone is thereafter branded a cheater by the entire "community" of casinos. You could probably make a decent legal argument about libel in that case since they've done significant harm to your reputation within the entirety of the only "community" where that reputation actually matters.
For anyone willing to put the effort in, trains obviously are very easy to derail. All it takes is cutting out a section of rail on a curve which can easily be done by anyone with power tools. Someone putting in more effort could even bend the rails or insert a pre-bent section of rail that they brought with them.
As for a remote override on the system, that could be done, but would probably be just as likely to be exploited as to be useful. Same reason a remote override on planes might be a bad idea. As for powered rails... That only happens in subway systems. Trains can consume a heap of power, sending enough along the rails means that touching them is fatal, so it's not something you can use everywhere. There's overhead power wires like in trolley systems, but you need a lot of power like I said. You'd need really thick cables and a short would be very bad. Pretty much all trains that go a decent distance have big diesel engines. From what I've heard, the rails often do have a current run through them in places regardless, but it's just enough so that an approaching train will break the circuit and make the barriers drop. Although, systems like that may be outdated. They probably all use pressure sensors and/or wireless signaling now.
A terrorist takeover of a train would be easy, but it's also true that there's not much that they could do with it once they've got it except take hostages, which they could do in something that isn't moving. So, as a target, the more likely thing is derailment or blowing up some particularly nasty and/or valuable cargo. Although, if they were aiming for derailment, they might want to sabotage the brakes and ramp up the speed.
As for the damage a derailed train can do, don't forget that trains towing a hundred cars aren't that unusual. Loaded up, that's in the neighborhood of 10,000 tons. A moving train has a tremendous amount of energy behind it and could probably be made to go a very long distance without rails. They also travel through lots of sensitive industrial areas, etc.
Overall a plane is certainly much more versatile than a plane. For simple acts of terrorism, however, a train is probably a much softer target since the rails are so vulnerable.
Well duh. People who expect otherwise are getting their ideas about martial arts from movies and TV. Might as well believe in detectives who solve a new murder every week and that you can have realistic immersive VR, but you'll die in real life if you die in the VR etc. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who takes martial arts classes will be a better fighter than they would be without them (barring debilitating injuries). That's pretty much going to be true even if only for the daily exercise. It doesn't make them a better fighter than everyone who hasn't taken the classes just automatically. It's exactly the same as any other skill. Someone can train for years, maybe all their life, and some newbie with talent or some physical attribute that gives them an edge can come along and best them with no training or maybe just a few lessons. It's true for chess, basketball (consider a super-well trained 5' 2'' basketball player vs. someone naturally athletic and 8 feet tall who can just reach up and put the ball into the basket), tennis, racecar driving, gymnastics, all kinds of martial arts, academics,and just about everything else.
All that doesn't mean that the training is somehow worthless, just that some people are naturally better at some things than others. Usually there's a tradeoff where they're better at one thing and worse at others. Realistically though, there are people who are better at absolutely everything than some other people: faster, stronger, better reflexes, better eyesight, better balance, better memory, better learning skills, more intelligent in every way, etc. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to measure that sort of thing objectively of course. Especially if you're going to claim it's hereditary. It could just be nutrition or lack of disease, etc. Plus, despite what insane social Darwinists might think, all the superpeople might die in a plague along with 99% of humanity while a subgroup with some sort of mutation that limits their intelligence and athletic ability, but also confers immunity, survives.
In any case, the "jocks" who come off the streets and defeat black-belts may be good in a fight. Put them in a fight with a parallel version of themselves who trained in martial arts from a young age and the parallel universe version is the one I would put my money on if I gambled.
You just need more ballast, and different ratios for leverage since it will be falling faster. The real limiting factor with a trebuchet is the strength of the materials. With a redesign, you should certainly be able to get a trebuchet working as well as it does on earth. It would need to be a big redesign, however. One important consideration is that, although the projectile would have 1/6th the weight it has on earth, it would still have the same mass and therefore the same inertia. That means that elements of the trebuchet that are under tension would mostly be under the same stresses they would be on earth. There might be distinct advantages to linear acceleration vs curved. I think it would take a while to come up with a practical design, and it's all speculation up to that point.
All that said, I'm not so sure you actually could use a trebuchet for this. You need to get the payload up to escape velocity, which is over eight thousand kilometers per hour on the moon. What's the longest you could make the trebuchet path? Maybe a few hundred meters with advanced materials and the moons low gravity? Hmm. Well, from what I can find, a trebuchet has been able to get a pumpkin up to around 700 KPH, so you "only" need to get a little more than an order of magnitude more out of it... I guess it's a big maybe.
Probably because the little humorous "I'm on your side" comment falls a little flat from the person heading the executive and who is therefore, provided the buck actually stops there, the one responsible for it. If the President needs to get a pat-down or be irradiated before getting on a plane, it's news to me. Similarly, we don't appreciate comments about how expensive it is to shop for the holidays from the boss who just cut our Christmas bonus. It's in really poor taste.
Planes aren't really all that easy to depressurize either. People believe all kinds of stupid things about depressurization. Like the idea that one bullet hole in the side of the plane would kill everyone on board. Just dumb. If the plane loses pressure, everyone breathes emergency air and the plane lands. Trains are hard to divert to Cuba, but they're really, really, really easy to derail. They are absolutely dependent on their tracks. They also have huge amounts of mass behind them, far more than any plane with just a few loaded cars. Not to mention that they can be carrying some really nasty stuff. Once they're derailed, the brakes don't do a lot of good either.
The difference between trains and planes is that you don't need to be in the train to attack it or use it in an attack. Even if you want to board the train, you don't need to get on at the station, you can board it while it's in motion a number of ways. The same is even more true for buses, which is why the recent trials of TSA style pat-downs for buses were so pathetically ridiculous. Of course, the proper response to the 9/11 hijackings have already taken place. That response is a change in public education on plane hijackings. It used to be that the proper thing to do in a hijacking was to comply with the hijackers and wait to be rescued by professionals. Now the proper thing to do is overwhelm the hijackers with superior numbers. A small group of hijackers with boxcutters and a fake bomb aren't going to be able to take over a plane again. If they hadn't been pushing the "don't be a hero" line on fliers for years, the World Trade center towers would probably still be standing.
Overall, I would say that TSA style pat-downs aren't necessary at all simply by looking at the numbers. The potential payoff in saved lives just doesn't seem worth it. Not even US society has traditionally been that risk-averse, but people are strange. It's like child disappearances and murders. Some of them get days, weeks, months or years of media coverage. But when they show you the statistics, you realize that those are just the tip of the iceburg. The reason is that people can't care about everything, there's just too much, they have to instead focus on certain representative cases and pour their emotion into those. Then there's a concentrating effect as that sort of thing travels up the layers of power driven partly by normal human principles as well as by cynical manipulation for personal gain (but I repeat myself).
Disturbingly, that's not as 100% true as you think. There are some cases of local laws in various places also being privately held copyrighted material and/or "trade secrets" of various organizations. The most common example of this are laws covering zoning and construction written by local engineering forms which then charge money for copies. The bigger concern isn't petty local corruption like that, however, it's actually things like case law and various binding legal interpretations by the legislative and executive branch. Case law has traditionally largely only been accessible by contracting with private firms with virtual monopolies on republishing them. Aside from that, we're increasingly seeing (or not seeing) more and more binding decisions being made by secret courts and various executive offices which in some cases aren't even accessible by Congress. We're also more and more seeing what amounts to superuser permissions to create binding policy equivalent to laws being handed off to more and more agencies.
Consider no fly lists. We know that certain people aren't allowed on airplanes. We don't know which people, and we don't know why, and we don't know which things we might do that might get us put on the list, or on other lists which we don't even know about. The rationale in that particular example is that flying is a privilege, not a right, and therefore having it taken away is not a punishment. Clearly that's a load of nonsense. Traveling about the country is certainly a right, and removing of the more convenient ways to do that is a curtailment of that right. If that argument is faulty, that means that it's acceptable to refuse registered voters entrance to polling places because it only inconveniences them and they can find another way to vote. Even if being able to board planes is a privilege and not a right, removal of privileges that everyone enjoys by default still qualifies as a punishment by any sane definition.
Actually, it seems to have started with an AC who wrote:
To the best of my knowledge, "animal rights activists" (a word similar to 'Unborn Child Rights Activists' in the US, those that kill abortion doctors) have placed more bombs in Europe than neo-nazis over the last 20 years.
So, by the rules of the Internet, moonbender doesn't have to provide the proof either way, the AC needs to provide the proof. Yay! moonbender wins the Internet!:)
Seriously, maybe moonbender doesn't know it "for a fact" like he said, but his general argument seems fairly reasonable. These arguments where people scream "you have to provide proof! It's easy to find, so prove it!" get kind of ridiculous. If it's that easy to find, then either side can find it to refute the other and gain a lot of credibility. No-one gains any credibility the other way.
This reminds me of the Fermi paradox in a way. To me, the simple fact that I can walk around without having to walk on a 5 meter deep layer of cats rebuts the Fermi paradox. After all I can go weeks without seeing a cat (only in theory since I have three at home) despite the fact that a single pregnant cat can produce billions of descendants after a few generations. They still exist, however, and they're all over the planet. The Fermi paradox is one of those back of the envelope calculations that tell us that kangaroos can't exist because they use more energy than they consume as food, or that Superman can't exist for the same reason, or that bumblebees can't fly, or that dragons can't fly, or that giant ants couldn't terrorize the city because their legs would snap under their own weight. The thing is, kangaroos do exist, and they don't use more energy than they consume because they recover something like eighty percent of the energy from the last hop for the next one. The Superman one is semi-famous because a boy sent in a letter to the comic book explaining that Superman would have to consume a ridiculous number of peanut butter sandwiches just to have enough energy to lift a train car. Disregarding the fact that the boy probably confused food Calories (kilocalories) with calories in his calculations (and that Superman is fictional), that doesn't prove his non-existence, just that he needs to get energy from another source (the editors came up with solar power from a yellow sun which has the whole surface area problem). Bumblebees self-evidently can fly, you just have to have a proper model of the aerodynamics to show it mathematically. Dragons might not actually be able to fly, but 747s obviously can, this one really bothers me because I read an explanation of it in a math magazine as a child and it wasn't until years later that I realized that the math was right, but that the flight model was a load. They worked under the assumption that, in order to fly, you have to generate downward thrust greater than or equal to your weight. 90+% of planes would fall out of the sky if this were true. True, dragons still probably wouldn't be able to fly, but their "proof" was meaningless. Same magazine had the giant ants from horror movies, proven impossible by the square-cube ratio. But they were giant, _mutant_ ants, and not actually even as big as elephants, not to mention that the legs on the movie models were significantly thicker compared to body size than on normal ants.
Playing with math means nothing to the real world if you don't have a correct model, and the Fermi paradox doesn't have a correct model and wow have I gone into a crazy rant. I think those math magazines really messed me up as a kid.
Ok, resetting a bit. My point is that steady growth in a heterogeneous environment is extremely, extremely unlikely. Especially when you throw in all the facets of human behavior to complicate the mess. Growth of something like human population over the millenia is more likely to be a staccato affair full of leaps and drops rather than steady growth. Comparing it to recent centuries doesn't really work for me. I think steady growth is exceedingly unlikely vs boom and bust, which means that I think that a very large portion of humans who have died have probably done so under catastrophic conditions. The alternative is statistically improbable.
Science is based on observation of either experiments or nature, yes. Some systems, such as the cosmos, obviously can't be experimentally recreated entire and whole. You have to create models and run experiments on the models, then compare them to reality. That's still science.
The observations you get, as I pointed out already, are very seldom binary results that are either absolutely positive or negative. In fact, the very nature of the universe (as we currently understand it) is that there are no truly positive or negative results. Technically speaking, for example, all that motion due to gravity we've observed over the years could just be a coincidence. All those particles could just be moving by coincidence in directions that make it look like gravity exists. This is the problem, you can legitimately attack the foundations of all knowledge. Now, statistically speaking, given certain axioms, it's incredibly unlikely that gravity doesn't exist. It's so close to 100% likely that it does that we can't even figure out the margin of error, but we know it's tiny. All knowledge is like that. Every last bit of it. So, all science, and all non scientific knowledge, is based on statistics and probabilities. There are faith-based beliefs, of course. The holders of those seem to insist that they are absolute truths, not just knowledge. I can't really speak to knowledge vs truth. I will, however, observe that there's more than enough variation in faith-based beliefs, even in the same individuals over time, that you can apply statistics to say that it's very unlikely any of them are absolute, 100% truth (either that, or they exist in a system where they can be mutually contradictory and still true).
I should point out, of course, that I mentioned "certain axioms" back there. One of those is that we aren't brains in a jar experiencing virtual reality. Or that we can actually understand math and that there aren't massive holes in our capability to understand that we can't see because we're not capable of understanding. That last one is frighteningly possible when you look at paranoids and schizophrenics with their time cubes who truly do believe that the products of their deranged minds are absolutely correct. It could be that all of us, even those whose understanding is rigorous and apparently entirely internally consistent, are actually just wearing blinders of some kind. Ultimately though, we have to proceed as if the universe we know isn't a lie and we can actually learn things about it. To give up on that would be to just give up on everything.
Wow. Do a basic background check. Yeah, because everyone does that when they get into a relationship. Plus, even if they did, as I pointed out already, an undercover police officer is going to have access to resources for faking an identity. You don't think organizations like credit reporting agencies cooperate with police? As for family and friends... I'm still not sure what part of undercover operative you're unclear on. They can fake family or just say all their close family is dead. That's not that uncommon. As for friends, they can have some fake friends who are also undercover or, since they're infiltrating the organization, they can just be friends with people in the organization. "I just moved here" is a pretty good excuse for not having other friends.
Also, I've noticed that you seem to be a bit of a misogynist. I should point out that, though the examples given so far have been male officers exploiting women, I would object just as much to male officers exploiting men, or female officers exploiting men or women. I also wouldn't viciously attack them for being victimized either. I'm not clear on what "personal responsibility" you feel that people should bear for being deceived by government officials. Even if there is some, how do the officers come out of this with no responsibility in your opinion? For example, in the recent massive pyramid scheme unveiled in the US, I can understand how some people could say that at least some of the victims bear some personal responsibility. At least some of them must have known that the deal they were getting was too good to be legit, but how in the hell would that absolve Madoff of his crimes?
Spouses have been married for decades and discovered that their other spouse was a serial killer, or had a girl chained up in a hidden room under the house or something more prosaic like having another wife and family or just having a lover. Yes, they may suspect that something is off from time to time, but they generally mentally edit that stuff out rather than focusing on it.
You seem to be working under the assumption that being in love with someone means that you look into their very soul and know everything about them. Very romantic, I suppose, but not very realistic.
In any case, I find your blame the victim attitude insufferable.
Interesting. Actually, the fusion we produce here on earth is not that much like what happens in the sun because we can pretty much only achieve it economically using Tritium and Deuterium, whereas stars like the sun are overwhelmingly made up of regular hydrogen. The prominent reactions in our sun, the proton-proton-chain reactions, involve regular hydrogen atoms combining and seeding additional reactions with their byproducts. The reactions we humans produce on earth are pretty much all tritium-deuterium reactions because they're easy and release lots of energy.
The big problem with solar style fusion working for us is that the sun is very dense compared to terrestrial matter (around 150X the density of water at its core) but has an energy output per unit volume about the same as that of your typical compost heap. It still has tremendous energy output, but that's because it has so much volume. If we could make a fusion reactor that replicates the suns core conditions (temperature and pressure) in an area 20 meters on a side (close to a 7 story building) it would weigh about 1.2 billion tons and produce around 2.2 Megawatts. That's not a lot of power for something that weighs a good six times more than the city of Manhattan. It would only run about a 5000th of Manhattan, for example. Not to mention that it would take more energy to compress and heat up than you could get out of it in any realistic working lifetime.
So, when we try to do fusion on Earth, we have to do a _lot_ better than the sun.
The mothers should have thought of the children before marrying and/or having kids with men who are hiding such a massive secret as a second life as a police officer. In fact, the mother's should have thought about the children before being involved in criminal activity.
Ok. Wow. You really went off the deep end on that one. How exactly are they supposed to know that they're marrying someone who is _secretly_ a policeman? That's a moral failing on _their_ part, that their lover is a liar? As for being involved in criminal activity... I think we can assume that, after that long being spied on by a police officer that intimately involved in their life, if they were really involved in criminal activity they'd be in jail. Unless a group is outlawed somehow, being a member of a group, even if some of its members have conducted illegal activity, isn't the same thing as being involved in criminal activity.
You don't have to be stupid to fall for a lie from a good liar. Sincerity is easy to fake. Now, there are things you can do to root out lies if you suspect someone. The thing is, an undercover police officer is going to be have access to all kinds of resources to back up their lies. Your average sleazebag just looking to trick women into bed isn't going to be able to, for example, hide things like his real name without a fake ID. An undercover police officer can get a real ID with a fake name if necessary.
Well, not to mention that the officer is being paid for the job. It's still prostitution if you pay someone to have sex with a third party rather than with yourself. I've never seen anything suggesting that it's not prostitution just because the sex is in order to obtain some sort of access for gathering information, theft, etc.
There is, of course, the traditional and sometimes reasonable argument that, while infiltrating dangerous gangs, etc. undercover officers might need to do things like take drugs, participate in theft, participate in a drive by shooting or lynching, etc. or risk being outed and killed by the gang. One officer talks about it and says that it's necessary to fit in since everyone is so allegedly promiscuous. The problem is, there's a real difference between infiltrating a dangerous drug gang and having to take drugs to prove loyalty and infiltrating an activist group and having to prove promiscuity. If you're in the drug gang and you refuse to take drugs, they may think you're a cop and kill you. If you're in, say, an environmental activist group and you refuse to have sex, they're not going to see it as instant proof of disloyalty. They're even less likely to see it as proof that you're a cop and, even if they do, they're pretty unlikely to take you out and shoot you compared to a violent drug gang. Maybe if they were infiltrating some sort of swingers group. I just don't see how, in their situation, they couldn't just say: "I have herpes, but I really support the cause", and get out of being "forced" into having sex while still getting to fit in.
So, it looks like it's pretty much just using sex as an information-gathering tool, and not as something necessary to protect the officers safety, or even their investigation. There's still the argument that they're not being paid explicitly to have sex, but are authorized to if it helps their investigation. That's a bit like a massage parlor working who is technically being paid to give massages by the owner, but who is authorized to have sex with the client if it will mean a big tip. Or hosts/hostesses/dance partners/gigolos/escorts who are just providing companionship. No one really buys it. I suppose it's most similar though to some sort of sales position where the salesperson is authorized to have sex with the customer if it will help ensure a sale. That one generally gets seen as prostitution as well.
In the end though, what was being said in the article about even distribution wasn't "rubbish". The original poster was trying to act as if the scientist behind the research was either an idiot with no understanding of statistics or a fraud deviously trying to deceive the rest of us. That poster was incorrect. If there's no warming, then you do expect a statistically even distribution of temperatures. If it increases as time goes on, and you can show that it's improbably this is just noise, then you've shown something is happening. The poster could have attacked the actual statistical analysis but s/he just attacked a fundamental statement that was actually correct. Pretty much all science is done this way. Very, very rarely are you doing something that has strict binary results that you can prove without statistics. Actually, never in reality do you have results that can be proven without statistics, even if you reproduce your results a trillion times, it's just generally considered no contest at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a number of things that seem a little dubious in this story, possibly because of plain old sensationalism or translation problems. The idea of a remote detonator isn't really one of them though. For one thing, it allows someone observing, say from a window somewhere, to set off the bomb for maximum effect. Also, it gets around the problem of a sudden attack of nerves or conscience on the part of the bomber at the last minute if they don't actually know when the last minute is.
I should also point out that, with all of the vilification of suicide bombers, people very seldom consider their motivations. While, undoubtedly, some of them are committed zealots, entirely ready to kill and die, others are maybe not so much. Many of them are going to be recruited and essentially brainwashed, manipulated, or even threatened. Let's not forget that pretty much all terrorist organizations are heavily mixed up with organized crime. I remember talking to some Irish college students back in the early 90's about the IRA. The IRA they were mostly familiar with wasn't chiefly concerned with bombings and politics, they were chiefly concerned with running protection rackets, money lending (with dire penalties for people who couldn't pay up), "solving problems" (ie, beating people up and possibly killing them) and settling disputes for a fee, and also, to some degree, charity. Most terrorist organizations are like that, acting as violent parallel governments, court systems and banking systems. Therefore, there are plenty of people who end up owing debts they can't pay back to some part of the organization or being obligated in some other way. It's not inconceivable that some of those people end up "volunteering" to blow themselves up essentially under pain of death for themselves and their relatives if they refuse. Suicide bombers like that will probably end up being held very closely, right up to the point where it's too late for them. Therefore they're going to end up in a "suicide" belt that they can't take off or disarm and detonated by someone else, because they can't be relied on to do it themselves by their handlers.
In the end, it's really hard to tell. The authorities probably dig up all kinds of evidence and produce a timeline and detailed information on the motivations of a suicide bomber. The chances of the public ever getting any of that information, especially any information that makes the bomber look more like a misguided human being, or even a victim, than a monster, is very slim.
Is it a war zone? I thought it was still at the level of protests. Although snipers shooting demonstrators seems like a great way to turn it into a civil war.
It also describes people who have been traveling and haven't had an opportunity to change and clean up before hurrying to an appointment they're already a day late for.
I'm not rally much of a gamer these days. I'm actually turned off by all this on-line gaming community stuff with achievements, rankings, and blah de blah. Stay off my lawn! Nevertheless, I'm going to weigh in on this.
I can see how it could certainly be possible to detect cheating in a number of ways via achievements. For example, have an achievement for collecting all of the weebles in a level, but hide one of the weebles in a part of the map that's inaccessible, then conclude that anyone who actually gets that achievement is using a hack that lets them fly or walk through walls, or collect weebles without actually getting close to them, etc. Or there might be some that you can't get at the same time, as you point out. Those seem to be pretty obvious proof of cheating.
Except that we've all seen, I hope, speed runs of various games. People using in game mechanics in ways that completely confound the expectations of the designers. Anyone remember the hidden areas you could reach in Metroid back in the day by trapping yourself in a door, then collapsing to a ball and standing up again really fast to climb upwards? You could also use that trick to get to places you weren't supposed to be able to get to yet. There were plenty of old games where you could use collision detection tricks to access areas prematurely without having collected the 7 magic keys yet, etc. There were also plenty of glitches that let you get stuck in a wall without any real advantage to you. Think of all the tricks you could pull rocket jumping in various games. The designers set up worlds with certain rules and sometimes you could find glitches in those rules. Sometimes it wasn't even a glitch, sometimes it's because they simply hadn't planned for all the possible consequences of their rules.
So, there's all sorts of things that can be done. You might be able to hurl your in-game avatar the entire length of a map and drop grenades as you go, simultaneously blowing up groups of enemies that you shouldn't be able to engage simultaneously and earning achievements for both. You might be able to reach the skybox and glide along one of the seams to places that are otherwise unreachable. You might be able to let the impact of an enemies weapon throw you through a wall to a place you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach yet and thereby perform actions out of order of the game logic. You might discover that you can bounce off an enemies head and go higher each time. You might discover that you can push the last remaining enemy of one type into a room with the last remaining enemy of another type and kill them together, earning two achievements at the same time, etc. etc.
Some of those things, the game company might look at and conclude that, even though you're using the in game physics, they're still cheating, and you should know that, for example, once you've been knocked through a solid wall by an enemy that you're in a place you shouldn't be yet and should stop playing. If you really know it's a glitch and you're deliberately exploiting it, they have a point, maybe. On the other hand, if you've been playing for hours, then a glitch occurs to your advantage, are you supposed to just stop playing? Kill yourself and restart the level? The entire game? Reroll your character? What about when it's not a glitch? What about when it's something that the game creators just didn't think of like the example of getting together two of the last type of each enemy. Maybe there's a barrier to the door of the room that you need to push them through that they can't pass, but the designers never thought to do that for the window? Or maybe they forgot to consider all the consequences of their ricocheting grenade that also does damage to whatever it ricochets off of and you bounce it off one enemies head, through a door, down a hall, up a shaft and blow up the second enemy all in the same second?
The point is, I don't automatically believe them on a simple statement where they declare that they double checked and he was cheating. I've spent lon
Not literally, no, but they do it virtually. The casinos all talk to each other and they blacklist people. So, once labeled a cheater by one casino, someone is thereafter branded a cheater by the entire "community" of casinos. You could probably make a decent legal argument about libel in that case since they've done significant harm to your reputation within the entirety of the only "community" where that reputation actually matters.
For anyone willing to put the effort in, trains obviously are very easy to derail. All it takes is cutting out a section of rail on a curve which can easily be done by anyone with power tools. Someone putting in more effort could even bend the rails or insert a pre-bent section of rail that they brought with them.
As for a remote override on the system, that could be done, but would probably be just as likely to be exploited as to be useful. Same reason a remote override on planes might be a bad idea. As for powered rails... That only happens in subway systems. Trains can consume a heap of power, sending enough along the rails means that touching them is fatal, so it's not something you can use everywhere. There's overhead power wires like in trolley systems, but you need a lot of power like I said. You'd need really thick cables and a short would be very bad. Pretty much all trains that go a decent distance have big diesel engines. From what I've heard, the rails often do have a current run through them in places regardless, but it's just enough so that an approaching train will break the circuit and make the barriers drop. Although, systems like that may be outdated. They probably all use pressure sensors and/or wireless signaling now.
A terrorist takeover of a train would be easy, but it's also true that there's not much that they could do with it once they've got it except take hostages, which they could do in something that isn't moving. So, as a target, the more likely thing is derailment or blowing up some particularly nasty and/or valuable cargo. Although, if they were aiming for derailment, they might want to sabotage the brakes and ramp up the speed.
As for the damage a derailed train can do, don't forget that trains towing a hundred cars aren't that unusual. Loaded up, that's in the neighborhood of 10,000 tons. A moving train has a tremendous amount of energy behind it and could probably be made to go a very long distance without rails. They also travel through lots of sensitive industrial areas, etc.
Overall a plane is certainly much more versatile than a plane. For simple acts of terrorism, however, a train is probably a much softer target since the rails are so vulnerable.
Well duh. People who expect otherwise are getting their ideas about martial arts from movies and TV. Might as well believe in detectives who solve a new murder every week and that you can have realistic immersive VR, but you'll die in real life if you die in the VR etc. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who takes martial arts classes will be a better fighter than they would be without them (barring debilitating injuries). That's pretty much going to be true even if only for the daily exercise. It doesn't make them a better fighter than everyone who hasn't taken the classes just automatically. It's exactly the same as any other skill. Someone can train for years, maybe all their life, and some newbie with talent or some physical attribute that gives them an edge can come along and best them with no training or maybe just a few lessons. It's true for chess, basketball (consider a super-well trained 5' 2'' basketball player vs. someone naturally athletic and 8 feet tall who can just reach up and put the ball into the basket), tennis, racecar driving, gymnastics, all kinds of martial arts, academics,and just about everything else.
All that doesn't mean that the training is somehow worthless, just that some people are naturally better at some things than others. Usually there's a tradeoff where they're better at one thing and worse at others. Realistically though, there are people who are better at absolutely everything than some other people: faster, stronger, better reflexes, better eyesight, better balance, better memory, better learning skills, more intelligent in every way, etc. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to measure that sort of thing objectively of course. Especially if you're going to claim it's hereditary. It could just be nutrition or lack of disease, etc. Plus, despite what insane social Darwinists might think, all the superpeople might die in a plague along with 99% of humanity while a subgroup with some sort of mutation that limits their intelligence and athletic ability, but also confers immunity, survives.
In any case, the "jocks" who come off the streets and defeat black-belts may be good in a fight. Put them in a fight with a parallel version of themselves who trained in martial arts from a young age and the parallel universe version is the one I would put my money on if I gambled.
Yes, I actually intended to put "theoretical" before that "potential".
So, it's more like being in the crater of an extinct volcano, fighting people on the plateau below the volcano?
You just need more ballast, and different ratios for leverage since it will be falling faster. The real limiting factor with a trebuchet is the strength of the materials. With a redesign, you should certainly be able to get a trebuchet working as well as it does on earth. It would need to be a big redesign, however. One important consideration is that, although the projectile would have 1/6th the weight it has on earth, it would still have the same mass and therefore the same inertia. That means that elements of the trebuchet that are under tension would mostly be under the same stresses they would be on earth. There might be distinct advantages to linear acceleration vs curved. I think it would take a while to come up with a practical design, and it's all speculation up to that point.
All that said, I'm not so sure you actually could use a trebuchet for this. You need to get the payload up to escape velocity, which is over eight thousand kilometers per hour on the moon. What's the longest you could make the trebuchet path? Maybe a few hundred meters with advanced materials and the moons low gravity? Hmm. Well, from what I can find, a trebuchet has been able to get a pumpkin up to around 700 KPH, so you "only" need to get a little more than an order of magnitude more out of it... I guess it's a big maybe.
Probably because the little humorous "I'm on your side" comment falls a little flat from the person heading the executive and who is therefore, provided the buck actually stops there, the one responsible for it. If the President needs to get a pat-down or be irradiated before getting on a plane, it's news to me. Similarly, we don't appreciate comments about how expensive it is to shop for the holidays from the boss who just cut our Christmas bonus. It's in really poor taste.
Maybe it's just me, but it looked more like a crosshatched pattern of purple and white to me in the picture. Not pink.
Planes aren't really all that easy to depressurize either. People believe all kinds of stupid things about depressurization. Like the idea that one bullet hole in the side of the plane would kill everyone on board. Just dumb. If the plane loses pressure, everyone breathes emergency air and the plane lands. Trains are hard to divert to Cuba, but they're really, really, really easy to derail. They are absolutely dependent on their tracks. They also have huge amounts of mass behind them, far more than any plane with just a few loaded cars. Not to mention that they can be carrying some really nasty stuff. Once they're derailed, the brakes don't do a lot of good either.
The difference between trains and planes is that you don't need to be in the train to attack it or use it in an attack. Even if you want to board the train, you don't need to get on at the station, you can board it while it's in motion a number of ways. The same is even more true for buses, which is why the recent trials of TSA style pat-downs for buses were so pathetically ridiculous. Of course, the proper response to the 9/11 hijackings have already taken place. That response is a change in public education on plane hijackings. It used to be that the proper thing to do in a hijacking was to comply with the hijackers and wait to be rescued by professionals. Now the proper thing to do is overwhelm the hijackers with superior numbers. A small group of hijackers with boxcutters and a fake bomb aren't going to be able to take over a plane again. If they hadn't been pushing the "don't be a hero" line on fliers for years, the World Trade center towers would probably still be standing.
Overall, I would say that TSA style pat-downs aren't necessary at all simply by looking at the numbers. The potential payoff in saved lives just doesn't seem worth it. Not even US society has traditionally been that risk-averse, but people are strange. It's like child disappearances and murders. Some of them get days, weeks, months or years of media coverage. But when they show you the statistics, you realize that those are just the tip of the iceburg. The reason is that people can't care about everything, there's just too much, they have to instead focus on certain representative cases and pour their emotion into those. Then there's a concentrating effect as that sort of thing travels up the layers of power driven partly by normal human principles as well as by cynical manipulation for personal gain (but I repeat myself).
Disturbingly, that's not as 100% true as you think. There are some cases of local laws in various places also being privately held copyrighted material and/or "trade secrets" of various organizations. The most common example of this are laws covering zoning and construction written by local engineering forms which then charge money for copies. The bigger concern isn't petty local corruption like that, however, it's actually things like case law and various binding legal interpretations by the legislative and executive branch. Case law has traditionally largely only been accessible by contracting with private firms with virtual monopolies on republishing them. Aside from that, we're increasingly seeing (or not seeing) more and more binding decisions being made by secret courts and various executive offices which in some cases aren't even accessible by Congress. We're also more and more seeing what amounts to superuser permissions to create binding policy equivalent to laws being handed off to more and more agencies.
Consider no fly lists. We know that certain people aren't allowed on airplanes. We don't know which people, and we don't know why, and we don't know which things we might do that might get us put on the list, or on other lists which we don't even know about. The rationale in that particular example is that flying is a privilege, not a right, and therefore having it taken away is not a punishment. Clearly that's a load of nonsense. Traveling about the country is certainly a right, and removing of the more convenient ways to do that is a curtailment of that right. If that argument is faulty, that means that it's acceptable to refuse registered voters entrance to polling places because it only inconveniences them and they can find another way to vote. Even if being able to board planes is a privilege and not a right, removal of privileges that everyone enjoys by default still qualifies as a punishment by any sane definition.
Actually, it seems to have started with an AC who wrote:
So, by the rules of the Internet, moonbender doesn't have to provide the proof either way, the AC needs to provide the proof. Yay! moonbender wins the Internet! :)
Seriously, maybe moonbender doesn't know it "for a fact" like he said, but his general argument seems fairly reasonable. These arguments where people scream "you have to provide proof! It's easy to find, so prove it!" get kind of ridiculous. If it's that easy to find, then either side can find it to refute the other and gain a lot of credibility. No-one gains any credibility the other way.
This reminds me of the Fermi paradox in a way. To me, the simple fact that I can walk around without having to walk on a 5 meter deep layer of cats rebuts the Fermi paradox. After all I can go weeks without seeing a cat (only in theory since I have three at home) despite the fact that a single pregnant cat can produce billions of descendants after a few generations. They still exist, however, and they're all over the planet. The Fermi paradox is one of those back of the envelope calculations that tell us that kangaroos can't exist because they use more energy than they consume as food, or that Superman can't exist for the same reason, or that bumblebees can't fly, or that dragons can't fly, or that giant ants couldn't terrorize the city because their legs would snap under their own weight. The thing is, kangaroos do exist, and they don't use more energy than they consume because they recover something like eighty percent of the energy from the last hop for the next one. The Superman one is semi-famous because a boy sent in a letter to the comic book explaining that Superman would have to consume a ridiculous number of peanut butter sandwiches just to have enough energy to lift a train car. Disregarding the fact that the boy probably confused food Calories (kilocalories) with calories in his calculations (and that Superman is fictional), that doesn't prove his non-existence, just that he needs to get energy from another source (the editors came up with solar power from a yellow sun which has the whole surface area problem). Bumblebees self-evidently can fly, you just have to have a proper model of the aerodynamics to show it mathematically. Dragons might not actually be able to fly, but 747s obviously can, this one really bothers me because I read an explanation of it in a math magazine as a child and it wasn't until years later that I realized that the math was right, but that the flight model was a load. They worked under the assumption that, in order to fly, you have to generate downward thrust greater than or equal to your weight. 90+% of planes would fall out of the sky if this were true. True, dragons still probably wouldn't be able to fly, but their "proof" was meaningless. Same magazine had the giant ants from horror movies, proven impossible by the square-cube ratio. But they were giant, _mutant_ ants, and not actually even as big as elephants, not to mention that the legs on the movie models were significantly thicker compared to body size than on normal ants.
Playing with math means nothing to the real world if you don't have a correct model, and the Fermi paradox doesn't have a correct model and wow have I gone into a crazy rant. I think those math magazines really messed me up as a kid.
Ok, resetting a bit. My point is that steady growth in a heterogeneous environment is extremely, extremely unlikely. Especially when you throw in all the facets of human behavior to complicate the mess. Growth of something like human population over the millenia is more likely to be a staccato affair full of leaps and drops rather than steady growth. Comparing it to recent centuries doesn't really work for me. I think steady growth is exceedingly unlikely vs boom and bust, which means that I think that a very large portion of humans who have died have probably done so under catastrophic conditions. The alternative is statistically improbable.
Science is based on observation of either experiments or nature, yes. Some systems, such as the cosmos, obviously can't be experimentally recreated entire and whole. You have to create models and run experiments on the models, then compare them to reality. That's still science.
The observations you get, as I pointed out already, are very seldom binary results that are either absolutely positive or negative. In fact, the very nature of the universe (as we currently understand it) is that there are no truly positive or negative results. Technically speaking, for example, all that motion due to gravity we've observed over the years could just be a coincidence. All those particles could just be moving by coincidence in directions that make it look like gravity exists. This is the problem, you can legitimately attack the foundations of all knowledge. Now, statistically speaking, given certain axioms, it's incredibly unlikely that gravity doesn't exist. It's so close to 100% likely that it does that we can't even figure out the margin of error, but we know it's tiny. All knowledge is like that. Every last bit of it. So, all science, and all non scientific knowledge, is based on statistics and probabilities. There are faith-based beliefs, of course. The holders of those seem to insist that they are absolute truths, not just knowledge. I can't really speak to knowledge vs truth. I will, however, observe that there's more than enough variation in faith-based beliefs, even in the same individuals over time, that you can apply statistics to say that it's very unlikely any of them are absolute, 100% truth (either that, or they exist in a system where they can be mutually contradictory and still true).
I should point out, of course, that I mentioned "certain axioms" back there. One of those is that we aren't brains in a jar experiencing virtual reality. Or that we can actually understand math and that there aren't massive holes in our capability to understand that we can't see because we're not capable of understanding. That last one is frighteningly possible when you look at paranoids and schizophrenics with their time cubes who truly do believe that the products of their deranged minds are absolutely correct. It could be that all of us, even those whose understanding is rigorous and apparently entirely internally consistent, are actually just wearing blinders of some kind. Ultimately though, we have to proceed as if the universe we know isn't a lie and we can actually learn things about it. To give up on that would be to just give up on everything.
Wow. Do a basic background check. Yeah, because everyone does that when they get into a relationship. Plus, even if they did, as I pointed out already, an undercover police officer is going to have access to resources for faking an identity. You don't think organizations like credit reporting agencies cooperate with police? As for family and friends... I'm still not sure what part of undercover operative you're unclear on. They can fake family or just say all their close family is dead. That's not that uncommon. As for friends, they can have some fake friends who are also undercover or, since they're infiltrating the organization, they can just be friends with people in the organization. "I just moved here" is a pretty good excuse for not having other friends.
Also, I've noticed that you seem to be a bit of a misogynist. I should point out that, though the examples given so far have been male officers exploiting women, I would object just as much to male officers exploiting men, or female officers exploiting men or women. I also wouldn't viciously attack them for being victimized either. I'm not clear on what "personal responsibility" you feel that people should bear for being deceived by government officials. Even if there is some, how do the officers come out of this with no responsibility in your opinion? For example, in the recent massive pyramid scheme unveiled in the US, I can understand how some people could say that at least some of the victims bear some personal responsibility. At least some of them must have known that the deal they were getting was too good to be legit, but how in the hell would that absolve Madoff of his crimes?
Spouses have been married for decades and discovered that their other spouse was a serial killer, or had a girl chained up in a hidden room under the house or something more prosaic like having another wife and family or just having a lover. Yes, they may suspect that something is off from time to time, but they generally mentally edit that stuff out rather than focusing on it.
You seem to be working under the assumption that being in love with someone means that you look into their very soul and know everything about them. Very romantic, I suppose, but not very realistic.
In any case, I find your blame the victim attitude insufferable.
Interesting. Actually, the fusion we produce here on earth is not that much like what happens in the sun because we can pretty much only achieve it economically using Tritium and Deuterium, whereas stars like the sun are overwhelmingly made up of regular hydrogen. The prominent reactions in our sun, the proton-proton-chain reactions, involve regular hydrogen atoms combining and seeding additional reactions with their byproducts. The reactions we humans produce on earth are pretty much all tritium-deuterium reactions because they're easy and release lots of energy.
The big problem with solar style fusion working for us is that the sun is very dense compared to terrestrial matter (around 150X the density of water at its core) but has an energy output per unit volume about the same as that of your typical compost heap. It still has tremendous energy output, but that's because it has so much volume. If we could make a fusion reactor that replicates the suns core conditions (temperature and pressure) in an area 20 meters on a side (close to a 7 story building) it would weigh about 1.2 billion tons and produce around 2.2 Megawatts. That's not a lot of power for something that weighs a good six times more than the city of Manhattan. It would only run about a 5000th of Manhattan, for example. Not to mention that it would take more energy to compress and heat up than you could get out of it in any realistic working lifetime.
So, when we try to do fusion on Earth, we have to do a _lot_ better than the sun.
It actually is insane to suggest that such a thing must always be true. Sorry to break it to you.
davev2.0 wrote:
Ok. Wow. You really went off the deep end on that one. How exactly are they supposed to know that they're marrying someone who is _secretly_ a policeman? That's a moral failing on _their_ part, that their lover is a liar? As for being involved in criminal activity... I think we can assume that, after that long being spied on by a police officer that intimately involved in their life, if they were really involved in criminal activity they'd be in jail. Unless a group is outlawed somehow, being a member of a group, even if some of its members have conducted illegal activity, isn't the same thing as being involved in criminal activity.
You don't have to be stupid to fall for a lie from a good liar. Sincerity is easy to fake. Now, there are things you can do to root out lies if you suspect someone. The thing is, an undercover police officer is going to be have access to all kinds of resources to back up their lies. Your average sleazebag just looking to trick women into bed isn't going to be able to, for example, hide things like his real name without a fake ID. An undercover police officer can get a real ID with a fake name if necessary.
Well, not to mention that the officer is being paid for the job. It's still prostitution if you pay someone to have sex with a third party rather than with yourself. I've never seen anything suggesting that it's not prostitution just because the sex is in order to obtain some sort of access for gathering information, theft, etc.
There is, of course, the traditional and sometimes reasonable argument that, while infiltrating dangerous gangs, etc. undercover officers might need to do things like take drugs, participate in theft, participate in a drive by shooting or lynching, etc. or risk being outed and killed by the gang. One officer talks about it and says that it's necessary to fit in since everyone is so allegedly promiscuous. The problem is, there's a real difference between infiltrating a dangerous drug gang and having to take drugs to prove loyalty and infiltrating an activist group and having to prove promiscuity. If you're in the drug gang and you refuse to take drugs, they may think you're a cop and kill you. If you're in, say, an environmental activist group and you refuse to have sex, they're not going to see it as instant proof of disloyalty. They're even less likely to see it as proof that you're a cop and, even if they do, they're pretty unlikely to take you out and shoot you compared to a violent drug gang. Maybe if they were infiltrating some sort of swingers group. I just don't see how, in their situation, they couldn't just say: "I have herpes, but I really support the cause", and get out of being "forced" into having sex while still getting to fit in.
So, it looks like it's pretty much just using sex as an information-gathering tool, and not as something necessary to protect the officers safety, or even their investigation. There's still the argument that they're not being paid explicitly to have sex, but are authorized to if it helps their investigation. That's a bit like a massage parlor working who is technically being paid to give massages by the owner, but who is authorized to have sex with the client if it will mean a big tip. Or hosts/hostesses/dance partners/gigolos/escorts who are just providing companionship. No one really buys it. I suppose it's most similar though to some sort of sales position where the salesperson is authorized to have sex with the customer if it will help ensure a sale. That one generally gets seen as prostitution as well.
In the end though, what was being said in the article about even distribution wasn't "rubbish". The original poster was trying to act as if the scientist behind the research was either an idiot with no understanding of statistics or a fraud deviously trying to deceive the rest of us. That poster was incorrect. If there's no warming, then you do expect a statistically even distribution of temperatures. If it increases as time goes on, and you can show that it's improbably this is just noise, then you've shown something is happening. The poster could have attacked the actual statistical analysis but s/he just attacked a fundamental statement that was actually correct. Pretty much all science is done this way. Very, very rarely are you doing something that has strict binary results that you can prove without statistics. Actually, never in reality do you have results that can be proven without statistics, even if you reproduce your results a trillion times, it's just generally considered no contest at that point.