FWIW, background investigations for the Department of Energy L and Q clearances (Q is the DOE equiv. of a DoD Top Secret) are handled by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) after an initial background investigation is performed by Pinkerton.
Did the DoJ take this as an invitation to alter the requirements? No, they just went right on down the list until they found the only people who COULDN'T say no... the people who work for them.
I believe you are misinformed on both the prevalance of security clearances among university faculty and what holding a security clearance entails. With a little bit of effort you could find just as many, if not more, MIT, UCSD, etc. faculty and staff who hold active security clearances, many of which are high level clearances such as Defense Dept. Top Secret clearances and DOE Q clearances. Faculty in the sciences and engineering frequently consult on government projects and they are they often asked to serve on external review committees.
A security clearance simply means that under certain circumstances (a "need to know") these individuals may access classified information. It does not obligate them to participate in any specific programs per se, but rather requires of them only that they not disclose sensitive information to uncleared people or participate in activities (such as recreational drug use) that are perceived as making them vulnerable to blackmail. In the case of Carnivore technology this may be a good thing since much of the technology is undoubtedly classified anyway--if the reviewers have no clearances then evaluation of the program would wait until the evaluators got the required clearances. This would be the case regardless of which institution is called upon to review the technology, and it is an issue that is separate from wondering about the integrity and objectiveness of the committee.
It hardly requires a security clearance to "rubber stamp" a program. It only requires a rubber stamp.
It also would ban the sale, purchase, import and distribution of devices used for hacking....
And in related news today: Axes, hatchets and machetes are now selling like hotcakes on Ebay in anticipation of the ban. (Time for another/. gripe fest over the meaning of the word "hacker/hacking").
Lizzy Bordon took an axe
and sunk it deep into a Vax.
When she saw what she had done
she turned and hacked apart a Sun. -author unknown
...but it certainly harms the reputation of the US as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners.
Ever dealt with the INS? Having observed the bureaucratic terrorism my wife suffered en route to attaining her citizenship, I can assure you that foreigners have no such delusions about the U.S. Case in point: the INS releases no telephone numbers. Everything must be handled either by mail (in which case they simply never bother responding to you) or in person (show up early, wait 4 hours in line, maybe be told that you should come back "in two weeks" and the matter will be "straightened out"--two lies for the price of one...a dozen iterations later one is led to wonder why anyone even bothers). All this for the dubious honor of intoning pithy jingoism to an examiner and suffering whiplash from the DOJ's jerking them around, losing their paperwork, suggesting a week before the swearing in ceremony that they begin the naturalization process anew, etc. No, I think it is safe to say that foreigners, in general, learn very quickly that the U.S. has institutional bias against them. YMMV, but not by much, I'm afraid.
I just don't see why everyone's so uptight over this. It's not like it's impossible or anything....
Let's suppose that this is just a statistical fluke and that the actual percentage of Windows users is indeed 100% - 28% = 72%. (Sorry, Mac users, but you are too busy playing with your cubes to vote anyway). The chance that 126500 consecutive "Go Windows Woo!!" votes came in is merely 2.75 * 10^18047 to 1. Far from impossible--what say we give the impartial folks over at MSNBC the benefit of the doubt?
I'm gonna put a foot down here and give an absolute: I refuse to believe that anyone should be held liable for the laws of the universe. If it's impossible to make a 100% secure lock then you shouldn't be able to sue the lockmaker unless they purposefully introduced a flaw into the mechanism.
I am not a lawyer (and I doubt you are one either) [IANALAIDYAOE], but I take issue with your pronouncement. Parties should, in principle, be held responsible for incompetence or negligence that harms others. The matter should not hinge on "intent to harm," as this would give carte blanche for corporations to produce most anything under any claims whatsoever provided you couldn't prove a willful introduction of deleterious flaws into the product. Most people would see no problem with holding responsible, say, a factory that inadvertantly contaminates a town's groundwater with heavy metals or a contractor who builds a bridge that falls down under a normal traffic load due to corners that were cut during the construction process. Neither is technically a purposeful introduction of a flaw nor a violation of physics, yet both are examples of negligence.
Begs the question: Has a software house ever been sued for a security flaw?)
Negligence itself in the U.S. has a curious definition. In essence (if I recall correctly--lawyers, please correct my errors), the criterion is the answer to "In hindsight, would you have done anything different to have prevented this from happening?" If the answer is "yes," then one is negligent. This, like many USian laws, seems to leave little room for common sense, and it is a system that can be easily abused: Of course McDonalds employees would warn a person of hot coffee if they knew she would later injure herself. Of course the soda machine company would warn people that it is dangerous to try tipping the machine over to get a free soda.
Software companies are different, however, since they have a shrink-wrap licensing agreement that disavows them of any responsibility for damages resulting from potential use or misuse of their products. If I'm not mistaken, one generally cannot even pose the negligence question to a software company since they make no claims whatsoever on the suitability of their products for any purpose, much less the purpose that led to damages to a party. This is yet another way that software differs from the "real world."
The beauty of this piece of election year politics is that a Congressional mandate will undoubtedly surface requiring the offending agencies to clean up their acts, but with no resources provided for them to do so. Unfunded mandates make for great sound bites and the Congressmen who make them can posture and feign outrage when security inevitably breaks down. If they genuinely cared about security, however, they would allocate the resources for it rather than slather the pork thicker in their home districts.
Does your college allow you to acquire a minor in a field of study? If so, then I'd suggest turning your three years of CompSci classes into a minor in CompSci, and then do something completely unrelated for your major--something that you enjoy. A good friend of mine had a similar problem with his physics major, and he ended up doing a physics-Russian literature double major. (He then rediscovered a passion for physics, and was a grad student in a top physics program the last I talked to him). Another friend of mine combined a comparative religion, Buddhist studies major with a mathematics minor; he's now a biophysicist. My roommate from college took his physics major/math & cs minor and went to law school to study patent and intellectual property law. You have many possibilities available to you, and I applaud your honesty in saying "Is this really what I want?" Better now, when you can do something about your situation, than suffer a mid-life crisis in a dead end job fifteen years down the road, with mortgage payments and children to put through college curtailing your options. Keeping the CS as a minor (if it is possible) may placate the parents while you find something fun and personally redeeming to pursue.
I'm all about continuing education, but folks have to remember that learning for the joy of learning doesn't have to take place in the classroom...
Having taught at a top-10 university in CS (I taught a physics course the CS program used as a "weed out" course), I would have to add "...and if you don't get any joy out of learning material that isn't directly related to coding for cash, if the only compelling reason for your being in college is to make making money easier, then go out and do it. Don't waste your time with college."
As an anecdote of no statistical relavence, two of my former students who received this advice from me and acted on it (they were intending to do this anyway--I just reiterated their convictions) are very happy with their decisions. They both plan to go back to school when they are good and ready--30-somethings make better "nontraditional" students than 90-hour-workweek IT slaves anyway, IMO.
YMMV and all that.
Re:Sounds interesting, but I'm annoyed by the US c
on
Ash: A Secret History
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· Score: 2
Is this a common occurence, editing books for the US market? I once purchased an American edition of 'Vurt' by Jeff Noon...
I believe so. FWIW, another notable "Yanks can't handle an ending like this" case is the omission of the last chapter of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Apparently the chapter was seen at the time as being too "warm and fuzzy" for a jaded America who had just survived Nixon and Watergate, and so the publisher nixed the ending where the protagonist, now no longer young, has become socialized at long last. This chapter changes one's entire outlook on the book, imo.
I don't think we can say that the black hole is rotating. The singularity is a point with (effectively) zero volume, and I would say that this precludes it's ability to rotate.
Rotating black holes have singularities that are not point-shaped, but rather are one-dimensional, ring-shaped beasts. As such they can have an angular momentum. IIRC (and it's been a decade since I've studied GR) the rotating nature of the black hole singularity distorts spacetime around it and causes reference frames to be "dragged" around the black hole. This is odd since it leads to a component of the gravitational force that appears to observers at large distances from the black hole to be "sideways" from the direction one would expect from Newtonian physics. ("Preposition overload" is a problem endemic to talking about GR).
From what I've read, a black hole is a singularity with mass. That is, it has mass but not size, it is a one-dimensional point. The only measurable property that a black hole has is mass.
Perhaps you should try reading more on the subject, since you seem to be a bit mistaken on black holes' propertiese. For starters, black holes may have a net electric charge and (if magnetic monopoles exist) a net magnetic charge. They may have a net angular momentum as well. All of these, in principle, are observable from outside a black hole's event horizon.
Furthermore, a black hole singularity does not need to be a single point. In the case of a charged, rotating black hole, for instance, the singularity is ring-shaped and has the curious feature that if you were to travel through the center of the ring it's anyone's guess where you would end up. You could, in principle, find yourself in a universe that is on a different "Riemann sheet" than the one we are in now that is connected to our universe through the little bridge of spacetime at the center of the ring singularity. Except for the untidiness of inevitably finding oneself inside a black hole's event horizon in the "parallel universe," this piece of physics seems tailor-made for science fiction.
From a practical standpoint you are correct, however. In 99% of the problems in astrophysics nobody gives a hoot what the esoteric properties of a black hole are. It's just a compact critter that radiates x-rays like crazy when it gobbles up matter. (A notable exception to this is people who study accretion in quasars, where assuming a Kerr geometry instead of a Schwartzchild geometry can affect accretion models by a noticeable amount).
Isn't the word "non-obvious" supposed to apply to potential patents?
IANAL, but I used to hang around with a couple. "Non-obvious" means something different in patent law than it does for the layperson; in particular a well-defined set of criteria need to be satisfied for something to be "non-obvious." In this regard it is similar to many scientific and technical fields. (A hard drive isn't the 405 at rush hour?)
Undoubtedly a lawyer will post and say "this is what it means for something to satisfy non-obviousness," and we'll see, much to our amusement, that the definition itself is non-obvious.
The difference between paying $600 a term for the 'vitabook' and paying $2000 for 'real' books is that YOU GET TO KEEP THE REAL BOOKS!
Even if no expiration date existed on the Vitabooks (vitamins + books? What a silly name), one is still left with the problem of ensuring that the technology for reading DVDs remains current and convenient for decades into the future. Aside from the obvious "solution" of using DeCSS to extract the data and save it as hard copy (undoubtedly in violation of the licensing agreement), this problem appears to be without remedy.
This is obviously about hardware problems, and possibly OEM software problems. Not about driver issues for every OS under the sun.
The interesting thing about the bill is that if software problems are not covered then vendors could just categorize everything as a problem with the software and wash their hands of the matter. "Scanner doesn't work? Software problem." "Machine crashes whenever these bad memory chips are in? Software problem. Oh, you replace the chips and the problem goes away? Still a software problem. Your software is incompatible with the chips we provlde." "Printer jams on every other page? Software problem. Your documents are too long." 95% of the people who purchase systems wouldn't be able to reliably diagnose hardware vs. software problems anyway. The other 5% would be bound by the obligatory and ensuing "crack open the case and you void the warranty" agreements.
Customer service would be trivial to perform. Just have an answering machine for Quaker State residents that picks up with "Hello, if you are having difficulty with one of our products then it is a software problem and not a hardware problem. Thank you and good day."
Re:Hmmmm some interesting fallout from that...
on
Focusing Audio
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I wonder if it could also be used as a weapon. Stun people with an amplified blast long enough to subdue them.
IIRC audio weapons have been made with very low freq. audio meant to hit a resonances in people's abdominal cavities. The trouble with the low-freq audio was that it tended to be omni-directional, so it was difficult to aim the cramp-inducing sound field at, say, a crowd of WTO protesters without harming the good people manning the device. One could imagine, however, using multiple, highly columnated, directional beams of slightly differing frequencies (with a low-frequency beat wave) to zap individuals. The resonance is moderately narrow (again, IIRC--someone more in the know please correct me if I'm wrong on this), so the carrier may not need to be of exceptionally high volume in order to drive the resonance to useful amplitudes.
It's been a long time since I read about these, but if I recall correctly the concept was inspired in part by a chicken farm located near a factory in Australia (perhaps New Zealand). The factory put out steady, low-frequency oscillations at a particular frequency that caused the chickens, when they grew to where their heads were a certain size, to die from having their brains scrambled.
The traditional media outlets are perhaps most influential around election time, when candidates fight tooth and nail for a splash of positive coverage, "face time," and a 3-second sound bite on the nightly news. It would be intriguing if the "new media" indeed were to inject substance into how political elections are conducted. Like many, I am disenchanted with mainstream election coverage that resembles a horse race, with running "So-and-so is 4 points ahead in the polls today" updates in place of the more substantial "My stance on issue X is as follows: [Insert esssay here]." I'd much prefer the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates over the pith-and-mud we have suffered in the recent past, and I honestly believe that the current "be everyone's friend" approach to political campaigning in the U.S. is the underlying cause for apathy and cynicism among the voting public. I look with guarded agathism to the new media to counteract this.
Nader has an interesting and provocative site; while I don't agree with everything he advocates (by a long shot), I do respect his taking a very public stance on contentious issues, and I wish more candidates would do the same.
Heaven runs Windows 2000 and there are no crashes? What are you getting at here?
While I don't believe in heaven, I do believe in magic smoke. Permit me to elaborate:
Everything runs on magic smoke. There is a simple demonstration of this: take off one of your boots and whack your monitor a few times with it. You should hear a hiss--that's the magic smoke escaping. When the hiss stops no more magic smoke will remain inside, and your monitor will cease to function. Similarly, if you overclock your chip without sufficient cooling the chip will start to release its magic smoke. Same principle. Why do overheated cars stop running? Acute loss of magic smoke. "Houston, we have a problem. We seem to be jetisoning something into space." Again, magic smoke.
Computer software runs on magic smoke too, as we all know. This is why it is so exhausting to write code--magic smoke goes from our brains to being wrapped around the symbols in our emacsen; we replenish the magic smoke in our bodies by drinking cola (that's what's in those little bubbles). Compilers merely concentrate the magic smoke so that it can do something useful, like propagate an Outlook virus or somesuch. Open Source projects like the Linux operating system let magic smoke escape every time people poke and prod at the code, particularly people who work in unsealed environments like apartment buildings or university computer labs. This is inevitable, rather like how the magic smoke excapes whenever you open the door to your microwave oven. Win2k, on the other hand, is created in a hermetically sealed, corporate environment so the magic smoke has nowhere to go. Its magic smoke stays put, and this is why W2K and the Closed Source design model wins out over Linux and its Open Source development--that is, until we start writing Linux while wrapped in celophane.
I attended an ionospheric modification conference some time ago ('94?) before Iridium was operational. At the conference one of the execs gave a presentation on Iridium where he very openly (for an exec) admitted problems with the business model and technical difficulties with their implementation of the system. I believe he concluded his talk with a statement to the effect of "Sure we'll have stiff competition for a very limited marketshare--three systems are planned and only one will survive. We hope to win by getting there first."
I'd like to note that nuclear weapons can be made of other things besides plutonium. In fact, the fission cross section of Pu-239 is high, so it is quite difficult to make weapons out of plutonium. One cannot use a gun assembly like Little Boy, the U-235 bomb that dropped on Hiroshima, and instead one surrounds a subcritical mass of plutonium with high explosives that, when detonated, compress/implode the material to get it to go critical. This is a delicate business best left for the pros e.g. Los Alamos Nat. Lab. An attractive and moderately low-cost alternative to plutonium that has been tried by at least one country (India, IIRC) is to breed U-233 from thorium to make material for weapons. (This is one place where the South Park song "Blame Canada" is actually fitting since, if I remember right, the materials were bred in reactors supplied by Canada).
The problem of uranium purification is a difficult one, and it would be nearly impossible to surreptitiously acquire enough reactor-grade uranium to construct a weapon without the world's intelligence agencies being clued in to the fact, mail-order uranium notwithstanding.
If I were a terrorist I'd forgo the whole nuclear weapons thing and just start manufacturing anthrax. Acquiring the materials is trivial (just go find a field of sheep), and you get considerably more deaths per dollar with biological agents than with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, they are easier to deploy, and they are much more difficult to detect and disable.
Even worse was the fact that there weren't real desk, just those psuedo desks that hang off the cube wall. So the guy opposite me would start stomping his feet to the music he was listening to, and my monitor would shake. Or somebody would sit on the desk in the cube next to me, and my monitor would rise up.
Better eight layers of management than half that with matrix management. I interviewed once for a position with one of the U.S. national laboratories, and in the interview the two other orthogonal management structures (in addition to line management) were described. I couldn't help but think that "matrix management" was bad terminology--perhaps "tensor management" instead?
A curious feature of matrix management is that it diffuses accountability to the point where nobody seems to be responsible for anything. No doubt this is by design.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, background investigations for the Department of Energy L and Q clearances (Q is the DOE equiv. of a DoD Top Secret) are handled by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) after an initial background investigation is performed by Pinkerton.
Did the DoJ take this as an invitation to alter the requirements? No, they just went right on down the list until they found the only people who COULDN'T say no... the people who work for them.
I believe you are misinformed on both the prevalance of security clearances among university faculty and what holding a security clearance entails. With a little bit of effort you could find just as many, if not more, MIT, UCSD, etc. faculty and staff who hold active security clearances, many of which are high level clearances such as Defense Dept. Top Secret clearances and DOE Q clearances. Faculty in the sciences and engineering frequently consult on government projects and they are they often asked to serve on external review committees.
A security clearance simply means that under certain circumstances (a "need to know") these individuals may access classified information. It does not obligate them to participate in any specific programs per se, but rather requires of them only that they not disclose sensitive information to uncleared people or participate in activities (such as recreational drug use) that are perceived as making them vulnerable to blackmail. In the case of Carnivore technology this may be a good thing since much of the technology is undoubtedly classified anyway--if the reviewers have no clearances then evaluation of the program would wait until the evaluators got the required clearances. This would be the case regardless of which institution is called upon to review the technology, and it is an issue that is separate from wondering about the integrity and objectiveness of the committee.
It hardly requires a security clearance to "rubber stamp" a program. It only requires a rubber stamp.
It also would ban the sale, purchase, import and distribution of devices used for hacking....
/. gripe fest over the meaning of the word "hacker/hacking").
And in related news today: Axes, hatchets and machetes are now selling like hotcakes on Ebay in anticipation of the ban. (Time for another
Lizzy Bordon took an axe
and sunk it deep into a Vax.
When she saw what she had done
she turned and hacked apart a Sun. -author unknown
...but it certainly harms the reputation of the US as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners.
Ever dealt with the INS? Having observed the bureaucratic terrorism my wife suffered en route to attaining her citizenship, I can assure you that foreigners have no such delusions about the U.S. Case in point: the INS releases no telephone numbers. Everything must be handled either by mail (in which case they simply never bother responding to you) or in person (show up early, wait 4 hours in line, maybe be told that you should come back "in two weeks" and the matter will be "straightened out"--two lies for the price of one...a dozen iterations later one is led to wonder why anyone even bothers). All this for the dubious honor of intoning pithy jingoism to an examiner and suffering whiplash from the DOJ's jerking them around, losing their paperwork, suggesting a week before the swearing in ceremony that they begin the naturalization process anew, etc. No, I think it is safe to say that foreigners, in general, learn very quickly that the U.S. has institutional bias against them. YMMV, but not by much, I'm afraid.
I just don't see why everyone's so uptight over this. It's not like it's impossible or anything....
Let's suppose that this is just a statistical fluke and that the actual percentage of Windows users is indeed 100% - 28% = 72%. (Sorry, Mac users, but you are too busy playing with your cubes to vote anyway). The chance that 126500 consecutive "Go Windows Woo!!" votes came in is merely 2.75 * 10^18047 to 1. Far from impossible--what say we give the impartial folks over at MSNBC the benefit of the doubt?
I'm gonna put a foot down here and give an absolute: I refuse to believe that anyone should be held liable for the laws of the universe. If it's impossible to make a 100% secure lock then you shouldn't be able to sue the lockmaker unless they purposefully introduced a flaw into the mechanism.
I am not a lawyer (and I doubt you are one either) [IANALAIDYAOE], but I take issue with your pronouncement. Parties should, in principle, be held responsible for incompetence or negligence that harms others. The matter should not hinge on "intent to harm," as this would give carte blanche for corporations to produce most anything under any claims whatsoever provided you couldn't prove a willful introduction of deleterious flaws into the product. Most people would see no problem with holding responsible, say, a factory that inadvertantly contaminates a town's groundwater with heavy metals or a contractor who builds a bridge that falls down under a normal traffic load due to corners that were cut during the construction process. Neither is technically a purposeful introduction of a flaw nor a violation of physics, yet both are examples of negligence.
Begs the question: Has a software house ever been sued for a security flaw?)
Negligence itself in the U.S. has a curious definition. In essence (if I recall correctly--lawyers, please correct my errors), the criterion is the answer to "In hindsight, would you have done anything different to have prevented this from happening?" If the answer is "yes," then one is negligent. This, like many USian laws, seems to leave little room for common sense, and it is a system that can be easily abused: Of course McDonalds employees would warn a person of hot coffee if they knew she would later injure herself. Of course the soda machine company would warn people that it is dangerous to try tipping the machine over to get a free soda.
Software companies are different, however, since they have a shrink-wrap licensing agreement that disavows them of any responsibility for damages resulting from potential use or misuse of their products. If I'm not mistaken, one generally cannot even pose the negligence question to a software company since they make no claims whatsoever on the suitability of their products for any purpose, much less the purpose that led to damages to a party. This is yet another way that software differs from the "real world."
The beauty of this piece of election year politics is that a Congressional mandate will undoubtedly surface requiring the offending agencies to clean up their acts, but with no resources provided for them to do so. Unfunded mandates make for great sound bites and the Congressmen who make them can posture and feign outrage when security inevitably breaks down. If they genuinely cared about security, however, they would allocate the resources for it rather than slather the pork thicker in their home districts.
Or perhaps:
> echo "#pragma launch" > boom.c
> gcc boom.c
#pragmas give me the heebie jeebies.
Does your college allow you to acquire a minor in a field of study? If so, then I'd suggest turning your three years of CompSci classes into a minor in CompSci, and then do something completely unrelated for your major--something that you enjoy. A good friend of mine had a similar problem with his physics major, and he ended up doing a physics-Russian literature double major. (He then rediscovered a passion for physics, and was a grad student in a top physics program the last I talked to him). Another friend of mine combined a comparative religion, Buddhist studies major with a mathematics minor; he's now a biophysicist. My roommate from college took his physics major/math & cs minor and went to law school to study patent and intellectual property law. You have many possibilities available to you, and I applaud your honesty in saying "Is this really what I want?" Better now, when you can do something about your situation, than suffer a mid-life crisis in a dead end job fifteen years down the road, with mortgage payments and children to put through college curtailing your options. Keeping the CS as a minor (if it is possible) may placate the parents while you find something fun and personally redeeming to pursue.
I'm all about continuing education, but folks have to remember that learning for the joy of learning doesn't have to take place in the classroom...
Having taught at a top-10 university in CS (I taught a physics course the CS program used as a "weed out" course), I would have to add "...and if you don't get any joy out of learning material that isn't directly related to coding for cash, if the only compelling reason for your being in college is to make making money easier, then go out and do it. Don't waste your time with college."
As an anecdote of no statistical relavence, two of my former students who received this advice from me and acted on it (they were intending to do this anyway--I just reiterated their convictions) are very happy with their decisions. They both plan to go back to school when they are good and ready--30-somethings make better "nontraditional" students than 90-hour-workweek IT slaves anyway, IMO.
YMMV and all that.
Is this a common occurence, editing books for the US market? I once purchased an American edition of 'Vurt' by Jeff Noon...
I believe so. FWIW, another notable "Yanks can't handle an ending like this" case is the omission of the last chapter of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Apparently the chapter was seen at the time as being too "warm and fuzzy" for a jaded America who had just survived Nixon and Watergate, and so the publisher nixed the ending where the protagonist, now no longer young, has become socialized at long last. This chapter changes one's entire outlook on the book, imo.
I don't think we can say that the black hole is rotating. The singularity is a point with (effectively) zero volume, and I would say that this precludes it's ability to rotate.
Rotating black holes have singularities that are not point-shaped, but rather are one-dimensional, ring-shaped beasts. As such they can have an angular momentum. IIRC (and it's been a decade since I've studied GR) the rotating nature of the black hole singularity distorts spacetime around it and causes reference frames to be "dragged" around the black hole. This is odd since it leads to a component of the gravitational force that appears to observers at large distances from the black hole to be "sideways" from the direction one would expect from Newtonian physics. ("Preposition overload" is a problem endemic to talking about GR).
From what I've read, a black hole is a singularity with mass. That is, it has mass but not size, it is a one-dimensional point. The only measurable property that a black hole has is mass.
Perhaps you should try reading more on the subject, since you seem to be a bit mistaken on black holes' propertiese. For starters, black holes may have a net electric charge and (if magnetic monopoles exist) a net magnetic charge. They may have a net angular momentum as well. All of these, in principle, are observable from outside a black hole's event horizon.
Furthermore, a black hole singularity does not need to be a single point. In the case of a charged, rotating black hole, for instance, the singularity is ring-shaped and has the curious feature that if you were to travel through the center of the ring it's anyone's guess where you would end up. You could, in principle, find yourself in a universe that is on a different "Riemann sheet" than the one we are in now that is connected to our universe through the little bridge of spacetime at the center of the ring singularity. Except for the untidiness of inevitably finding oneself inside a black hole's event horizon in the "parallel universe," this piece of physics seems tailor-made for science fiction.
From a practical standpoint you are correct, however. In 99% of the problems in astrophysics nobody gives a hoot what the esoteric properties of a black hole are. It's just a compact critter that radiates x-rays like crazy when it gobbles up matter. (A notable exception to this is people who study accretion in quasars, where assuming a Kerr geometry instead of a Schwartzchild geometry can affect accretion models by a noticeable amount).
Isn't the word "non-obvious" supposed to apply to potential patents?
IANAL, but I used to hang around with a couple. "Non-obvious" means something different in patent law than it does for the layperson; in particular a well-defined set of criteria need to be satisfied for something to be "non-obvious." In this regard it is similar to many scientific and technical fields. (A hard drive isn't the 405 at rush hour?)
Undoubtedly a lawyer will post and say "this is what it means for something to satisfy non-obviousness," and we'll see, much to our amusement, that the definition itself is non-obvious.
The difference between paying $600 a term for the 'vitabook' and paying $2000 for 'real' books is that YOU GET TO KEEP THE REAL BOOKS!
Even if no expiration date existed on the Vitabooks (vitamins + books? What a silly name), one is still left with the problem of ensuring that the technology for reading DVDs remains current and convenient for decades into the future. Aside from the obvious "solution" of using DeCSS to extract the data and save it as hard copy (undoubtedly in violation of the licensing agreement), this problem appears to be without remedy.
Anyone remember the old 8" floppies?
This is obviously about hardware problems, and possibly OEM software problems. Not about driver issues for every OS under the sun.
The interesting thing about the bill is that if software problems are not covered then vendors could just categorize everything as a problem with the software and wash their hands of the matter. "Scanner doesn't work? Software problem." "Machine crashes whenever these bad memory chips are in? Software problem. Oh, you replace the chips and the problem goes away? Still a software problem. Your software is incompatible with the chips we provlde." "Printer jams on every other page? Software problem. Your documents are too long." 95% of the people who purchase systems wouldn't be able to reliably diagnose hardware vs. software problems anyway. The other 5% would be bound by the obligatory and ensuing "crack open the case and you void the warranty" agreements.
Customer service would be trivial to perform. Just have an answering machine for Quaker State residents that picks up with "Hello, if you are having difficulty with one of our products then it is a software problem and not a hardware problem. Thank you and good day."
I wonder if it could also be used as a weapon. Stun people with an amplified blast long enough to subdue them.
IIRC audio weapons have been made with very low freq. audio meant to hit a resonances in people's abdominal cavities. The trouble with the low-freq audio was that it tended to be omni-directional, so it was difficult to aim the cramp-inducing sound field at, say, a crowd of WTO protesters without harming the good people manning the device. One could imagine, however, using multiple, highly columnated, directional beams of slightly differing frequencies (with a low-frequency beat wave) to zap individuals. The resonance is moderately narrow (again, IIRC--someone more in the know please correct me if I'm wrong on this), so the carrier may not need to be of exceptionally high volume in order to drive the resonance to useful amplitudes.
It's been a long time since I read about these, but if I recall correctly the concept was inspired in part by a chicken farm located near a factory in Australia (perhaps New Zealand). The factory put out steady, low-frequency oscillations at a particular frequency that caused the chickens, when they grew to where their heads were a certain size, to die from having their brains scrambled.
The traditional media outlets are perhaps most influential around election time, when candidates fight tooth and nail for a splash of positive coverage, "face time," and a 3-second sound bite on the nightly news. It would be intriguing if the "new media" indeed were to inject substance into how political elections are conducted. Like many, I am disenchanted with mainstream election coverage that resembles a horse race, with running "So-and-so is 4 points ahead in the polls today" updates in place of the more substantial "My stance on issue X is as follows: [Insert esssay here]." I'd much prefer the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates over the pith-and-mud we have suffered in the recent past, and I honestly believe that the current "be everyone's friend" approach to political campaigning in the U.S. is the underlying cause for apathy and cynicism among the voting public. I look with guarded agathism to the new media to counteract this.
Nader has an interesting and provocative site; while I don't agree with everything he advocates (by a long shot), I do respect his taking a very public stance on contentious issues, and I wish more candidates would do the same.
Heaven runs Windows 2000 and there are no crashes? What are you getting at here?
While I don't believe in heaven, I do believe in magic smoke. Permit me to elaborate:
Everything runs on magic smoke. There is a simple demonstration of this: take off one of your boots and whack your monitor a few times with it. You should hear a hiss--that's the magic smoke escaping. When the hiss stops no more magic smoke will remain inside, and your monitor will cease to function. Similarly, if you overclock your chip without sufficient cooling the chip will start to release its magic smoke. Same principle. Why do overheated cars stop running? Acute loss of magic smoke. "Houston, we have a problem. We seem to be jetisoning something into space." Again, magic smoke.
Computer software runs on magic smoke too, as we all know. This is why it is so exhausting to write code--magic smoke goes from our brains to being wrapped around the symbols in our emacsen; we replenish the magic smoke in our bodies by drinking cola (that's what's in those little bubbles). Compilers merely concentrate the magic smoke so that it can do something useful, like propagate an Outlook virus or somesuch. Open Source projects like the Linux operating system let magic smoke escape every time people poke and prod at the code, particularly people who work in unsealed environments like apartment buildings or university computer labs. This is inevitable, rather like how the magic smoke excapes whenever you open the door to your microwave oven. Win2k, on the other hand, is created in a hermetically sealed, corporate environment so the magic smoke has nowhere to go. Its magic smoke stays put, and this is why W2K and the Closed Source design model wins out over Linux and its Open Source development--that is, until we start writing Linux while wrapped in celophane.
This isn't rocket science, people.
I attended an ionospheric modification conference some time ago ('94?) before Iridium was operational. At the conference one of the execs gave a presentation on Iridium where he very openly (for an exec) admitted problems with the business model and technical difficulties with their implementation of the system. I believe he concluded his talk with a statement to the effect of "Sure we'll have stiff competition for a very limited marketshare--three systems are planned and only one will survive. We hope to win by getting there first."
There's a metaphor here somewhere.
James Accord is a most curious figure, and I confess I hadn't heard of his project before today.
Thanks for the links!
22 pound sphere of Uranium cut in two at the equator...
I just can't get this picture out of my head: You, standing next to a critical mass of uranium and holding a hacksaw.
...and it's not plutonium or anything...
I'd like to note that nuclear weapons can be made of other things besides plutonium. In fact, the fission cross section of Pu-239 is high, so it is quite difficult to make weapons out of plutonium. One cannot use a gun assembly like Little Boy, the U-235 bomb that dropped on Hiroshima, and instead one surrounds a subcritical mass of plutonium with high explosives that, when detonated, compress/implode the material to get it to go critical. This is a delicate business best left for the pros e.g. Los Alamos Nat. Lab. An attractive and moderately low-cost alternative to plutonium that has been tried by at least one country (India, IIRC) is to breed U-233 from thorium to make material for weapons. (This is one place where the South Park song "Blame Canada" is actually fitting since, if I remember right, the materials were bred in reactors supplied by Canada).
The problem of uranium purification is a difficult one, and it would be nearly impossible to surreptitiously acquire enough reactor-grade uranium to construct a weapon without the world's intelligence agencies being clued in to the fact, mail-order uranium notwithstanding.
If I were a terrorist I'd forgo the whole nuclear weapons thing and just start manufacturing anthrax. Acquiring the materials is trivial (just go find a field of sheep), and you get considerably more deaths per dollar with biological agents than with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, they are easier to deploy, and they are much more difficult to detect and disable.
Bioweapons--the poor-man's nuke.
Even worse was the fact that there weren't real desk, just those psuedo desks that hang off the cube wall. So the guy opposite me would start stomping his feet to the music he was listening to, and my monitor would shake. Or somebody would sit on the desk in the cube next to me, and my monitor would rise up.
Surely you've seen the film Brazil?
Better eight layers of management than half that with matrix management. I interviewed once for a position with one of the U.S. national laboratories, and in the interview the two other orthogonal management structures (in addition to line management) were described. I couldn't help but think that "matrix management" was bad terminology--perhaps "tensor management" instead?
A curious feature of matrix management is that it diffuses accountability to the point where nobody seems to be responsible for anything. No doubt this is by design.