At least he didn't start giving you a hard time for exposing him to "secondhand radiation," thereby exposing him to an unacceptible health risk.
If the data can be manipulated and interpreted in such a way as to find the tiniest glimmer of a possibility of a health hazard resulting from cell-phone use, then this is the argument that will be used by the scaremongers to legislate their demise.
Cracking good symmetric cyphers does not rely on factorization - the techniques for breaking them are quite different. A friend of mine who works on this stuff mentioned that quantum computers, if developed, would provide an algorithmic improvement for keyspace searches equivalent to halving the key length.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify this for me. Can you ask your friend for a reference on this? I am interested in reading more on the subject. Thanks.
quantum computing can theoretically search a 256 bit in the same time a conventional computer can do a 128 bit key.
I am unsure what you mean by this, since no actual quantum computer exists to make the comparison. Quantum factorization algorithms are known which have a different computational complexity than classical algorithms. In principle, if/when quantum computers become technically realizable then keys of any length could be factored with enough time.
Has anyone heard of any public-key cyphers that aren't easily crackable if a quantum computer is built?
A class of encryption methods that may be safe from attack by quantum techniques is elliptic curve cryptography. Much less is known about these algorithms, and (to my knowledge) no quantum attack on elliptic curve crypto has been discovered. This is not the same as saying that they are safe from quantum attack, but they have the possibility of being safer than methods that rely on the difficulty of factoring large numbers.
One functional programming language (and, for that matter, procedural programming language and rule-based programming language) that receives quite a bit of use today is Mathematica. While it is possible to write FORTRAN-like Mathematica code, it is rarely advantageous to do so, and functional programming is generally a more efficient way to write code in Mathematica. (Prior to executing a Mathematica statement the code is parsed into an equivalent functional form anyway, with this functional equivalent being what is what is fed to the interpreter. If one writes functionally almost all of the extra stuff going on behind the scenes that can make Mathematica dog-slow may be avoided).
Secondly, How often do you replace your mouse? Mine last about 1.5 years.
I agree. While I don't go through mice as quickly as you do (I've been using the same optical mouse for about 6 years now on my home machine), it doesn't make much sense to embed an expensive biometrics scanner in a very cheap input device that is subject to regular mechanical stress. A stand-alone reader would seem to make alot more sense.
Probably the best finger scanning technology is (ahem, plug) by...
It's not an official plug unless you give a link to the web site.:) I wonder how long until systems such as these become standard in secure computing environments. One-time pass codes are nice, but a combination of one-time pass codes and biometrics would seem to be much more secure.
...he could see the Cerenkov radiation flashses inside his eyes...
While I don't doubt that he saw something, and it may well have been correlated to enhanced levels of radiation experienced in the SAA, claims of GeV+ protons produced from geomagnetism are difficult to believe. (Electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the most violent geomagnetic phenomena in the heliosphere, but the ions remain non-relativistic). IMO a more plausible explanation for what the cosmonaut saw would be that shielding from the cosmic ray flux was lower in that region due to a thinner atmosphere/ionosphere above him, so more ambient cosmic rays could pass through his body.
Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat.
I agree with you, but my point was that the danger from energetic particles of heliospheric origin would be much lower for the ISS than for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Shielding from ambient cosmic ray flux is a different matter altogether--irrespective of the level of solar activity, people living in Santa Fe (7000 ft.) receive a much higher dose of cosmic rays than people living in Los Angeles (sea level). In LEO, away from the magnetic poles, Earth's magnetic field offers quite good protection from energetic plasma streaming from the Sun. The plasma can still find its way into the magnetosphere eventually, but this is an indirect process, with most of the highly energetic plasma confined to magnetic flux tubes far above the orbiting space station.
Unless it is an especially violent geomagnetic storm it should pose no huge threat to astronauts on the ISS. The ISS lives in low earth orbit (unlike many satellites which are at geosynchronous orbit) and as a consequence it is shielded quite well by Earth's magnetic field.
I would like an amendment saying that if any part of a bill is ruled unconstitutional, the entire bill is rendered null and void.
This could have interesting consequences in the case of an appropriations bill. What does one do if, three years down the road, the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill is voided by the courts? Require agencies to refund the money?
If one exempts appropriations bills from this amendment, then either every new bill will get a tiny "appropriations" resolution in it to safeguard it, or else the big appropriations bills would be even harder to get passed since they would be littered with riders. (And we think it's hard to get a budget approved now...).
If Microsoft wanted to actually create a standard, they need to release it and make it available to all operating systems and browsers.
Realistically, with 85%+ of the marketshare, most anything MS/IE chooses to do becomes standard--witness Word as the standard for business documents. This didn't come about by releasing information about the format to competitors, but rather by dominating the market so completely.
Many people are opposed to their "embrace, extend, extinguish" practices, as am I, but is this so different from a dominant compiler writer releasing proprietary extensions to a programming language? Some of these language features influence the standards committees and consequently lead to improvements in the languages themselves.
Didn't Netscape do the same in the early days of browsers (i.e. when they still enjoyed a dominant place in the market)? IIRC, this is what brought us blinking text....
I doubt Mr. Katz genuinely hates his perceived enemy, but he has made a career out of raising the spectre of class warfare, about seeing every banal topic through a "geeks vs. corporatism" lens, out of being the self-appointed spokesperson for the "persecuted geeks" of the world. (Read: milquetoast, middle class, USA, suburbia world. But hey--they are the only ones who "get it" anyway, right?) Why should he abandon a cash cow?
I do have to admit that I may suffer from "OldFartism" myself since I just don't see a need to invent new words for every essay. Does his "New Media" require a new language to accompany it?
drug information, no make that all information must be free, so that people can make informed, rational decisions.
I think their inclusion of such a resolution is inspired more by pragmatism and election year politics, with restricting the information a convenient, if secondary, motive. The political incentive for the resolution is obvious; this is an election year, and many politicians want to be in the Congressional Record as having recently supported anti-drug legislation. As for pragmatism, most of this information is already published onto wood pulp (many libraries contain this material, and a quick search on Amazon.com reveals a number of titles) and then distributed through book vendors, libraries, etc. It is much easier for the DEA and FBI to track who is getting the drug information, however, when they can subpoena Amazon.com's records instead of trying to attach packets to people (always a dicey game at best) in a way that will satisfy the courts.
The failure of the Communications Decency Act should demonstrate the impracticality and questionable legality of trying to restrict this kind of information on the Internet. The political capital to be gained from supporting such a bill, however, outweighs that of opposing it, so it is doubtful that we can do much to affect its eventual passage even though it appears to revoke civil liberties that are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
The law is not intended to hold up in courts. It is not intended to be good public policy. It is (probably) not even intended to be enforced. It is nothing but election year politics--if it helps its supporters get reelected, then it has done its job. Look for it to be overturned the first time it is challenged in the courts.
And this is where, after reading all the fucking inane bullshit on slashdot for a year, I totally...
...contribute to it? Nice spew. Feel better now?
Have any of you stopped, EVEN ONCE, and considered what goes on outside the windows of your fucking Lexus?
Why yes, yes indeed. My wife drives it most days so I walk to work instead.
Many developing nations are opting to build universities and educate their people as a means of addressing poverty. I know of someone (a brother of a good friend) who is in Nigeria right now helping a university there set up its computer networks; he began by helping with the building construction, but since he knows a few things about setting up networks he was able to help out here as well.
I suppose you believe that these nations should be growing their economies by waiting for handouts from the West instead? I hate to break it to you, but unless the nation is rich in natural resources such as oil the West would just as soon forget what goes on in a developing country. Case in point: How many Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994? 800,000? IIRC, your "goddamned news" gave it scant coverage after the first week or so. The last time I checked this is on par with estimates for some famous Western genocides (such as the million or so who perished in the Armenian genocide), however suprisingly little effort was made on the part of the West to try to pacify the situation. We seem not to care much about people with brown or black skin who have no resources to peddle.
Opposition to technological investment by developing nations because "people are suffering" is silly and paternalistic. People are starving in the United States too, but we allow the tech industries to thrive--we even prefer "computers in the classroom" over investing in social programs to address these problems.
I realize that politics play huge role in scientific development and progress, but why involve governments at all.
Generally governments are involved because the science they fund is perceived to be good for the country in some fashion. For instance, a cure for AIDS would be good business for whoever comes up with it. Likewise, fusion power plants would be good business. Nuclear reactor research is both good business and also good for defense. (Nuclear reactors for energy, nuclear subs, breeder reactors to manufacture plutonium, etc). Rocket science was initially developed in the U.S. to allow Corona to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War--again, something perceived to be good for the national defense and, eventually, good for business. States often have a good reason to support much of the research that they do, and unfortunately finding innovative, inexpensive ways to launch stuff into orbit isn't terribly compelling to most nations. It is doubtful that this research would get much more support under the "world scientific foundation" banner if the majority of its constituents consider the problem to be of low priority.
All non-corporate scientists would work for a section of the UN. Their research would be funded by each government putting X, Y, or Z percent of their budget into the project, depending on the economic status of their country, and all the scientists would be able to draw from that pool.
Many dangers lurk in turning over the responsibility for science leadership and funding to a completely autonomous agency. Perhaps foremost among these is that public funds would still be required for such a body. It would likely be even harder to drum up support for science when a nation could opt to let the other nations carry the burden for them. (Witness how difficult it is now to get the U.S. to pay what it owes to the U.N.) The incentive to contribute would be even lower if the spending of the agency didn't match the priorities of a nation. For example, India may place a high value on fusion energy research, given its economic situation, whereas the U.S. may love cheap oil and place a low value on fusion energy research.
This would mean that the scientists would be unaffected by politics.
In my experience, the process of evaluating and distributing research grants is itself a very political process; to consolidate all this into one central agency may give too much power to small factions of grant reviewers whose agendas may not necessarily coincide with the advancement of good science.
These are just a few difficulties I have with your agency. Don't get me wrong--yours is an interesting idea, however I will need some convincing before I believe that it is an improvement on the present system.
Man did that thing ever rock! Two, count em, two floppy disk drives, a whopping 64k of ram, and a great big red power button on the keyboard. Sure it had sucky games, but then again it helped me learn assembly language programming (Z-80) in 6th grade. I didn't own an assembler (couldn't talk the parents into springing for one) so I hand-assembled everything with a hex calculator and entered it directly into memory with the debugger.... Ah, the good old days. I loved the thing--a throwback to when computers cost about as much as an automobile and weighed about the same too.
Btw., whatever happened to Scripsit, the greatest word processor of all time?
Depending on your organization, what you did, and how motivated your organization is to press the matter, the response could be reprimanding you, firing you, suing you (if you violate NDAs and the like) or bringing criminal charges against you (a favorite of many U.S. Govt. agencies).
A first ammendment that only protects the speech you agree with protects little.
Once when I was in college I visited a friend at his school. While we were there a rally took place to protest how someone's free speech was being suppressed (I forget the exact cause--just the gist of what the rally was about). An intriguing moment during the rally was when someone arrived with a stack of highly conservative on-campus newspapers that were sharply critical of the position taken by the protesters. Up they went in a big bonfire.
To this day I wonder whether it was a highly provocative political statement, or just delicious irony.
This new attack on privacy -- not to mention all the dangers of contamination you mention -- is outrageous and MUST be FOUGHT!!!
Ah, no. Fighting for civil liberties is passe--went out of fashion about 225 years ago. What you do is you now is resign yourself to a combination of skin-flake testing and other "scientific, objective" tests, e.g. the polygraph, expert witness testimony, and psychological profiling. So much sci-babble can't all be wrong, can it?
It is getting progressively less important to preserve peoples ephemeral rights than it is to ensure that the populace is happy, safe, and content (in other words, controlled). Liberties? No way man, give me stock options, a new SUV, and DirectTV. People's perspectives have been skewed by the in-your-face coverage of terrorist bombings and kids going apeshit with firearms in their schools, so folks irrationally fear getting blown up or blown away despite the probability being about as high that the same people will spontaneously combust.
Give me another hit of soma, will ya partner?
Re:Easy solution - ban DNA cross referencing
on
Walk-By DNA Testing
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· Score: 2
The american people need to vote on what they want more: Freedom or safety.
Well said. Unfortunately, it would appear that most American people are more concerned about safety than freedom, and they are more than willing to throw common sense to the wind when doing this.
A feel-good, spur-of-the-moment resolution is always more palatable for the American people than careful examination and analysis of a complex issue: "Ban guns because guns kill people!" Well, so does red meat and talking on cell phones while driving, just not as dramatically. "Use blocking software in public web facilities. Enact decency laws on web-page content. Internet pr0n will destroy our children!" and the backlash will threaten our freedom of speech. "Hard drives are missing from a national laboratory! Enact new security policies now to punish those unpatriotic scientists!" And highly talented scientists leave the labs in droves as the draconian changes to security policies make their work lives unbearable. And this helps national security how? "Unscrupulous cashiers! Electronics stores now require the customer to show his or her receipt upon leaving the store with the purchased item." A fix to the problem, but the item is legally the property of the customer once the purchase is made, so the practice constitutes unlawful search and siezure.
This new technology is just one in a long string of episodes where Americans will affix a band-aid cure and abridge their civil liberties to prevent something of negligible probability (terrorist bombing that can bypass current safeguards) from occurring.
You can be perfectly safe, more or less, but you'll be living in a police state.
If you have any sympathies towards China or the Chinese, or even if you just want to read an objective discussion on something as innocuous as "which OS is preferred there," then reading anything said in a public forum in this country about China is bound to be frustrating. It is currently fashionable to bash the Chinese and blame them for the world's ills. Much of this stems from the GOP leadership trying desparately to find something else to drag Clinton (and, by extension, Gore) down, and much of it derives from a culture of suspicion and fear that can't quite let go of the Cold War. It is always easier to find someone and lay the blame on them than to address genuine problems: "Low wages/loss of manufacturing jobs? Blame China and their slave-labor camps!" "No drug for your particular ailment? Blame China--their IP laws allow drug piracy on a grand scale and thus drug companies can't afford to innovate." "Hard drives misplaced for a short time at Los Alamos? Blame the Chinese! It is easier for us to imagine their breaking into one of our most secret establishments, making off with the drives, then replacing them than it is to think that maybe the drives were, in fact, misplaced." "The president is not who we want? Blame Chinese donations to his campaign!" Conspiracy theorizing and fear-mongering carry the day in the U.S. today.
AC, Ask the native Americans how just and benevolent a government the U.S. is. By your line of reasoning the U.S. Government is evil incarnate since they carried out campaign of genocide some time ago against unsavory elements of the population within its borders. The inconvenient fact that the Trail of Tears happened over a century ago is immaterial; afterall, Mao is no longer in power either, and most of his more extreme policies have been reversed or changed since he ruled. To turn your quote against you: "Yes, the U.S. government is evil -- everyone in the current leadership could be convicted of conspiracy to commit tens of millions of murders," at least on the same grounds as one says this regarding the current regime in the PRC.
The U.S. was under martial law during much of Lincoln's time in office, and people's civil rights were suspended, sometimes egregiously, during that time. Shall we mention Lincoln in the same breath as Chairman Mao?
This should be extended to cell phones, beepers, digital watches, and those GameBoy things. I taught physics once in a 300-student lecture theater, and I had a devil of a time with students who wouldn't turn off their beepers/cell phones. Once I had a student in the front row take a call and talk audibly on her phone for about 5 minutes, with all the obligatory giggling and Valley Girl idioms, about where to go to lunch.
The next lecture I brought in a big hammer and laid it on the front table. "Any physicians in the room? Any paramedics?" (silence). "Good. Please turn off your cell phones and beepers. You have been warned."
He's right. Either leads to a consistent formulation of special relativity. That being said....
I can also point out that from the point of view of a purist it is cleaner to think that way.
Others may argue just as convincingly that it is cleaner to interpret mass as a Lorentz invariant and incorporate the extra gamma factor into the momentum. Ultimately it seems to depend upon what one intends to do with the SR formulation. Since much of the more modern physics literature (e.g. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, Landau and Lifshitz's The Classical Theory of Fields) interprets mass as the Lorentz invariant quantity m showing up in E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2 c^2, using the more conventional definition has some pragmatic value.
I must confess that I've never done any calculations in general relativity using your convention for mass, and my interest is piqued. Do you find GR is easier to interpret using your mass convention?
Whoooeeee! Stick the pig, Pa, we're havin' dinner! Someone obviously MISSED Physics 101. Too much time watching WWF maybe? Or out tippin' cows maybe? As per BASIC HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS,light has properties of both particles and waves, and is almost, but not completely, massless.
Please wipe that egg off your face, BadERA, and go tell your high school physics instructor that he failed miserably in teaching you basic high school physics.
Light has momentum but has never been shown to have any measurable amount of mass; it has been verified experimentally to an enormously high degree of accuracy that light does not have mass.
Wrong! As we all know, light is a wave and as such has no mass, therefore by definition it always has zero momentum...
This is not true. While I'm sure you will be inundated with all the quantum theory of light "Hey bonehead, E = h nu and E = sqrt[(mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2], so for light (which has m = 0) h nu = p c, or p = h nu / c" posts, I would like to comment that you can also get momentum flux from classical electromagnetic theory as well. (It is clear to me from your post that you have no background in relativity, and--I'm guessing--quantum theory, so this may be more relevant to you): Basically, from Poynting's theorem one can show that the volume integral of (E x B) is proportional to the electromagnetic momentum.
Absorption of the light is the only way to make these sails work - the light heats up the sail, thermionic emission of electrons occurs and it is this emission of electrons which is responsible for the change in momentum which propels the spacecraft.
Not really; if desired you could just have the sails be reflecting surfaces. If you reflect the incident wave, then the momentum exchange will be twice (roughly, allowing for dissipative effects) that of the incident wave.
Slashdot Mirror
At least he didn't start giving you a hard time for exposing him to "secondhand radiation," thereby exposing him to an unacceptible health risk.
If the data can be manipulated and interpreted in such a way as to find the tiniest glimmer of a possibility of a health hazard resulting from cell-phone use, then this is the argument that will be used by the scaremongers to legislate their demise.
Cracking good symmetric cyphers does not rely on factorization - the techniques for breaking them are quite different. A friend of mine who works on this stuff mentioned that quantum computers, if developed, would provide an algorithmic improvement for keyspace searches equivalent to halving the key length.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify this for me. Can you ask your friend for a reference on this? I am interested in reading more on the subject. Thanks.
quantum computing can theoretically search a 256 bit in the same time a conventional computer can do a 128 bit key.
I am unsure what you mean by this, since no actual quantum computer exists to make the comparison. Quantum factorization algorithms are known which have a different computational complexity than classical algorithms. In principle, if/when quantum computers become technically realizable then keys of any length could be factored with enough time.
Has anyone heard of any public-key cyphers that aren't easily crackable if a quantum computer is built?
A class of encryption methods that may be safe from attack by quantum techniques is elliptic curve cryptography. Much less is known about these algorithms, and (to my knowledge) no quantum attack on elliptic curve crypto has been discovered. This is not the same as saying that they are safe from quantum attack, but they have the possibility of being safer than methods that rely on the difficulty of factoring large numbers.
One functional programming language (and, for that matter, procedural programming language and rule-based programming language) that receives quite a bit of use today is Mathematica. While it is possible to write FORTRAN-like Mathematica code, it is rarely advantageous to do so, and functional programming is generally a more efficient way to write code in Mathematica. (Prior to executing a Mathematica statement the code is parsed into an equivalent functional form anyway, with this functional equivalent being what is what is fed to the interpreter. If one writes functionally almost all of the extra stuff going on behind the scenes that can make Mathematica dog-slow may be avoided).
/@ Range[ 1, 10 ]; /. {i_ -> (i^2 - 4)};
(* Using built-in Table[] function *)
arr = Table[ (i^2 - 4), {i,1,10} ];
(* Procedural *)
Do[ arr[[i]] = (i^2 - 4), {i,1,10} ];
(* Functional *)
arr = #^2 - 4 &
(* Rule-based *)
arr = Range[ 1, 10 ]
Secondly, How often do you replace your mouse? Mine last about 1.5 years.
:) I wonder how long until systems such as these become standard in secure computing environments. One-time pass codes are nice, but a combination of one-time pass codes and biometrics would seem to be much more secure.
I agree. While I don't go through mice as quickly as you do (I've been using the same optical mouse for about 6 years now on my home machine), it doesn't make much sense to embed an expensive biometrics scanner in a very cheap input device that is subject to regular mechanical stress. A stand-alone reader would seem to make alot more sense.
Probably the best finger scanning technology is (ahem, plug) by...
It's not an official plug unless you give a link to the web site.
...he could see the Cerenkov radiation flashses inside his eyes...
While I don't doubt that he saw something, and it may well have been correlated to enhanced levels of radiation experienced in the SAA, claims of GeV+ protons produced from geomagnetism are difficult to believe. (Electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the most violent geomagnetic phenomena in the heliosphere, but the ions remain non-relativistic). IMO a more plausible explanation for what the cosmonaut saw would be that shielding from the cosmic ray flux was lower in that region due to a thinner atmosphere/ionosphere above him, so more ambient cosmic rays could pass through his body.
Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat.
I agree with you, but my point was that the danger from energetic particles of heliospheric origin would be much lower for the ISS than for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Shielding from ambient cosmic ray flux is a different matter altogether--irrespective of the level of solar activity, people living in Santa Fe (7000 ft.) receive a much higher dose of cosmic rays than people living in Los Angeles (sea level). In LEO, away from the magnetic poles, Earth's magnetic field offers quite good protection from energetic plasma streaming from the Sun. The plasma can still find its way into the magnetosphere eventually, but this is an indirect process, with most of the highly energetic plasma confined to magnetic flux tubes far above the orbiting space station.
Unless it is an especially violent geomagnetic storm it should pose no huge threat to astronauts on the ISS. The ISS lives in low earth orbit (unlike many satellites which are at geosynchronous orbit) and as a consequence it is shielded quite well by Earth's magnetic field.
Hi Ben.
I would like an amendment saying that if any part of a bill is ruled unconstitutional, the entire bill is rendered null and void.
This could have interesting consequences in the case of an appropriations bill. What does one do if, three years down the road, the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill is voided by the courts? Require agencies to refund the money?
If one exempts appropriations bills from this amendment, then either every new bill will get a tiny "appropriations" resolution in it to safeguard it, or else the big appropriations bills would be even harder to get passed since they would be littered with riders. (And we think it's hard to get a budget approved now...).
If Microsoft wanted to actually create a standard, they need to release it and make it available to all operating systems and browsers.
Realistically, with 85%+ of the marketshare, most anything MS/IE chooses to do becomes standard--witness Word as the standard for business documents. This didn't come about by releasing information about the format to competitors, but rather by dominating the market so completely.
Many people are opposed to their "embrace, extend, extinguish" practices, as am I, but is this so different from a dominant compiler writer releasing proprietary extensions to a programming language? Some of these language features influence the standards committees and consequently lead to improvements in the languages themselves.
Didn't Netscape do the same in the early days of browsers (i.e. when they still enjoyed a dominant place in the market)? IIRC, this is what brought us blinking text....
Well stated.
I doubt Mr. Katz genuinely hates his perceived enemy, but he has made a career out of raising the spectre of class warfare, about seeing every banal topic through a "geeks vs. corporatism" lens, out of being the self-appointed spokesperson for the "persecuted geeks" of the world. (Read: milquetoast, middle class, USA, suburbia world. But hey--they are the only ones who "get it" anyway, right?) Why should he abandon a cash cow?
I do have to admit that I may suffer from "OldFartism" myself since I just don't see a need to invent new words for every essay. Does his "New Media" require a new language to accompany it?
drug information, no make that all information must be free, so that people can make informed, rational decisions.
I think their inclusion of such a resolution is inspired more by pragmatism and election year politics, with restricting the information a convenient, if secondary, motive. The political incentive for the resolution is obvious; this is an election year, and many politicians want to be in the Congressional Record as having recently supported anti-drug legislation. As for pragmatism, most of this information is already published onto wood pulp (many libraries contain this material, and a quick search on Amazon.com reveals a number of titles) and then distributed through book vendors, libraries, etc. It is much easier for the DEA and FBI to track who is getting the drug information, however, when they can subpoena Amazon.com's records instead of trying to attach packets to people (always a dicey game at best) in a way that will satisfy the courts.
The failure of the Communications Decency Act should demonstrate the impracticality and questionable legality of trying to restrict this kind of information on the Internet. The political capital to be gained from supporting such a bill, however, outweighs that of opposing it, so it is doubtful that we can do much to affect its eventual passage even though it appears to revoke civil liberties that are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
The law is not intended to hold up in courts. It is not intended to be good public policy. It is (probably) not even intended to be enforced. It is nothing but election year politics--if it helps its supporters get reelected, then it has done its job. Look for it to be overturned the first time it is challenged in the courts.
And this is where, after reading all the fucking inane bullshit on slashdot for a year, I totally...
...contribute to it? Nice spew. Feel better now?
Have any of you stopped, EVEN ONCE, and considered what goes on outside the windows of your fucking Lexus?
Why yes, yes indeed. My wife drives it most days so I walk to work instead.
Many developing nations are opting to build universities and educate their people as a means of addressing poverty. I know of someone (a brother of a good friend) who is in Nigeria right now helping a university there set up its computer networks; he began by helping with the building construction, but since he knows a few things about setting up networks he was able to help out here as well.
I suppose you believe that these nations should be growing their economies by waiting for handouts from the West instead? I hate to break it to you, but unless the nation is rich in natural resources such as oil the West would just as soon forget what goes on in a developing country. Case in point: How many Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994? 800,000? IIRC, your "goddamned news" gave it scant coverage after the first week or so. The last time I checked this is on par with estimates for some famous Western genocides (such as the million or so who perished in the Armenian genocide), however suprisingly little effort was made on the part of the West to try to pacify the situation. We seem not to care much about people with brown or black skin who have no resources to peddle.
Opposition to technological investment by developing nations because "people are suffering" is silly and paternalistic. People are starving in the United States too, but we allow the tech industries to thrive--we even prefer "computers in the classroom" over investing in social programs to address these problems.
I realize that politics play huge role in scientific development and progress, but why involve governments at all.
Generally governments are involved because the science they fund is perceived to be good for the country in some fashion. For instance, a cure for AIDS would be good business for whoever comes up with it. Likewise, fusion power plants would be good business. Nuclear reactor research is both good business and also good for defense. (Nuclear reactors for energy, nuclear subs, breeder reactors to manufacture plutonium, etc). Rocket science was initially developed in the U.S. to allow Corona to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War--again, something perceived to be good for the national defense and, eventually, good for business. States often have a good reason to support much of the research that they do, and unfortunately finding innovative, inexpensive ways to launch stuff into orbit isn't terribly compelling to most nations. It is doubtful that this research would get much more support under the "world scientific foundation" banner if the majority of its constituents consider the problem to be of low priority.
All non-corporate scientists would work for a section of the UN. Their research would be funded by each government putting X, Y, or Z percent of their budget into the project, depending on the economic status of their country, and all the scientists would be able to draw from that pool.
Many dangers lurk in turning over the responsibility for science leadership and funding to a completely autonomous agency. Perhaps foremost among these is that public funds would still be required for such a body. It would likely be even harder to drum up support for science when a nation could opt to let the other nations carry the burden for them. (Witness how difficult it is now to get the U.S. to pay what it owes to the U.N.) The incentive to contribute would be even lower if the spending of the agency didn't match the priorities of a nation. For example, India may place a high value on fusion energy research, given its economic situation, whereas the U.S. may love cheap oil and place a low value on fusion energy research.
This would mean that the scientists would be unaffected by politics.
In my experience, the process of evaluating and distributing research grants is itself a very political process; to consolidate all this into one central agency may give too much power to small factions of grant reviewers whose agendas may not necessarily coincide with the advancement of good science.
These are just a few difficulties I have with your agency. Don't get me wrong--yours is an interesting idea, however I will need some convincing before I believe that it is an improvement on the present system.
Man did that thing ever rock! Two, count em, two floppy disk drives, a whopping 64k of ram, and a great big red power button on the keyboard. Sure it had sucky games, but then again it helped me learn assembly language programming (Z-80) in 6th grade. I didn't own an assembler (couldn't talk the parents into springing for one) so I hand-assembled everything with a hex calculator and entered it directly into memory with the debugger.... Ah, the good old days. I loved the thing--a throwback to when computers cost about as much as an automobile and weighed about the same too.
Btw., whatever happened to Scripsit, the greatest word processor of all time?
...we all turn into people from a bad MadMax/Water World flick.
Were there any good MadMax/WaterWorld flicks?
Better go buy a muscle car and start stockpiling dirt, I say.
Depending on your organization, what you did, and how motivated your organization is to press the matter, the response could be reprimanding you, firing you, suing you (if you violate NDAs and the like) or bringing criminal charges against you (a favorite of many U.S. Govt. agencies).
A first ammendment that only protects the speech you agree with protects little.
Once when I was in college I visited a friend at his school. While we were there a rally took place to protest how someone's free speech was being suppressed (I forget the exact cause--just the gist of what the rally was about). An intriguing moment during the rally was when someone arrived with a stack of highly conservative on-campus newspapers that were sharply critical of the position taken by the protesters. Up they went in a big bonfire.
To this day I wonder whether it was a highly provocative political statement, or just delicious irony.
This new attack on privacy -- not to mention all the dangers of contamination you mention -- is outrageous and MUST be FOUGHT!!!
Ah, no. Fighting for civil liberties is passe--went out of fashion about 225 years ago. What you do is you now is resign yourself to a combination of skin-flake testing and other "scientific, objective" tests, e.g. the polygraph, expert witness testimony, and psychological profiling. So much sci-babble can't all be wrong, can it?
It is getting progressively less important to preserve peoples ephemeral rights than it is to ensure that the populace is happy, safe, and content (in other words, controlled). Liberties? No way man, give me stock options, a new SUV, and DirectTV. People's perspectives have been skewed by the in-your-face coverage of terrorist bombings and kids going apeshit with firearms in their schools, so folks irrationally fear getting blown up or blown away despite the probability being about as high that the same people will spontaneously combust.
Give me another hit of soma, will ya partner?
The american people need to vote on what they want more: Freedom or safety.
Well said. Unfortunately, it would appear that most American people are more concerned about safety than freedom, and they are more than willing to throw common sense to the wind when doing this.
A feel-good, spur-of-the-moment resolution is always more palatable for the American people than careful examination and analysis of a complex issue: "Ban guns because guns kill people!" Well, so does red meat and talking on cell phones while driving, just not as dramatically. "Use blocking software in public web facilities. Enact decency laws on web-page content. Internet pr0n will destroy our children!" and the backlash will threaten our freedom of speech. "Hard drives are missing from a national laboratory! Enact new security policies now to punish those unpatriotic scientists!" And highly talented scientists leave the labs in droves as the draconian changes to security policies make their work lives unbearable. And this helps national security how? "Unscrupulous cashiers! Electronics stores now require the customer to show his or her receipt upon leaving the store with the purchased item." A fix to the problem, but the item is legally the property of the customer once the purchase is made, so the practice constitutes unlawful search and siezure.
This new technology is just one in a long string of episodes where Americans will affix a band-aid cure and abridge their civil liberties to prevent something of negligible probability (terrorist bombing that can bypass current safeguards) from occurring.
You can be perfectly safe, more or less, but you'll be living in a police state.
Perhaps we already are.
If you have any sympathies towards China or the Chinese, or even if you just want to read an objective discussion on something as innocuous as "which OS is preferred there," then reading anything said in a public forum in this country about China is bound to be frustrating. It is currently fashionable to bash the Chinese and blame them for the world's ills. Much of this stems from the GOP leadership trying desparately to find something else to drag Clinton (and, by extension, Gore) down, and much of it derives from a culture of suspicion and fear that can't quite let go of the Cold War. It is always easier to find someone and lay the blame on them than to address genuine problems: "Low wages/loss of manufacturing jobs? Blame China and their slave-labor camps!" "No drug for your particular ailment? Blame China--their IP laws allow drug piracy on a grand scale and thus drug companies can't afford to innovate." "Hard drives misplaced for a short time at Los Alamos? Blame the Chinese! It is easier for us to imagine their breaking into one of our most secret establishments, making off with the drives, then replacing them than it is to think that maybe the drives were, in fact, misplaced." "The president is not who we want? Blame Chinese donations to his campaign!" Conspiracy theorizing and fear-mongering carry the day in the U.S. today.
AC, Ask the native Americans how just and benevolent a government the U.S. is. By your line of reasoning the U.S. Government is evil incarnate since they carried out campaign of genocide some time ago against unsavory elements of the population within its borders. The inconvenient fact that the Trail of Tears happened over a century ago is immaterial; afterall, Mao is no longer in power either, and most of his more extreme policies have been reversed or changed since he ruled. To turn your quote against you: "Yes, the U.S. government is evil -- everyone in the current leadership could be convicted of conspiracy to commit tens of millions of murders," at least on the same grounds as one says this regarding the current regime in the PRC.
The U.S. was under martial law during much of Lincoln's time in office, and people's civil rights were suspended, sometimes egregiously, during that time. Shall we mention Lincoln in the same breath as Chairman Mao?
This should be extended to cell phones, beepers, digital watches, and those GameBoy things. I taught physics once in a 300-student lecture theater, and I had a devil of a time with students who wouldn't turn off their beepers/cell phones. Once I had a student in the front row take a call and talk audibly on her phone for about 5 minutes, with all the obligatory giggling and Valley Girl idioms, about where to go to lunch.
The next lecture I brought in a big hammer and laid it on the front table. "Any physicians in the room? Any paramedics?" (silence). "Good. Please turn off your cell phones and beepers. You have been warned."
Pity I never got a chance to use it.
s/mass/rest mass/g
*Wipes the egg off his own face.*
He's right. Either leads to a consistent formulation of special relativity. That being said....
I can also point out that from the point of view of a purist it is cleaner to think that way.
Others may argue just as convincingly that it is cleaner to interpret mass as a Lorentz invariant and incorporate the extra gamma factor into the momentum. Ultimately it seems to depend upon what one intends to do with the SR formulation. Since much of the more modern physics literature (e.g. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, Landau and Lifshitz's The Classical Theory of Fields) interprets mass as the Lorentz invariant quantity m showing up in E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2 c^2, using the more conventional definition has some pragmatic value.
I must confess that I've never done any calculations in general relativity using your convention for mass, and my interest is piqued. Do you find GR is easier to interpret using your mass convention?
Whoooeeee! Stick the pig, Pa, we're havin' dinner!
Someone obviously MISSED Physics 101. Too much time watching WWF maybe? Or out tippin' cows maybe?
As per BASIC HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS,light has properties of both particles and waves, and is almost, but not completely, massless.
Please wipe that egg off your face, BadERA, and go tell your high school physics instructor that he failed miserably in teaching you basic high school physics.
Light has momentum but has never been shown to have any measurable amount of mass; it has been verified experimentally to an enormously high degree of accuracy that light does not have mass.
Wrong! As we all know, light is a wave and as such has no mass, therefore by definition it always has zero momentum...
This is not true. While I'm sure you will be inundated with all the quantum theory of light "Hey bonehead, E = h nu and E = sqrt[(mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2], so for light (which has m = 0) h nu = p c, or p = h nu / c" posts, I would like to comment that you can also get momentum flux from classical electromagnetic theory as well. (It is clear to me from your post that you have no background in relativity, and--I'm guessing--quantum theory, so this may be more relevant to you):
Basically, from Poynting's theorem one can show that the volume integral of (E x B) is proportional to the electromagnetic momentum.
Absorption of the light is the only way to make these sails work - the light heats up the sail, thermionic emission of electrons occurs and it is this emission of electrons which is responsible for the change in momentum which propels the spacecraft.
Not really; if desired you could just have the sails be reflecting surfaces. If you reflect the incident wave, then the momentum exchange will be twice (roughly, allowing for dissipative effects) that of the incident wave.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.