Well, for one thing the fatality rate is less than 100%. And the infection rates were less than 100% too. Were the infection and fatality rates 100%, the epidemic would quickly burn itself out. You can set up a differential equation describing this situation: the rate of transmission is proportional to the chance of transmission and how frequently an infected person encounters an uninfected person. But that frequency of contact drops as populations are decimated, so that a particularly aggressive strain soon finds itself dealing with a host population to sparse to maintain itself.
In fact plague *did* kill everyone in many isolated places. Some villages were entirely wiped out by aggressive infections, but if you think about it, the strains that killed everyone quickly were doomed to extinction. There's an optimal level of virulence if you want to spread a pathogen as far and wide as possible.
Consider tuberculosis, which is *highly* transmittable between humans and unlike plague does not require an arthropod vector for transmission. Why hasn't tuberculosis wiped out everyone? Well it *has*, many, many times, wiped out all the humans in small, isolated communities. In fact some scholars have speculated that the vampire legend arose from the spread of virulent strains of TB that wiped out small, rural populations. But in a large population the emergence of an aggressive strain still isn't going to get everyone. Some people will escape infection by chance, and people will flee the area. It's the slow-burning, persistent strains that take months or years to kill someone that have the best chance of surviving long term.
Well, the Norway (aka "brown") rats are carriers of an almost incredible variety of infectious agents that are human pathogens, including hantavirus and Toxoplasma.
The issue with rats isn't that they're *particularly* susceptible to zoonotic pathogens. The issue is that they're well adapted to living around human habitations,which provide them with excellent protection from predation. With plenty food and shelter and no predators, they reach unnaturally high population concentrations. These populations are "preyed upon" by germs instead of carnivores, because inevitably everything in nature is food for something else. Some of those pathogens will also effect humans, and since those dense colonies are living in close proximity to dense colonies of *humans*, brown rats present a public health concern, even though none of their pathogens have quite the marquee name recognition of The Black Death.
Another example of this phenomenon is the raccoon. Because raccoons are still frequently encountered in natural settings people don't have the same revulsion towards them as they do towards rats, but raccoons are just as well adapted to living with humans as rats are. In places where high raccoon populations live in close proximity to humans, they're a serious health concern. I've known natural science geeks -- people who have no qualms about handing dead animals or picking through animal scat -- to treat suburban raccoons with revulsion. A suburban raccoon can be a terrifying bag of disease, and there are documented cases of people dying as a result of handling their poop.
It doesn't mean racoons are *bad*, or that rats are *bad*. It means that wild animal populations with nearly unlimited resources and no predation are an all-you-can-eat banquet for germs.
Well, I'm not sure what "people" you are talking about, but if you're talking about "researchers", the answer would be "no". Researchers are definitely not representative of general population of what they "like" and "dislike".
Two war stories follow.
Some researchers in a tropical medicine discovered that a mens room at the school had been infested with tiny little flies. Did they complain to the management? No. They trapped some of the flies, brought them back to the lab and bred them as pets.
I was walking in the woods one day with a zoologist friend of mine, when we came upon a rotting coyote head in the middle of the trail. "Ooh!" she says, "I want to show that to my students!" Whereupon she picks up the head, maggot-ridden eyeholes and all, and pops it into the pocket of her windbreaker.
So no, I don't think anti-rat bias is a problem for researchers.
Person who worked for years in arthropod borne disease control here.
Except for the reporting screw-up about virus vs. bacteria, this is all just quibbling. The reporters got it wrong as usual, but that doesn't mean that the researchers got it wrong.
Zoonotic diseases (ones that spills over from one animal population to another) always have fantastically complex life cycles. In epidemics of zoonotic diseases it's common for epizootic transmission (transmission between species) to be overtaken by enzootic transmission (transmission *within* a species). For example influenza is a bird pathogen that can cross over into mammalian species like swine and humans. If flu epidemics didn't shift gears from epizootic transmission (bird to human) to enzootic (human to human), they wouldn't be as big a deal. Just stay away from chickens.
So the idea that the black plague was primarily spread among humans enzootically is hardy groundbreaking epidemiology. It certainly doesn't mean that it's not dangerous to live in a place infested with plague-ridden rats. But the shift to enzootic transmission is something that's a bit different from the mosquito or tick borne diseases or occasional, isolated epizootic plague infections we're largely familiar with today.
It's a neat finding, in that it wasn't necessarily expected, but it makes sense in retrospect. In something like West Nile Virus, the natural focus of the pathogen is migratory bird populations that fly thousands of miles. But while a rat can hop on a ship and travel thousands of miles, the vast majority of rats spend their entire lives in a radius of a few hundred feet. Humans are much more mobile than rats; even if a few rats hitch a ride on a ship, they never go anywhere far *without* humans.
What's simplistic is the assumption there has to be only *one* factor involved in a zoonotic epidemic. Without epizootic transmission the plague would not have happened in the first place. That's not news. Without human-to-human enzootic transmission it would not have spread so widely or kill such a high percentage of the population. That is news (I guess -- I didn't work with people doing plauge so I have no direct knowledge of what people in that field thought). Of course before it becomes established science it's going to have to stand up to criticism for a few years.
Well... I've seen MIT try to cope with problems. I've known people working at MIT try to get the Institute to do something about things that most of the people there care about. it's not a pretty picture.
The thing you may be missing about MIT is that it is a behaviorally rigid bureaucracy that swallows up and individual initiative and spits out... nothing. Yes, I know that describes many higher education institutions, but I've worked with many such institutions, even as part of a non-profit that was supposed to help colleges and universities implement changes, and trust me, no matter how dysfunctional your institution is at responding to new situations, *MIT is probably worse*.
So when the Swartz became public, folks reactions were that MIT must be full of horrible, uncaring people. But that's not true. MIT has all kinds of people, and the kind of people like *you* are a much higher proportion of that population than in the general population. Imagine you are a caring, energetic person who goes to work at MIT... OK, maybe you don't know how to picture that. Imagine you are an agile fly darting around faster than the eye can follow. Then you land on this nice looking tree, and end up in this gooey sap-stuff. Now you get the picture.
Busybodies? MIT is an environment practically engineered to turn energetic, caring people into busybodies. If you're a person who wants to make a difference, you find yourself trapped in an endless well of inertia. So you do *what* you can, as *hard* as you can. And people who like to think of themselves as rational are as prone to rationalization as anyone else. Maybe more so.
It's still a great place, full of great people. People you'd like. But if you work there, you've got to learn to live in the moment, not in any plans you might have for the future.
Well, I haven't thought through *all* the consequences well enough to make such a broad statement, but there is a feature of the no-fly list as currently managed that is very, very dangerous: the blurring of the distinction between suspicion and guilt.
Basically, the founders assumed suspicion was benign. That's because treating someone as suspicious was expensive and self-limiting. You ran an investigation and if it turned up nothing you moved the resources allocated to that investigation elsewhere. Suspicion was a burden an innocent citizen could bear for awhile in return for the authorities catching criminals.
Unlike the founders, we live in a world with the technological and bureaucratic infrastructure to make suspicion pervasive, persistent and automatic. Being flagged as "suspicious" or "dangerous" is something that can follow you everywhere you go, for the rest of your life, unless somebody decides on their own to take you off. And there's never any incentive to take you off. And because the system doesn't even *acknowledge* that this determination has been made about you, you in effect have been found guilty by witnesses and evidence you can't confront or challenge, which is unconstitutional. It is merely quibbling to call such restrictions anything but a deprivation of liberty without due process, a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.
I think something like a no-fly list might reasonably be maintained, but a person should not be parked on the list for an unlimited time. If the government cannot turn up something in, say, ten weeks, it should remove the person from the list, or give the person an opportunity to challenge his status. That should be automatic and routine as Mirandizing.
Good catch. We have to distinguish between vulnerabilities and threats. The exploitation of a vulnerability tells us next to nothing. Some people will twist a doorknob without thinking. But if someone particularly targets certain assets, like reporter email and phone logs, you can use that along with who the attacker targets to infer some pretty solid things about him.
Journalists *should* have been on high alert years before Snowden, because their number one most dangerous threat a court order demanding they reveal their sources. The courts could physically seize the equipment of the reporter and his employer and search them well before the NSA started recording everything everywhere.
I suppose the best possible way is to hack the patsy's computer and use it to launch an attack. That could, in principle, be nearly impossible to distinguish from an attack initiated by the patsy; not without the investigators hacking into the patsy's computer themselves. I suppose if I were going to implicate some patsy in cybershenanigans I'd start by securing his system from everybody but me.
Once you've considered the possibility that an attack is frameup, you'd find yourself asking questions like, "Who would want to embarrass the New York Times AND get a Chinese engineering student into trouble? Well, another Chinese engineering student, I guess, but I wouldn't bet on it. The problem is that this kind of reasoning is extremely unreliable. One of the toughest lessons I've had to teach clients is that the motivations of attackers may not make any sense to you. In fact they probably won't.
Take the attack itself. What does it accomplish to deface an American's newspaper's website? It doesn't stop people from getting the news. It doesn't stop people from getting the paper's website for very long. It certainly doesn't do anything to change US Government policies or actions. All it does, in the end, is get some site admins into trouble with their bosses. Essentially, it accomplishes nothing.
But then, a lot of political stuff people do doesn't accomplish anything but make them feel like their doing something. So if we're going to criminally profile the hacker, what we've got is a technically clever stupid person. That is to say somebody who is good at figuring things out and persistent at problem solving, but not very good at choosing useful ways to apply that talent.
It's not exactly true that "Walmart competes on price." At least not on an apples-to-apples basis.
What Walmart does is advertise the lowest price item in a category, then once it has you in the doors it up-sells you to something you're more likely to buy. If you actually check the competitors' pricing, you'll find that Walmart usually charges about the same or even a little bit more on the models they expect you to buy. I find that the local mom-and-pop hardware store is usually two or three percent cheaper on power tools. When in Walmart, Google Shopping is your friend.
Also beware Walmart-only models of anything. That's often a bowdlerized version of the real thing, but made more cheaply. This is a strategy of selling the sizzle, not the steak, then delivering a cheaper steak than the consumer thinks he's buying.
Walmart has got *appearing* to sell things for less without actually doing so down to a science. So, no, I wouldn't expect lower prices if Walmart gets its hands on a litigation windfall. That's not how Walmart competes.
Remember the Monty Python "Dennis Moore" sketch? Well North Korea did it for real. Under the Songbun system turned the old system of hereditary aristocracy on its head, producing... another hereditary aristocracy.
Henry Ford once said, "The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." Taking that as our standard for elegance, I wouldn't criticize a piece of code as "inelegant" just because it dealt exceptions, language or library quirks that have be dealt with. These are *necessary* things, not "excess weight".
On the other hand, I *would* criticize a piece of code because the programmer failed to make it as concise and clear as it could have been. Inelegant code is a fact of life because schedule pressures are a fact of life. It's not necessarily the programmers fault, inelegant code may be the best he can do *under the circumstances*.
But that doesn't excuse the *code* for being excessively complicated or unnecessarily obscure. It's still mediocre code, but sometimes mediocre code happens for good reasons.
I think it's a cop out to say "real world code can't be elegant", or "elegant code is impractical", because it's not always circumstances that cause our work to fall short of what it can be. Sometimes it's us. Sometimes aren't focused or we're too tired to put the extra bit of effort and imagination it would take to render the useless fat out of our code.
We should value elegant code, because when it comes to code "elegant" just means "simple and robust".
This is the problem in dealing with problems: people who are determined to be helpless in the face of a problem. There are other possibilities than doing nothing or forcing poverty on people.
In any case, if you actually travel around the world to places where there is an incredibly high rate of poverty, you'll find that poor places are frequently dirty and polluted. In part this may be because they can't afford clean energy and industry, but I think the fact that poor people don't have political clout has something to do with it. In any case, go to *rich* places, and they tend to be clean, which at least proves that a cleaner environment doesn't automatically lead to poverty.
Jimmy Carter lowered the Federal deficit (look it up!), and through his Fed chair appointee Paul Volcker squelched an incipient hyperinflation crisis by choking off the money supply. This was necessary because Nixon's appointee, Arthur F. Burns, had put the economy on a disastrous inflationary path. Volcker began relentlessly raising interest rates month after quarter to no avail, until finally the prime rate hit 20.00% (!!!). For comparison the current prime rate is 3.25%.
The result of fiscal austerity with a reduced money supply is high unemployment and stagnant growth, and since the medicine doesn't act instantly Carter got stagnation and near hyperinflation together. That was the right thing to do economically but very bad politics. But by July of the 1980 election year inflation had begun to decline, but this was too late to affect the elections.
Economic growth rebounded strongly in the first quarter of 1981. This was after Reagan took office, but months before any of his economic and budgeting policies took effect. Essentially, the "Reagan Boom" started under Carter's economic policies. Some will say it was Reagan's personality that infused the economy with confidence, and there may be a little truth in that; but I think that inflation dropping to single digits for the first time had something to do with the renewed confidence.
Reagan's economic policy amounted to this; massive increases deficit spending on a scale unseen since WW2. Federal outlays in 1981 were 678 billion; in 1989 it had balloned to 1,144 billion, an astonishing 69% increase in spending. Federal deficits rose from 2.75% of GDP under Carter's last budget to an average of 4.2% of GDP under Reagan. Which was not necessarily a bad thing, although I think it was a little excessive. But imagine raising deficits to 5.2% of GDP (as Reagan once did) if inflation were 15% or even 20%. There would have been no Keynsian "Reagan Boom" without the Carter era austerity. But Reagan gets 100% of the political credit for ending stagflation, even though he deserves no credit whatsoever in ending the inflationary part.
The right thing to do economically is a matter of context. Sometimes it's better to spend, other times it's better to tighten your belt. But tightening your belt is never politically popular, and it doesn't produce instant results.
That's incorrect. The set user error induced accidents and the set of design error induced accidents intersect each other.
If you look deeply into most mishaps, you'll usually see a series of errors that compound each other. Often the omission of any one of them would have prevented the mishap. If it is foreseeable that a person wearing winter footwear might depress the accelerator when he intends to use the brake, *and* a simple design change could prevent this, the manufacturer ought to make the change.
This is distinct from when a user *misuses* a feature. I have a friend that manufactures a sports car pedal extender that allows drivers on a track to simultaneously work the brake and accelerator. It's an aftermarket modification meant for track use, and it's the customer's responsibility to exercise special caution if he leaves the device installed in a car he drives on the street. The customer has to be aware of the potential for unintended acceleration because he installed the device himself. The reason that the sports car pedal isn't designed to facilitate heel-and-toe shifting is that it would surprise people accustomed to "normal" controls who bought the car for cruising around on public roads.
You have to take the characteristics of the user population in mind when designing a product. So the very qualities which make the aftermarket modification a good design would be a design *flaw* on a car intended primarily for on-street use by less-than-serious drivers.
Also known, in every country with a halfway-sensible nuclear policy, as "reactor fuel."
... if by "reactor" you mean "radioisotope thermal generator". That's actually an intriguing variant on the silly "shoot it all into the Sun" idea. Build spacecraft to explore the out solar system, placing the material far away from mischief, and call the cost of the spacecraft a "disposal fee".
Unfortunately the real issue in this story isn't the inherent danger of the materials, but the doubts the story raises about whether we as a nation are responsible enough to handle such materials.
Except a CDN is not what is being described in the article, which is
a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web,
This, in plain language, describes preferential routing for Apple's services. Now given the quality of technology journalism it's quite possible that Comcast and Apple are actually working on setting up a content delivery network, but that this as garbled along the way by an ignorant journalist. That's a plausible interpretation of what has been presented as fact, especially given the special restrictions Comcast agreed to as part of getting the NBCUniversal deal approved. But it's still a *speculative* interpretation.
Again these are regional data. The extreme northern, southern, and western Pacific were somewhat warmer than usual during the MWP, but the tropical and eastern Pacific was colder.
Well, sure. But if it were the kind of exchange you were talking about, then they wouldn't have any user funds on hand to freeze.
The fact that they *do* have customer funds to freeze means that even if they call themselves an exchange, they're functioning as a bank. They're taking deposits for customers which then have to be frozen when they lack sufficient reserves to cover current operations. If they accept only crypto currency deposits they can function like a bank without being regulated.
You made the point I was going to make. The thing doesn't need nuclear propulsion because it's not a functioning aircraft carrier.
If we think, however, the Iranians are building this thing because they're dumb, we're the dumb ones. They have a use for it, we just haven't figured out what that is.
The idea of an PR stunt or movie prop doesn't make that much sense to me. The thing is *huge*, over 700 feet long if the NYT article is correct. . Surely they could pay some special effects shop somewhere to animate a pretty good CGI Nimitz for them at a fraction of the cost.
So it seems to me that they probably have a use for an actual physical model of a US supercarrier that's on the same order of magnitude for size. I have no idea what that is, but if I had to takea wild guess I'd be thinking about Iran's drone and missile programs. Perhaps they're testing autonomous aircraft that can locate specific ships within a carrier battle group.
Just as you should not confuse weather with climate, you should not confuse *regional* climate with *global* climate. The Medieval "Warm" Period refers to the temperatures in European climate. High temperatures around the North Atlantic were offset by anomalously cool temperatures elsewhere. In contrast average temperatures have been anomalously high in every region of the globe in the last decade or so.
In other words, we are experiencing *global* warming now, but had *regional* warming in the MWP.
This isn't just a case of normal teething problems. This is a case of a program to build an affordable, stealthy multirole fighter ballooning into the most expensive defense program ever, yet still failing to meet most of its performance goals. The F35 is heavier, slower, less agile and less stealthy than originally planned, has shorter range, and is much, much more expensive. The vanilla F35A will cost as much as an F22 per unit, and cost 2x as much per hour to operate as some of the aircraft it is replacing. And that's assuming the F35 becomes operational when promised. Already it is late by longer than the entire development cycle, from contract to deployment, of any of the teen series fighters.
By any reasonable standard, this was a scandalously managed program. If it is successful, it is only by revising all of the program's original goals. That may still leave the F35 as the best multi-role fighter in the world, but that should have been done years ago at a fraction of the cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for one thing the fatality rate is less than 100%. And the infection rates were less than 100% too. Were the infection and fatality rates 100%, the epidemic would quickly burn itself out. You can set up a differential equation describing this situation: the rate of transmission is proportional to the chance of transmission and how frequently an infected person encounters an uninfected person. But that frequency of contact drops as populations are decimated, so that a particularly aggressive strain soon finds itself dealing with a host population to sparse to maintain itself.
In fact plague *did* kill everyone in many isolated places. Some villages were entirely wiped out by aggressive infections, but if you think about it, the strains that killed everyone quickly were doomed to extinction. There's an optimal level of virulence if you want to spread a pathogen as far and wide as possible.
Consider tuberculosis, which is *highly* transmittable between humans and unlike plague does not require an arthropod vector for transmission. Why hasn't tuberculosis wiped out everyone? Well it *has*, many, many times, wiped out all the humans in small, isolated communities. In fact some scholars have speculated that the vampire legend arose from the spread of virulent strains of TB that wiped out small, rural populations. But in a large population the emergence of an aggressive strain still isn't going to get everyone. Some people will escape infection by chance, and people will flee the area. It's the slow-burning, persistent strains that take months or years to kill someone that have the best chance of surviving long term.
Well, the Norway (aka "brown") rats are carriers of an almost incredible variety of infectious agents that are human pathogens, including hantavirus and Toxoplasma.
The issue with rats isn't that they're *particularly* susceptible to zoonotic pathogens. The issue is that they're well adapted to living around human habitations,which provide them with excellent protection from predation. With plenty food and shelter and no predators, they reach unnaturally high population concentrations. These populations are "preyed upon" by germs instead of carnivores, because inevitably everything in nature is food for something else. Some of those pathogens will also effect humans, and since those dense colonies are living in close proximity to dense colonies of *humans*, brown rats present a public health concern, even though none of their pathogens have quite the marquee name recognition of The Black Death.
Another example of this phenomenon is the raccoon. Because raccoons are still frequently encountered in natural settings people don't have the same revulsion towards them as they do towards rats, but raccoons are just as well adapted to living with humans as rats are. In places where high raccoon populations live in close proximity to humans, they're a serious health concern. I've known natural science geeks -- people who have no qualms about handing dead animals or picking through animal scat -- to treat suburban raccoons with revulsion. A suburban raccoon can be a terrifying bag of disease, and there are documented cases of people dying as a result of handling their poop.
It doesn't mean racoons are *bad*, or that rats are *bad*. It means that wild animal populations with nearly unlimited resources and no predation are an all-you-can-eat banquet for germs.
Well, I'm not sure what "people" you are talking about, but if you're talking about "researchers", the answer would be "no". Researchers are definitely not representative of general population of what they "like" and "dislike".
Two war stories follow.
Some researchers in a tropical medicine discovered that a mens room at the school had been infested with tiny little flies. Did they complain to the management? No. They trapped some of the flies, brought them back to the lab and bred them as pets.
I was walking in the woods one day with a zoologist friend of mine, when we came upon a rotting coyote head in the middle of the trail. "Ooh!" she says, "I want to show that to my students!" Whereupon she picks up the head, maggot-ridden eyeholes and all, and pops it into the pocket of her windbreaker.
So no, I don't think anti-rat bias is a problem for researchers.
Person who worked for years in arthropod borne disease control here.
Except for the reporting screw-up about virus vs. bacteria, this is all just quibbling. The reporters got it wrong as usual, but that doesn't mean that the researchers got it wrong.
Zoonotic diseases (ones that spills over from one animal population to another) always have fantastically complex life cycles. In epidemics of zoonotic diseases it's common for epizootic transmission (transmission between species) to be overtaken by enzootic transmission (transmission *within* a species). For example influenza is a bird pathogen that can cross over into mammalian species like swine and humans. If flu epidemics didn't shift gears from epizootic transmission (bird to human) to enzootic (human to human), they wouldn't be as big a deal. Just stay away from chickens.
So the idea that the black plague was primarily spread among humans enzootically is hardy groundbreaking epidemiology. It certainly doesn't mean that it's not dangerous to live in a place infested with plague-ridden rats. But the shift to enzootic transmission is something that's a bit different from the mosquito or tick borne diseases or occasional, isolated epizootic plague infections we're largely familiar with today.
It's a neat finding, in that it wasn't necessarily expected, but it makes sense in retrospect. In something like West Nile Virus, the natural focus of the pathogen is migratory bird populations that fly thousands of miles. But while a rat can hop on a ship and travel thousands of miles, the vast majority of rats spend their entire lives in a radius of a few hundred feet. Humans are much more mobile than rats; even if a few rats hitch a ride on a ship, they never go anywhere far *without* humans.
What's simplistic is the assumption there has to be only *one* factor involved in a zoonotic epidemic. Without epizootic transmission the plague would not have happened in the first place. That's not news. Without human-to-human enzootic transmission it would not have spread so widely or kill such a high percentage of the population. That is news (I guess -- I didn't work with people doing plauge so I have no direct knowledge of what people in that field thought). Of course before it becomes established science it's going to have to stand up to criticism for a few years.
Well... I've seen MIT try to cope with problems. I've known people working at MIT try to get the Institute to do something about things that most of the people there care about. it's not a pretty picture.
The thing you may be missing about MIT is that it is a behaviorally rigid bureaucracy that swallows up and individual initiative and spits out ... nothing. Yes, I know that describes many higher education institutions, but I've worked with many such institutions, even as part of a non-profit that was supposed to help colleges and universities implement changes, and trust me, no matter how dysfunctional your institution is at responding to new situations, *MIT is probably worse*.
So when the Swartz became public, folks reactions were that MIT must be full of horrible, uncaring people. But that's not true. MIT has all kinds of people, and the kind of people like *you* are a much higher proportion of that population than in the general population. Imagine you are a caring, energetic person who goes to work at MIT... OK, maybe you don't know how to picture that. Imagine you are an agile fly darting around faster than the eye can follow. Then you land on this nice looking tree, and end up in this gooey sap-stuff. Now you get the picture.
Busybodies? MIT is an environment practically engineered to turn energetic, caring people into busybodies. If you're a person who wants to make a difference, you find yourself trapped in an endless well of inertia. So you do *what* you can, as *hard* as you can. And people who like to think of themselves as rational are as prone to rationalization as anyone else. Maybe more so.
It's still a great place, full of great people. People you'd like. But if you work there, you've got to learn to live in the moment, not in any plans you might have for the future.
Well, I haven't thought through *all* the consequences well enough to make such a broad statement, but there is a feature of the no-fly list as currently managed that is very, very dangerous: the blurring of the distinction between suspicion and guilt.
Basically, the founders assumed suspicion was benign. That's because treating someone as suspicious was expensive and self-limiting. You ran an investigation and if it turned up nothing you moved the resources allocated to that investigation elsewhere. Suspicion was a burden an innocent citizen could bear for awhile in return for the authorities catching criminals.
Unlike the founders, we live in a world with the technological and bureaucratic infrastructure to make suspicion pervasive, persistent and automatic. Being flagged as "suspicious" or "dangerous" is something that can follow you everywhere you go, for the rest of your life, unless somebody decides on their own to take you off. And there's never any incentive to take you off. And because the system doesn't even *acknowledge* that this determination has been made about you, you in effect have been found guilty by witnesses and evidence you can't confront or challenge, which is unconstitutional. It is merely quibbling to call such restrictions anything but a deprivation of liberty without due process, a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.
I think something like a no-fly list might reasonably be maintained, but a person should not be parked on the list for an unlimited time. If the government cannot turn up something in, say, ten weeks, it should remove the person from the list, or give the person an opportunity to challenge his status. That should be automatic and routine as Mirandizing.
Good catch. We have to distinguish between vulnerabilities and threats. The exploitation of a vulnerability tells us next to nothing. Some people will twist a doorknob without thinking. But if someone particularly targets certain assets, like reporter email and phone logs, you can use that along with who the attacker targets to infer some pretty solid things about him.
Journalists *should* have been on high alert years before Snowden, because their number one most dangerous threat a court order demanding they reveal their sources. The courts could physically seize the equipment of the reporter and his employer and search them well before the NSA started recording everything everywhere.
Depends on your standard of proof.
I suppose the best possible way is to hack the patsy's computer and use it to launch an attack. That could, in principle, be nearly impossible to distinguish from an attack initiated by the patsy; not without the investigators hacking into the patsy's computer themselves. I suppose if I were going to implicate some patsy in cybershenanigans I'd start by securing his system from everybody but me.
Once you've considered the possibility that an attack is frameup, you'd find yourself asking questions like, "Who would want to embarrass the New York Times AND get a Chinese engineering student into trouble? Well, another Chinese engineering student, I guess, but I wouldn't bet on it. The problem is that this kind of reasoning is extremely unreliable. One of the toughest lessons I've had to teach clients is that the motivations of attackers may not make any sense to you. In fact they probably won't.
Take the attack itself. What does it accomplish to deface an American's newspaper's website? It doesn't stop people from getting the news. It doesn't stop people from getting the paper's website for very long. It certainly doesn't do anything to change US Government policies or actions. All it does, in the end, is get some site admins into trouble with their bosses. Essentially, it accomplishes nothing.
But then, a lot of political stuff people do doesn't accomplish anything but make them feel like their doing something. So if we're going to criminally profile the hacker, what we've got is a technically clever stupid person. That is to say somebody who is good at figuring things out and persistent at problem solving, but not very good at choosing useful ways to apply that talent.
But there's a hell of a lot of people like that.
It's not exactly true that "Walmart competes on price." At least not on an apples-to-apples basis.
What Walmart does is advertise the lowest price item in a category, then once it has you in the doors it up-sells you to something you're more likely to buy. If you actually check the competitors' pricing, you'll find that Walmart usually charges about the same or even a little bit more on the models they expect you to buy. I find that the local mom-and-pop hardware store is usually two or three percent cheaper on power tools. When in Walmart, Google Shopping is your friend.
Also beware Walmart-only models of anything. That's often a bowdlerized version of the real thing, but made more cheaply. This is a strategy of selling the sizzle, not the steak, then delivering a cheaper steak than the consumer thinks he's buying.
Walmart has got *appearing* to sell things for less without actually doing so down to a science. So, no, I wouldn't expect lower prices if Walmart gets its hands on a litigation windfall. That's not how Walmart competes.
Remember the Monty Python "Dennis Moore" sketch? Well North Korea did it for real. Under the Songbun system turned the old system of hereditary aristocracy on its head, producing ... another hereditary aristocracy.
....That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Hmm. "Just because you're reasonable doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
Wow, that actually works.
Henry Ford once said, "The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." Taking that as our standard for elegance, I wouldn't criticize a piece of code as "inelegant" just because it dealt exceptions, language or library quirks that have be dealt with. These are *necessary* things, not "excess weight".
On the other hand, I *would* criticize a piece of code because the programmer failed to make it as concise and clear as it could have been. Inelegant code is a fact of life because schedule pressures are a fact of life. It's not necessarily the programmers fault, inelegant code may be the best he can do *under the circumstances*.
But that doesn't excuse the *code* for being excessively complicated or unnecessarily obscure. It's still mediocre code, but sometimes mediocre code happens for good reasons.
I think it's a cop out to say "real world code can't be elegant", or "elegant code is impractical", because it's not always circumstances that cause our work to fall short of what it can be. Sometimes it's us. Sometimes aren't focused or we're too tired to put the extra bit of effort and imagination it would take to render the useless fat out of our code.
We should value elegant code, because when it comes to code "elegant" just means "simple and robust".
Good design isn't done by committees, either.
This is the problem in dealing with problems: people who are determined to be helpless in the face of a problem. There are other possibilities than doing nothing or forcing poverty on people.
In any case, if you actually travel around the world to places where there is an incredibly high rate of poverty, you'll find that poor places are frequently dirty and polluted. In part this may be because they can't afford clean energy and industry, but I think the fact that poor people don't have political clout has something to do with it. In any case, go to *rich* places, and they tend to be clean, which at least proves that a cleaner environment doesn't automatically lead to poverty.
Jimmy Carter lowered the Federal deficit (look it up!), and through his Fed chair appointee Paul Volcker squelched an incipient hyperinflation crisis by choking off the money supply. This was necessary because Nixon's appointee, Arthur F. Burns, had put the economy on a disastrous inflationary path. Volcker began relentlessly raising interest rates month after quarter to no avail, until finally the prime rate hit 20.00% (!!!). For comparison the current prime rate is 3.25%.
The result of fiscal austerity with a reduced money supply is high unemployment and stagnant growth, and since the medicine doesn't act instantly Carter got stagnation and near hyperinflation together. That was the right thing to do economically but very bad politics. But by July of the 1980 election year inflation had begun to decline, but this was too late to affect the elections.
Economic growth rebounded strongly in the first quarter of 1981. This was after Reagan took office, but months before any of his economic and budgeting policies took effect. Essentially, the "Reagan Boom" started under Carter's economic policies. Some will say it was Reagan's personality that infused the economy with confidence, and there may be a little truth in that; but I think that inflation dropping to single digits for the first time had something to do with the renewed confidence.
Reagan's economic policy amounted to this; massive increases deficit spending on a scale unseen since WW2. Federal outlays in 1981 were 678 billion; in 1989 it had balloned to 1,144 billion, an astonishing 69% increase in spending. Federal deficits rose from 2.75% of GDP under Carter's last budget to an average of 4.2% of GDP under Reagan. Which was not necessarily a bad thing, although I think it was a little excessive. But imagine raising deficits to 5.2% of GDP (as Reagan once did) if inflation were 15% or even 20%. There would have been no Keynsian "Reagan Boom" without the Carter era austerity. But Reagan gets 100% of the political credit for ending stagflation, even though he deserves no credit whatsoever in ending the inflationary part.
The right thing to do economically is a matter of context. Sometimes it's better to spend, other times it's better to tighten your belt. But tightening your belt is never politically popular, and it doesn't produce instant results.
User Error != Manufacturer Defect
That's incorrect. The set user error induced accidents and the set of design error induced accidents intersect each other.
If you look deeply into most mishaps, you'll usually see a series of errors that compound each other. Often the omission of any one of them would have prevented the mishap. If it is foreseeable that a person wearing winter footwear might depress the accelerator when he intends to use the brake, *and* a simple design change could prevent this, the manufacturer ought to make the change.
This is distinct from when a user *misuses* a feature. I have a friend that manufactures a sports car pedal extender that allows drivers on a track to simultaneously work the brake and accelerator. It's an aftermarket modification meant for track use, and it's the customer's responsibility to exercise special caution if he leaves the device installed in a car he drives on the street. The customer has to be aware of the potential for unintended acceleration because he installed the device himself. The reason that the sports car pedal isn't designed to facilitate heel-and-toe shifting is that it would surprise people accustomed to "normal" controls who bought the car for cruising around on public roads.
You have to take the characteristics of the user population in mind when designing a product. So the very qualities which make the aftermarket modification a good design would be a design *flaw* on a car intended primarily for on-street use by less-than-serious drivers.
And who's going to do the reprocessing?
The problem is that America's political system is so dysfunctional it can't be trusted to regulate a process like waste disposal or reprocessing.
Also known, in every country with a halfway-sensible nuclear policy, as "reactor fuel."
... if by "reactor" you mean "radioisotope thermal generator". That's actually an intriguing variant on the silly "shoot it all into the Sun" idea. Build spacecraft to explore the out solar system, placing the material far away from mischief, and call the cost of the spacecraft a "disposal fee".
Unfortunately the real issue in this story isn't the inherent danger of the materials, but the doubts the story raises about whether we as a nation are responsible enough to handle such materials.
Except a CDN is not what is being described in the article, which is
a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web,
This, in plain language, describes preferential routing for Apple's services. Now given the quality of technology journalism it's quite possible that Comcast and Apple are actually working on setting up a content delivery network, but that this as garbled along the way by an ignorant journalist. That's a plausible interpretation of what has been presented as fact, especially given the special restrictions Comcast agreed to as part of getting the NBCUniversal deal approved. But it's still a *speculative* interpretation.
Again these are regional data. The extreme northern, southern, and western Pacific were somewhat warmer than usual during the MWP, but the tropical and eastern Pacific was colder.
Well, sure. But if it were the kind of exchange you were talking about, then they wouldn't have any user funds on hand to freeze.
The fact that they *do* have customer funds to freeze means that even if they call themselves an exchange, they're functioning as a bank. They're taking deposits for customers which then have to be frozen when they lack sufficient reserves to cover current operations. If they accept only crypto currency deposits they can function like a bank without being regulated.
You made the point I was going to make. The thing doesn't need nuclear propulsion because it's not a functioning aircraft carrier.
If we think, however, the Iranians are building this thing because they're dumb, we're the dumb ones. They have a use for it, we just haven't figured out what that is.
The idea of an PR stunt or movie prop doesn't make that much sense to me. The thing is *huge*, over 700 feet long if the NYT article is correct. . Surely they could pay some special effects shop somewhere to animate a pretty good CGI Nimitz for them at a fraction of the cost.
So it seems to me that they probably have a use for an actual physical model of a US supercarrier that's on the same order of magnitude for size. I have no idea what that is, but if I had to takea wild guess I'd be thinking about Iran's drone and missile programs. Perhaps they're testing autonomous aircraft that can locate specific ships within a carrier battle group.
Depends on where you live.
Just as you should not confuse weather with climate, you should not confuse *regional* climate with *global* climate. The Medieval "Warm" Period refers to the temperatures in European climate. High temperatures around the North Atlantic were offset by anomalously cool temperatures elsewhere. In contrast average temperatures have been anomalously high in every region of the globe in the last decade or so.
In other words, we are experiencing *global* warming now, but had *regional* warming in the MWP.
Even withglobal warming your neck of the woods may experience instances of anomalously cool weather. Under more extreme global warming levels, where you live might even experience regional *cooling*, due to disruptions in the transfer of energy from low to high latitudes -- although that is still hypothetical at this point. At present nearly the entire planet has been experiencing higher average temperatures.
This isn't just a case of normal teething problems. This is a case of a program to build an affordable, stealthy multirole fighter ballooning into the most expensive defense program ever, yet still failing to meet most of its performance goals. The F35 is heavier, slower, less agile and less stealthy than originally planned, has shorter range, and is much, much more expensive. The vanilla F35A will cost as much as an F22 per unit, and cost 2x as much per hour to operate as some of the aircraft it is replacing. And that's assuming the F35 becomes operational when promised. Already it is late by longer than the entire development cycle, from contract to deployment, of any of the teen series fighters.
By any reasonable standard, this was a scandalously managed program. If it is successful, it is only by revising all of the program's original goals. That may still leave the F35 as the best multi-role fighter in the world, but that should have been done years ago at a fraction of the cost.