I don't know. In my experience every design choice has unintended (although hopefully not unaccounted-for) consequences.
You have to add up all the foreseeable failure modes of a system with a mechanical switch -- including but not limited to a mechanical failure when you actually need to use it -- weighted by the probabilities of those failure modes. Just throwing a mechanical switch into a system because you had a failure is not engineering. In engineering you don't just focus on the desired result of a feature.
I'm not saying that a physical arming switch isn't the best option, but designing a solution to this problem is a job for someone with experience dealing with human factors in systems. I suspect having distinct armed/test modes is a good idea, but a switch alone isn't going to be enough, you'd need to have other indications the system is live -- e.g. klaxons and flashing lights.
What matters to people, apparently, are legal technicalities rather than character. If a con-man can rewrite the laws so that his con isn't illegal, that's good enough for them.
In a nutshell, there are a lot of people who are content to be ruled.
Well, it makes lunar habitation feasible in the relatively nearer future.
Consider this analogous question: did the discovery of the cancer gene BRCA1 affect anyone at all? To your way of thinking, no, because it didn't immediately cure anyone's cancer. It only affected the lives of a very small number of cancer scientists by pointing them down promising avenues of research.
Depends on the altitude of the blast. EMP is primarily produced by the interaction of gamma rays with the upper atmosphere. A single large warhead detonated at an altitude calculated for maximum casualties would almost certainly NOT produce the kind of EMP effects lazy thriller writers have taught the public are an inevitable part of any nuclear attack.
I know this because I've critiqued a number of science fiction manuscripts, and the "huge bomb creates the end of technological civilization" scenario is so popular as an inciting incident in crummy manuscripts that I actually did the research that the authors didn't do. The optimal profile for an EMP attack is a large number of small, non-thermonuclear atomic warheads detonated well above the stratosphere. This is not to say there would be *no* EMP effects of a ground level burst, but they're likely to affect long conductors like transmission lines, not the printed circuit traces in a transistor radio.
Nope. The radius of destructive effect rises as the 2/3 power of yield. That's because the energy is dissipated in a three dimensional volume, and you're calculating the radius of intersection of that volume with a two dimensional surface. TL;DR: 20x the yield equals 7x the destructive radius.
Anyhow you can look up on the expected fatal radius by bomb type and yield, and the immediately fatal thermal effects of the warhead NK tested for an unprotected individual would be less than 5 miles, although many closer would survive because of shelter. Honolulu is about 12 miles across. If you put the warhead in the geographic center of the city to maximize casualties a lot of people on either end will survive. A lot of them will be uninjured too. The 5 psi blast radius is only three miles, outside that radius even residential buildings will still stand and people shaded by them will likely escape uninjured if they can get inside before the fallout.
Baby boomer here. I remember when they taught this shit in school. Stay in your house, away from windows, keep curtains drawn. Have a battery radio and fill up containers with drinking water.
There are multiple ways for a nuclear strike to kill you: ionizing radiation burn, pressure wave, thermal radiation burn, firestorm, and fallout. Each has its own characteristic radius within which you will probably die from it, but your chances are improved by being inside.
You car would be a bad idea for many reasons unless it is in a garage. If your car is outside it will get quickly covered with very hot short-lived radioactive fallout. The gamma rays will cut through your car like it wasn't even there. You want physical distance to cut down your radiation dose until the hottest isotopes decay. The area in which the fallout will kill you quickly actually begins to contract after only an hour or so, even though the fallout is spreading. The area in which short exposures to fallout represents a health risk starts to drop after a day.
Get inside, stay inside, listen on the radio for the all clear.
The closest Hiroshima survivor was in a cellar only 300 m from ground zero -- which is very close when you consider that the bomb was detonated at 500 m altitude.
Now the device North Korea tested back in September was 10x to 20x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but still if a bomb were detonated over Pearl Harbor and you were standing on the beach in Waikiki, you'd almost certainly survive, albeit possibly with thermal burns.
Here's the thing about all that Duck and Cover stuff from the 50s: when you're talking about a handful of bombs distributed over the entire country, diving under a picnic blanket actually makes sense. It wont' help you if you're at ground zero, but if you're five miles away or so it could make the difference between surviving uninjured or requiring hospital treatment. Multiply that by tens of thousands of people, and duck and cover type education is a sensible defensive strategy.
There is, however, a simple counter: attack with a lot more warheads. By the early 70s the Soviets had something like 25,000 of them. An all-out attack would not only result in multiple bombs falling on every city, it would guarantee the collapse of American society and a short and hellish existence for anyone unlucky enough to survive. Fatalism makes sense in that scenario. You might as well enjoy the show for a few hundred milliseconds and then die.
That's not where we are with a North Korean nuclear attack, not by a long shot. North Korea's arsenal is not large enough yet to cause the collapse of American society, or even to kill the majority of people in a city like Honolulu. So maybe we should be dusting off those old civil defense films.
Words are like nice new wood chisels that get stored in a common work area. They don't stay sharp long because people keep misusing them.
"Balky" means "tending to refuse to respond as directed". If you have a car which often fails to start, that is a balky car. Balkiness is a tendency to a particular kind of malfunction, but the submitter here used it as a synonym for "malfunctioning".
Terry Gross is probably the best in the world at what she does. I find that interesting. How did she get that way? Well it turns out that fear of not being good enough is at least part of what makes her good at her job. I find that interesting too.
How did she end up doing what she does? She failed at something else (being a writer). That's something that resonates in tech.
And she talks about making the trolls angry.
But ultimately being exposed to different information than you're used to isn't tantamount to an injury. It's good for you, just like reading an article on technology would be good for someone who mainly reads about public affairs, or art history.
To look up all the excellent work done by mathematicians, economists, political scientists and cryptographers on (a) how to conduct votes and (b) how to use votes to select candidates, before I bang together my own half-baked proportional representation scheme.
The maybe I'd write an R routine to detect gerrymandered states (actually quite easy if you've taken the first step above) and then hack into politicians' social media accounts so I could blackmail them into outlawing partisan gerrymandering.
I've been saying this for a long time in the context of desktop OS features. We don't need them anymore.
Desktop computers are still useful. Having a large screen and keyboard is still the way to go for performing tasks. But they can stop trying to be the digital switchboard for your life. Nobody who has a smartphone needs all those bells and whistles. I never, ever need my desktop to notify me of anything anymore.
Well in my case having spent twelve years in schools run by nuns I'm pretty sure it's a trained response ("Imagine Jesus is between you and everyone else you touch!"). Nonetheless your experience intrigues me.
If you can't argue both sides of the question, chances are you are missing something. There is immense social pressure on both sides to turn every question in every event into something that is quick and simple to understand. And sometimes the situation *is* simple to understand, as in the case of Harvey Weinstein. But the world is full of tricky corner cases, where context and nuance matter. And the world if full of degrees of transgression that start well below "assault", yet are nonetheless transgressions.
Let's say Bob grabs Carol's Ass. It makes a difference whether they are on their honeymoon, on a date, or in the workplace. Let's say it's in the workplace, but Bob misread Carol's social cues. That's not assault, because assault is a crime and crime requires intent; but it's still a bad thing. Now let's say Carol tells Bob to stop and he doesn't. That becomes more sinister. Carol goes to her boss and asks for help, and he ignores her. That's even more sinister.
Harm is a matter of context. And individual actions that cause only limited harm in isolation may add up to something worse. Imagine being Carol going to work knowing that it's open season on your ass. What does that say about respect?
But I applaud any attempt to find and explore middle territory and corner cases. That's the only way we'll ever be able to navigate this thing.
There's also breeding, which ingrains conditioned reflexes for interacting with people that carry over to inanimate objects.
If I stumble into a chair in a dark room, I automatically say "excuse me," not because I think the chair has *feelings*, but because the words come out of me before I have consciously processed the event. That rapidity is no accident: I was trained to say "excuse me" quickly enough that a *person* I bumped into wouldn't have processed the event either. This forestalls any misunderstanding on their part.
Why news for nerds *and* stuff that matters? Because nerds knowing about stuff that matters is a very good thing. Nerds matter, today more than ever.
There was a time not so long ago that every major city had multiple daily newspapers (sometimes with morning and evening editions), and at least one paper in every city had a science desk. The reporters in the science desk would put out a weekly science section, but their real purpose was to provide science and tech background to stories like the one we're talking about.
Those people are largely gone now. All the world has is *us*, god help it.
You complain there isn't enough of a science or technology slant on the story? What do you expect? News gets reported by people who probably couldn't define "molecule" or explain "entropy" if their life depended on it.
Green sea turtles take between twenty and fifty years to reach sexual maturity.
A 2C change over 100,000 years -- roughly normal for geologic history -- would almost certainly produce the kind of adaptation you are envisioning. But speed that up by a factor of one thousand and you've got a different picture. 100 years represents between two and five generations for green sea turtles. A century isn't long enough for polygenetic adaptation to this magnitude of change; the only possibility of population survival would be a single allele fix. However surviving individual male turtles don't necessarily carry that allele if it exists; many of them would have been produced the normal way, through variations in nesting circumstances.
Under the status quo emissions scenarios you have expect populations of animals like sea turtles and wild salmon to disappear. There just isn't time for evolution to work some kind of "magic".
That gives you a kind of window into a world with rapidly changing climate. It greatly favors tribble-like reproductive cycles: lots of of offspring that are reproductively viable almost immediately. So expect a world in which insects and small rodent species move into vacated terrestrial ecological niches. In the oceans look to things like jellyfish, zooplankton and bacteria increasing as large predators with vulnerable life cycles are checked.
Oh, come now. You can't figure out why a *remote attack* that can be executed against a virtually limitless number of targets using their own facilities and leaving no forensic trail back to you might not be just a teensy bit preferable to a truck bomb?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. In my experience every design choice has unintended (although hopefully not unaccounted-for) consequences.
You have to add up all the foreseeable failure modes of a system with a mechanical switch -- including but not limited to a mechanical failure when you actually need to use it -- weighted by the probabilities of those failure modes. Just throwing a mechanical switch into a system because you had a failure is not engineering. In engineering you don't just focus on the desired result of a feature.
I'm not saying that a physical arming switch isn't the best option, but designing a solution to this problem is a job for someone with experience dealing with human factors in systems. I suspect having distinct armed/test modes is a good idea, but a switch alone isn't going to be enough, you'd need to have other indications the system is live -- e.g. klaxons and flashing lights.
... this isn't the most ridiculous use of cryptocurrency that's in the news.
What matters to people, apparently, are legal technicalities rather than character. If a con-man can rewrite the laws so that his con isn't illegal, that's good enough for them.
In a nutshell, there are a lot of people who are content to be ruled.
Get your story straight. Is he a moron or an evil genius?
Well, it makes lunar habitation feasible in the relatively nearer future.
Consider this analogous question: did the discovery of the cancer gene BRCA1 affect anyone at all? To your way of thinking, no, because it didn't immediately cure anyone's cancer. It only affected the lives of a very small number of cancer scientists by pointing them down promising avenues of research.
Depends on the altitude of the blast. EMP is primarily produced by the interaction of gamma rays with the upper atmosphere. A single large warhead detonated at an altitude calculated for maximum casualties would almost certainly NOT produce the kind of EMP effects lazy thriller writers have taught the public are an inevitable part of any nuclear attack.
I know this because I've critiqued a number of science fiction manuscripts, and the "huge bomb creates the end of technological civilization" scenario is so popular as an inciting incident in crummy manuscripts that I actually did the research that the authors didn't do. The optimal profile for an EMP attack is a large number of small, non-thermonuclear atomic warheads detonated well above the stratosphere. This is not to say there would be *no* EMP effects of a ground level burst, but they're likely to affect long conductors like transmission lines, not the printed circuit traces in a transistor radio.
Nope. The radius of destructive effect rises as the 2/3 power of yield. That's because the energy is dissipated in a three dimensional volume, and you're calculating the radius of intersection of that volume with a two dimensional surface. TL;DR: 20x the yield equals 7x the destructive radius.
Anyhow you can look up on the expected fatal radius by bomb type and yield, and the immediately fatal thermal effects of the warhead NK tested for an unprotected individual would be less than 5 miles, although many closer would survive because of shelter. Honolulu is about 12 miles across. If you put the warhead in the geographic center of the city to maximize casualties a lot of people on either end will survive. A lot of them will be uninjured too. The 5 psi blast radius is only three miles, outside that radius even residential buildings will still stand and people shaded by them will likely escape uninjured if they can get inside before the fallout.
Baby boomer here. I remember when they taught this shit in school. Stay in your house, away from windows, keep curtains drawn. Have a battery radio and fill up containers with drinking water.
There are multiple ways for a nuclear strike to kill you: ionizing radiation burn, pressure wave, thermal radiation burn, firestorm, and fallout. Each has its own characteristic radius within which you will probably die from it, but your chances are improved by being inside.
You car would be a bad idea for many reasons unless it is in a garage. If your car is outside it will get quickly covered with very hot short-lived radioactive fallout. The gamma rays will cut through your car like it wasn't even there. You want physical distance to cut down your radiation dose until the hottest isotopes decay. The area in which the fallout will kill you quickly actually begins to contract after only an hour or so, even though the fallout is spreading. The area in which short exposures to fallout represents a health risk starts to drop after a day.
Get inside, stay inside, listen on the radio for the all clear.
Hmm. Whose investment advice should I take, Warren Buffet's or Anonymous Coward's?
The closest Hiroshima survivor was in a cellar only 300 m from ground zero -- which is very close when you consider that the bomb was detonated at 500 m altitude.
Now the device North Korea tested back in September was 10x to 20x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but still if a bomb were detonated over Pearl Harbor and you were standing on the beach in Waikiki, you'd almost certainly survive, albeit possibly with thermal burns.
Here's the thing about all that Duck and Cover stuff from the 50s: when you're talking about a handful of bombs distributed over the entire country, diving under a picnic blanket actually makes sense. It wont' help you if you're at ground zero, but if you're five miles away or so it could make the difference between surviving uninjured or requiring hospital treatment. Multiply that by tens of thousands of people, and duck and cover type education is a sensible defensive strategy.
There is, however, a simple counter: attack with a lot more warheads. By the early 70s the Soviets had something like 25,000 of them. An all-out attack would not only result in multiple bombs falling on every city, it would guarantee the collapse of American society and a short and hellish existence for anyone unlucky enough to survive. Fatalism makes sense in that scenario. You might as well enjoy the show for a few hundred milliseconds and then die.
That's not where we are with a North Korean nuclear attack, not by a long shot. North Korea's arsenal is not large enough yet to cause the collapse of American society, or even to kill the majority of people in a city like Honolulu. So maybe we should be dusting off those old civil defense films.
Words are like nice new wood chisels that get stored in a common work area. They don't stay sharp long because people keep misusing them.
"Balky" means "tending to refuse to respond as directed". If you have a car which often fails to start, that is a balky car. Balkiness is a tendency to a particular kind of malfunction, but the submitter here used it as a synonym for "malfunctioning".
Terry Gross is probably the best in the world at what she does. I find that interesting. How did she get that way? Well it turns out that fear of not being good enough is at least part of what makes her good at her job. I find that interesting too.
How did she end up doing what she does? She failed at something else (being a writer). That's something that resonates in tech.
And she talks about making the trolls angry.
But ultimately being exposed to different information than you're used to isn't tantamount to an injury. It's good for you, just like reading an article on technology would be good for someone who mainly reads about public affairs, or art history.
To look up all the excellent work done by mathematicians, economists, political scientists and cryptographers on (a) how to conduct votes and (b) how to use votes to select candidates, before I bang together my own half-baked proportional representation scheme.
The maybe I'd write an R routine to detect gerrymandered states (actually quite easy if you've taken the first step above) and then hack into politicians' social media accounts so I could blackmail them into outlawing partisan gerrymandering.
I've been saying this for a long time in the context of desktop OS features. We don't need them anymore.
Desktop computers are still useful. Having a large screen and keyboard is still the way to go for performing tasks. But they can stop trying to be the digital switchboard for your life. Nobody who has a smartphone needs all those bells and whistles. I never, ever need my desktop to notify me of anything anymore.
That's why I use i3.
And your point would be?
Well in my case having spent twelve years in schools run by nuns I'm pretty sure it's a trained response ("Imagine Jesus is between you and everyone else you touch!"). Nonetheless your experience intrigues me.
I wonder if has anything to do with the rubber hand illusion.
If you can't argue both sides of the question, chances are you are missing something. There is immense social pressure on both sides to turn every question in every event into something that is quick and simple to understand. And sometimes the situation *is* simple to understand, as in the case of Harvey Weinstein. But the world is full of tricky corner cases, where context and nuance matter. And the world if full of degrees of transgression that start well below "assault", yet are nonetheless transgressions.
Let's say Bob grabs Carol's Ass. It makes a difference whether they are on their honeymoon, on a date, or in the workplace. Let's say it's in the workplace, but Bob misread Carol's social cues. That's not assault, because assault is a crime and crime requires intent; but it's still a bad thing. Now let's say Carol tells Bob to stop and he doesn't. That becomes more sinister. Carol goes to her boss and asks for help, and he ignores her. That's even more sinister.
Harm is a matter of context. And individual actions that cause only limited harm in isolation may add up to something worse. Imagine being Carol going to work knowing that it's open season on your ass. What does that say about respect?
But I applaud any attempt to find and explore middle territory and corner cases. That's the only way we'll ever be able to navigate this thing.
Probably true, and it probably has to do with my upbringing, just not this particular aspect of it.
There's also breeding, which ingrains conditioned reflexes for interacting with people that carry over to inanimate objects.
If I stumble into a chair in a dark room, I automatically say "excuse me," not because I think the chair has *feelings*, but because the words come out of me before I have consciously processed the event. That rapidity is no accident: I was trained to say "excuse me" quickly enough that a *person* I bumped into wouldn't have processed the event either. This forestalls any misunderstanding on their part.
File it under stuff that matters.
Why news for nerds *and* stuff that matters? Because nerds knowing about stuff that matters is a very good thing. Nerds matter, today more than ever.
There was a time not so long ago that every major city had multiple daily newspapers (sometimes with morning and evening editions), and at least one paper in every city had a science desk. The reporters in the science desk would put out a weekly science section, but their real purpose was to provide science and tech background to stories like the one we're talking about.
Those people are largely gone now. All the world has is *us*, god help it.
You complain there isn't enough of a science or technology slant on the story? What do you expect? News gets reported by people who probably couldn't define "molecule" or explain "entropy" if their life depended on it.
Here's the thing about plotting a story: time matters.
That's the reason for the whole ticking time bomb device. Time pressure creates the possibility of failure.
Green sea turtles take between twenty and fifty years to reach sexual maturity.
A 2C change over 100,000 years -- roughly normal for geologic history -- would almost certainly produce the kind of adaptation you are envisioning. But speed that up by a factor of one thousand and you've got a different picture. 100 years represents between two and five generations for green sea turtles. A century isn't long enough for polygenetic adaptation to this magnitude of change; the only possibility of population survival would be a single allele fix. However surviving individual male turtles don't necessarily carry that allele if it exists; many of them would have been produced the normal way, through variations in nesting circumstances.
Under the status quo emissions scenarios you have expect populations of animals like sea turtles and wild salmon to disappear. There just isn't time for evolution to work some kind of "magic".
That gives you a kind of window into a world with rapidly changing climate. It greatly favors tribble-like reproductive cycles: lots of of offspring that are reproductively viable almost immediately. So expect a world in which insects and small rodent species move into vacated terrestrial ecological niches. In the oceans look to things like jellyfish, zooplankton and bacteria increasing as large predators with vulnerable life cycles are checked.
Stagnation is probably an inevitable result of self-satisfaction.
OK you're seriously not up on your technology history.
Oh, come now. You can't figure out why a *remote attack* that can be executed against a virtually limitless number of targets using their own facilities and leaving no forensic trail back to you might not be just a teensy bit preferable to a truck bomb?