You're assuming that if we see radio bursts from point A and point B 180 degrees apart it's A and B exchanging messages. It could be one set of aliens at A communicating with another set near A, and we're just catching some stray signals. B could be another unconnected civilization; or it could be a different, natural phenomenon that emits radio bursts.
So I don't think we can say it can't be aliens. But I think the fact we can't explain some unusual signal is weak evidence for aliens, because statistically unusual events are inevitable if you run enough trials. If you flip a coin enough times you'll get a run of a hundred heads. If you comb the entire sky with enough precision and for long enough you will find startling signals.
If intelligent life is a natural phenomenon, looking for signals from a civilization is simply looking for a particular statistically rare event. I suspect we'll eventually find what we're looking for, but the challenge will be confirming we're looking at that particular kind of event and not some other rare event.
The situation we're in is like being a blind man searching for a needle in a haystack. Eventually we get our finger pricked. It's exciting, but it's not anything close to proof until we've eliminated other pointy things, like thorns.
Or engineer the packs so they cannot reasonably be squeezed by hand.
Nothing is easier than eating more veggies. You just eat more veggies. But I think we've reached -- or at least are approaching -- a tipping point where food in its unpackaged state is no longer perceived by many people as food.
Well, just to play devil's advocate, some contracts are unenforceable because by their very nature they're invalid.
In a contract one party agrees to do something (say, hand over a good) in return for a consideration (say, receiving payment in some form). A contract in which a party agreed to do something in return for not being prevented from doing something they had every right to do would likely be ruled unconscionable.
So if laying cable is an act of speech, the government can only restrict it by means narrowly tailored to achieve the specific interest it has in regulating that speech. They could compel Comcast to choose a path for its cable which minimized public nuisance, but I very much doubt they'd be allowed to permit Comcast to do something conditionally on helping them out with some different concern other than nuisance minimization. That is a direct contradiction of what "narrowly tailored" means.
Well, here's the flaw in your newspaper analogy. A physical copy of a newspaper is an embodiment of expression. A network is not; it's just a delivery mechanism.
So the closest newspaper analogy would be a newspaper vending box -- something younger people here may never have seen but which were once ubiquitous enough to be considered a nuisance. And there's even case law about regulating newspaper vending boxes. Generally you can as long as you don't do it based on what the box contains (e.g. no difference in treatment for the Washington Post and the Washington Times), you have a legitimate public interest in that regulation and it's narrowly tailored to meet its ends.
Well, what difference would it make if it were yesterday?
Some theologians believe the universe is continually created, moment by moment, in the mind of God. On the other hand, some atheists believe we are living in a simulation being run in some kind of meta-universe, which is much the same thing. Every tick of the cosmic CPU clock creates a new universe according to some set of rules which use the prior universe as input. There is no logical need to have run the simulation from the postulated starting point.
From a scientific standpoint these are pointless ideas because they lead to no negatable propositions; the positivist philosophers would say they "contain no cognitive content". Except possibly not in the case of simulation. If the Cosmic Programmer is not infallible, it could in principle be possible to detect flaws in his initial conditions if he didn't start the simulation at the big bang. This would manifest itself in the realization that the universe is logically impossible as a consequence of the past.
While I agree with your conclusion, I think your line of reasoning is a bit shaky.
Laying cable is not subject to First Amendment protections, not because it requires a permit, but because it is not speech. There is no expressive content, and you're burying your work in the fricken' ground.
Comcast's argument, if I understand it, amounts to an analogy. They're claiming that saying, "You can lay cable here as long as you also lay a certain amount of cable there," is analogous to saying "You can hold a rally, but you have to praise the Dear Leader." And it is analogous; but like all analogies it has its limitations; in this case the limitation is that laying cable isn't protected by the First Amendment.
Still, it'd be a huge victory for Comcast if they could get the court to rule that laying cable is speech. This would greatly limit the power of government to regulate their business.
It's not that hard to avoid. Just use a virtual phone number. In fact if I were a celebrity I'd probably have several, to limit my exposure to any one breach.
What you'll find is that the bounds of technology and the line over which lies "miraculous" territory get pushed back simultaneously, because they're inextricably linked.
To me the single biggest everyday miracle is that I can put a string of text into Google and get hundreds of thousands of hits back spanning the sum of human... well let's say data rather than knowledge; and that it comes back in what for practical purposes is instantaneously while at the same time millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing.
When I stop to think of it, which is fairly often, it strikes me as the very next thing to magic, even though as an engineer with a degree in computer science I have at least some idea of the things that make this possible. Yet it is the most ordinary and unremarkable thing to my children, who have never known a time without it, it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable.
Earlier generations of engineers probably felt the same way about radio.
If you're thinking about handing the phone down to your kids, you're going to see the phone differently than the do. You see it as a lifeline. They'll see it as a casual gaming and social media terminal.
And here's the problem with that: you run afoul of the finite lifespan of li-ion batteries. Flagship phones these days are built to be thin as possible, and that means when the battery life starts going south, you've got to replace them or avoid using them too much. Basically a phone with non-replaceable battery is like a nice, fresh fish left out on a summer's day. It won't stay nice and fresh long.
Generally speaking I think lease makes more sense if that's an option. If you do buy with the idea of handing it down either (1) get one of the few remaining phones with a removable battery or (2) consider the moto series which an take auxillary battery packs or (3) get a phone with ridiculously good battery life and hand it off while it is still relatively new.
The point, at least to most crowd funding efforts, is to create a kind of hybrid of purchasing and investing.
Well, this is the "investing" half of the equation: sometimes you lose.
But you have a chance to change the world, at least in a small but observable way; a way that otherwise only venture capitalists would get to experience.
They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.
-- The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
And when that fails the next Pratchettian proviso kicks in:
he phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.
In other words most people don't want to believe change is coming, and when they can't keep that up, they don't want to believe there's anything they can do about it.
You realize it will still get cold in the winter, don't you?
AGW's direct effects in high latitudes are confined to the summer, when there is solar radiation to trap.
Granted there are indirect effects caused by the trapping of thermal energy in the oceans and the exchange of air masses with lower latitudes, but on most winter days it will as cold as it ever was.
Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines.
Not like in the old days, when we memorized those trig tables.
Looking something up on your phone isn't any different than looking it up in a printed table. So looking up the sin of some particular angle (other than pi/2, pi/6 etc.) is something everyone has always done. The real challenge is memorizing trigonometric identities. But to be frank, if a student can find the trig identity he needs and use it successfully, who the hell cares? That's a very good result in itself.
There's been a considerable effort in recent weeks to reign in some of the chaos in the White House, led by John Kelly, which I expect to be at least moderately successful in the near term. We're still operating under an Obama budget at least through September, and hopefully the Republicans learned their emergency response lesson from Katrina.
Most of all, Donald Trump wants to look good. This is true of all politicians, but it's rare to have this level of narcissism even in a politician. He also has too short an attention span to interfere much in details.
So I expect in the near term at least things will run well at FEMA.
What we will see from the President is extravagant gestures and posturing on disaster management, until inevitably something falls short. It always does, even through no fault of the agency or administration, because that's the nature of a disaster: it undermines your ability to cope.
Then at *that* point he'll turn on Long, just like he's turned on everyone else who has served him faithfully when matters touching his image can't be avoided.
Well, there actually are other geoengineering possibilities. One proposal is fertilizing the Antarctic Oceans with iron to generate massive algal blooms. The problem with that is that it has *other* consequences, like destroying the ecosystem in the part of the ocean where you do it. But the big advantage is that it's cheap, and it'd probably work, at the costs of turning large swathes of the oceans into toxic muck.
While planting an individual tree isn't expensive, planting enough trees to offset human carbon emissions is not. It's a matter of marginal costs; at some point the marginal cost of removing the next ton of carbon with a tree is less than the marginal cost of eliminating a ton of human emissions. Planting forests is probably on the list of things we'll need to do, but at some point you've got to start making dumping carbon in the air more expensive, if you want the most cost effective response.
And that's the problem; a cost effective, conservative response is going to be relatively complex, and it runs afoul of our dysfunctional political system. I think it highly likely we'll reach the precipice of an economic catastrophe and do something cheap, radical, and almost as catastrophic, like fertilizing marine algal blooms.
Which is why the company ought to have its hide nailed to the wall. An engineer is allowed to be a bastard, but if he's a liar, he's not a fricken' engineer.
Or it could simply be data mining. These people could all be unequivocally connected by a vital records search. The cost wouldn't be prohibitive for a company Facebook's size.
was apparently an individual clerk abusing his authorization to poke around in patient files. The "14" years timing is interesting; HIPAA's privacy rules took effect in 2003, in other words 14 years ago.
So while by modern standards this event is a breach, it's not the kind of technical breach people seem to think it was. What's more at the time it may not even have resulted from violations of then-current standard practices. Back in the day it was common to simply trust people who needed access to records to use that access responsibly.
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You're assuming that if we see radio bursts from point A and point B 180 degrees apart it's A and B exchanging messages. It could be one set of aliens at A communicating with another set near A, and we're just catching some stray signals. B could be another unconnected civilization; or it could be a different, natural phenomenon that emits radio bursts.
So I don't think we can say it can't be aliens. But I think the fact we can't explain some unusual signal is weak evidence for aliens, because statistically unusual events are inevitable if you run enough trials. If you flip a coin enough times you'll get a run of a hundred heads. If you comb the entire sky with enough precision and for long enough you will find startling signals.
If intelligent life is a natural phenomenon, looking for signals from a civilization is simply looking for a particular statistically rare event. I suspect we'll eventually find what we're looking for, but the challenge will be confirming we're looking at that particular kind of event and not some other rare event.
The situation we're in is like being a blind man searching for a needle in a haystack. Eventually we get our finger pricked. It's exciting, but it's not anything close to proof until we've eliminated other pointy things, like thorns.
Or engineer the packs so they cannot reasonably be squeezed by hand.
Nothing is easier than eating more veggies. You just eat more veggies. But I think we've reached -- or at least are approaching -- a tipping point where food in its unpackaged state is no longer perceived by many people as food.
What I'm saying is that a permit is not the same thing as a contract.
Well, just to play devil's advocate, some contracts are unenforceable because by their very nature they're invalid.
In a contract one party agrees to do something (say, hand over a good) in return for a consideration (say, receiving payment in some form). A contract in which a party agreed to do something in return for not being prevented from doing something they had every right to do would likely be ruled unconscionable.
So if laying cable is an act of speech, the government can only restrict it by means narrowly tailored to achieve the specific interest it has in regulating that speech. They could compel Comcast to choose a path for its cable which minimized public nuisance, but I very much doubt they'd be allowed to permit Comcast to do something conditionally on helping them out with some different concern other than nuisance minimization. That is a direct contradiction of what "narrowly tailored" means.
Well, here's the flaw in your newspaper analogy. A physical copy of a newspaper is an embodiment of expression. A network is not; it's just a delivery mechanism.
So the closest newspaper analogy would be a newspaper vending box -- something younger people here may never have seen but which were once ubiquitous enough to be considered a nuisance. And there's even case law about regulating newspaper vending boxes. Generally you can as long as you don't do it based on what the box contains (e.g. no difference in treatment for the Washington Post and the Washington Times), you have a legitimate public interest in that regulation and it's narrowly tailored to meet its ends.
Well, what difference would it make if it were yesterday?
Some theologians believe the universe is continually created, moment by moment, in the mind of God. On the other hand, some atheists believe we are living in a simulation being run in some kind of meta-universe, which is much the same thing. Every tick of the cosmic CPU clock creates a new universe according to some set of rules which use the prior universe as input. There is no logical need to have run the simulation from the postulated starting point.
From a scientific standpoint these are pointless ideas because they lead to no negatable propositions; the positivist philosophers would say they "contain no cognitive content". Except possibly not in the case of simulation. If the Cosmic Programmer is not infallible, it could in principle be possible to detect flaws in his initial conditions if he didn't start the simulation at the big bang. This would manifest itself in the realization that the universe is logically impossible as a consequence of the past.
While I agree with your conclusion, I think your line of reasoning is a bit shaky.
Laying cable is not subject to First Amendment protections, not because it requires a permit, but because it is not speech. There is no expressive content, and you're burying your work in the fricken' ground.
Comcast's argument, if I understand it, amounts to an analogy. They're claiming that saying, "You can lay cable here as long as you also lay a certain amount of cable there," is analogous to saying "You can hold a rally, but you have to praise the Dear Leader." And it is analogous; but like all analogies it has its limitations; in this case the limitation is that laying cable isn't protected by the First Amendment.
Still, it'd be a huge victory for Comcast if they could get the court to rule that laying cable is speech. This would greatly limit the power of government to regulate their business.
Well, "fall to the Earth but miss" is probably a more accurate description of what an orbiting object does than "fly".
So you think you're smarter than Felicia Day?
It's not that hard to avoid. Just use a virtual phone number. In fact if I were a celebrity I'd probably have several, to limit my exposure to any one breach.
What you'll find is that the bounds of technology and the line over which lies "miraculous" territory get pushed back simultaneously, because they're inextricably linked.
To me the single biggest everyday miracle is that I can put a string of text into Google and get hundreds of thousands of hits back spanning the sum of human ... well let's say data rather than knowledge; and that it comes back in what for practical purposes is instantaneously while at the same time millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing.
When I stop to think of it, which is fairly often, it strikes me as the very next thing to magic, even though as an engineer with a degree in computer science I have at least some idea of the things that make this possible. Yet it is the most ordinary and unremarkable thing to my children, who have never known a time without it, it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable.
Earlier generations of engineers probably felt the same way about radio.
If you're thinking about handing the phone down to your kids, you're going to see the phone differently than the do. You see it as a lifeline. They'll see it as a casual gaming and social media terminal.
And here's the problem with that: you run afoul of the finite lifespan of li-ion batteries. Flagship phones these days are built to be thin as possible, and that means when the battery life starts going south, you've got to replace them or avoid using them too much. Basically a phone with non-replaceable battery is like a nice, fresh fish left out on a summer's day. It won't stay nice and fresh long.
Generally speaking I think lease makes more sense if that's an option. If you do buy with the idea of handing it down either (1) get one of the few remaining phones with a removable battery or (2) consider the moto series which an take auxillary battery packs or (3) get a phone with ridiculously good battery life and hand it off while it is still relatively new.
They will be a dime a dozen when someone figures out they can stream advertising to the things.
The point, at least to most crowd funding efforts, is to create a kind of hybrid of purchasing and investing.
Well, this is the "investing" half of the equation: sometimes you lose.
But you have a chance to change the world, at least in a small but observable way; a way that otherwise only venture capitalists would get to experience.
-- The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
And when that fails the next Pratchettian proviso kicks in:
In other words most people don't want to believe change is coming, and when they can't keep that up, they don't want to believe there's anything they can do about it.
You realize it will still get cold in the winter, don't you?
AGW's direct effects in high latitudes are confined to the summer, when there is solar radiation to trap.
Granted there are indirect effects caused by the trapping of thermal energy in the oceans and the exchange of air masses with lower latitudes, but on most winter days it will as cold as it ever was.
Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines.
Not like in the old days, when we memorized those trig tables.
Looking something up on your phone isn't any different than looking it up in a printed table. So looking up the sin of some particular angle (other than pi/2, pi/6 etc.) is something everyone has always done. The real challenge is memorizing trigonometric identities. But to be frank, if a student can find the trig identity he needs and use it successfully, who the hell cares? That's a very good result in itself.
There's been a considerable effort in recent weeks to reign in some of the chaos in the White House, led by John Kelly, which I expect to be at least moderately successful in the near term. We're still operating under an Obama budget at least through September, and hopefully the Republicans learned their emergency response lesson from Katrina.
Most of all, Donald Trump wants to look good. This is true of all politicians, but it's rare to have this level of narcissism even in a politician. He also has too short an attention span to interfere much in details.
So I expect in the near term at least things will run well at FEMA.
What we will see from the President is extravagant gestures and posturing on disaster management, until inevitably something falls short. It always does, even through no fault of the agency or administration, because that's the nature of a disaster: it undermines your ability to cope.
Then at *that* point he'll turn on Long, just like he's turned on everyone else who has served him faithfully when matters touching his image can't be avoided.
Well, there actually are other geoengineering possibilities. One proposal is fertilizing the Antarctic Oceans with iron to generate massive algal blooms. The problem with that is that it has *other* consequences, like destroying the ecosystem in the part of the ocean where you do it. But the big advantage is that it's cheap, and it'd probably work, at the costs of turning large swathes of the oceans into toxic muck.
While planting an individual tree isn't expensive, planting enough trees to offset human carbon emissions is not. It's a matter of marginal costs; at some point the marginal cost of removing the next ton of carbon with a tree is less than the marginal cost of eliminating a ton of human emissions. Planting forests is probably on the list of things we'll need to do, but at some point you've got to start making dumping carbon in the air more expensive, if you want the most cost effective response.
And that's the problem; a cost effective, conservative response is going to be relatively complex, and it runs afoul of our dysfunctional political system. I think it highly likely we'll reach the precipice of an economic catastrophe and do something cheap, radical, and almost as catastrophic, like fertilizing marine algal blooms.
Which is why the company ought to have its hide nailed to the wall. An engineer is allowed to be a bastard, but if he's a liar, he's not a fricken' engineer.
The engineer gets prosecuted for decisions signed off by the executives?
Speaking as an engineer -- hell yes.
You expect managers to be dishonest, craven bastards. But an engineer is supposed to have integrity.
You have to know where to drop the bombs, which, without physical access to the country, you won't.
It's probably impossible to hide a HEU processing facility, period, but the Pu route could feasibly be hidden from aerial surveillance.
Or it could simply be data mining. These people could all be unequivocally connected by a vital records search. The cost wouldn't be prohibitive for a company Facebook's size.
was apparently an individual clerk abusing his authorization to poke around in patient files. The "14" years timing is interesting; HIPAA's privacy rules took effect in 2003, in other words 14 years ago.
So while by modern standards this event is a breach, it's not the kind of technical breach people seem to think it was. What's more at the time it may not even have resulted from violations of then-current standard practices. Back in the day it was common to simply trust people who needed access to records to use that access responsibly.
South Africa.