More than half of the population in the US still thinks the planet is between six and ten thousand years old. That level of irrationality is a very viable target for politicians, especially those politicians that rely on irrationality in their constituents to keep them in office. The problem with the US is not religion, per se, but the stubborn irrationality that many US citizens cling to.
Seriously -- if they are willing to pass legislation that alters science, why not help out our engineers too? Granted, I wouldn't be wanting to ride over any bridges in Missouri if they did, but it's the thought that counts, no? The best I can see coming out of this legislation (if it passes) will be when the combined forces of rationality and reason get this whole religion in public schools thing to SCOTUS and we get a precedent setting-decision that will clearly define for the rest of the planet exactly where the US stands on this whole Enlightenment thing.
> Not once have I seen one where you could actually use the online system to arbitrarily move money outside the account owner's accounts.
Huh? Just go to "transfer money", write the account number of the receiver and the amount, and off the money goes.
At least that is how it works here in Denmark. Very handy, too. Is the US still using personal paper checks?
Out of curiosity, what is the fee structure? I have on- and off-shore US, Mexican, and Costa Rican accounts, and can do EFT from the bank's web interface to any financial institution that supports EFT from any of them. They just charge me an arm and a leg to do it, but the convenience definitely outweighs the expense for me. Btw, I've never done any business with an entity that didn't have access to EFT, so I'm skeptical of the GP's claim.
interesting history. One can certainly believe without proof (this is faith in a bucket, and why all religions are, by definition, irrational) but -- agnosticism implies that there is something to know (or not know.) There isn't. I'll stick with atheist as a label. Seems to capture the non-existence of gods in a more rigorous way.:)
I'm an atheist the same way I'm amoral. IMHO, morals are way too multi-valued to be a useful guide to modulating my behavior. I'm not anti-moral, or even immoral (how can I be immoral if I don't use any morals?) I'm just amoral, without morals.
I'm not sure if this is a sublte Jesuitical troll, or whether you're a bit thick.
Being an atheist is orthoganol to being a good or bad (moral or immoral) person. Only psychopaths and animals are truly amoral. It is not a good thing in a rational human being.
heh. probably a bit thick. It was a bad analogy. Thanks for the correction.
Hmmm...assuming that national pride is going to be a motivator ("no way in hell..." is how you actually phrased it) then we can restate the problem in terms of preserving national pride. When you look at the problem from that perspective, it becomes a matter of *preventing* the Chinese from getting to Mars before the US does. In order to prevent the Chinese from getting to Mars, the US will have to be able to project their national will on the Chinese, and the way one nation projects its will on another nation is by force. This force is applied by military and economic might. Finding funding for military might (at least in the US) has been pretty much independent of political or economic issues. Defense budgets routinely survive presidential and congressional elections, and are less affected by economic slumps. (Not untouched by, but certainly don't suffer as much as other government programs do.) So -- in a bucket, beating the Chinese to Mars becomes a matter of delaying the Chinese long enough for the US to get there first. Overt or covert military ops, industrial espionage and economic warfare to sabotage the Chinese Mars effort become plausible when you look at the problem this way. I'm not saying I want it to happen this way, or that it will happen this way, but it is a plausible scenario that is fairly independent of politics and economics in the US. It only requires that the US be more concerned about national pride than the consequences of using military or economic force. As events have showed us over the past dozen years, the US seems to be more than willing to go to war (on multiple fronts, if necessary, and at a severe cost to their economy) when their national pride has been damaged, so I would conclude that some kind of action by the US to prevent the Chinese from reaching Mars first has a probability approaching unity of occurring.
In July 2010, the Vatican doubled the length of time after the 18th birthday of the victim that clergymen can be tried in a church court and streamlined the processes for removing "pedophile priests."
So they streamlined a process to cater to a "mythical conspiracy project?"
People like you are what's wrong with organized religion and one of the primary reasons of why I am atheist. The people that run the Vatican and those in the past that have stood up and protected that power structure at all costs are fallible mortals. Shut up and deal with it or I'll throw you in with Scientology.
And all those cases have dried up, right? Right? If you give money to the Roman Catholic church, that's what you're paying for, in part.
Dude -- The "a" in "atheist"means without or lacking. I'm an atheist the same way I'm amoral. IMHO, morals are way too multi-valued to be a useful guide to modulating my behavior. I'm not anti-moral, or even immoral (how can I be immoral if I don't use any morals?) I'm just amoral, without morals. Ditto atheism -- since I know there is no way to demonstrate the existence of a god, I am, by definition, without a god -- an atheist. I am also without all the associated baggage that theists have to trundle around, which seems to be your point of friction, here. You should seriously consider rebranding yourself, if what's wrong with religion is one of your primary reasons for calling yourself an atheist. Try anti-theist for starts. You don't like the way theists behave, so the label you choose for yourself should reflect that dislike. You can label yourself an atheist when you realize that there were no gods, are no gods and never can be gods. Incidentally, being honest and transparent in this manner allows you to cooperate with theists when their goals happen to align with yours (and to dispatch them without remorse when they don't.)
Just don't post location data or activities if you're engaging in protests... disable location services on your phone. You're giving data to a public database and then crying about privacy... just don't give them information.
Indeed. Terrorists hide their activity from the authorities by concealing themselves within the populace. This is the first rule of asymmetric warfare. And it still holds, whether you are hiding within a city's population being surveilled by cameras operated by the authorities, or within the statistical bubble that the authorities are able to track via software like RIOT. The nature of the battles may change, but the nature of warfare doesn't.
The internet is a tool for moving information around. Keeping the internet functional means that all information riding around on it has to be treated the same way; that is the nature of a packet-switched protocol. The protocol has to be pretty much blind to the constraints imposed on the information. The net neutrality problem is that information with a value (for what ever definition of value that you want to use) riding on the internet means content providers have to armor their information to keep that value from leaking away as it transits the internet -- that armor invalidates the idea of the neutral nature of the information, and therefore compromises the usefulness of the internet for the content providers. I'm pretty sure that having open spectrum that content providers can grab up and use as their distribution channel will fix this problem. A distribution channel that they own and control means that they can armor their information in whatever way they want to, and to brick any device on the network (including the end-points) while only minimally compromising their ability to deliver content, which is what their business is supposed to profit by. They cannot control the internet in this way, and that's why I see them grabbing up the spectrum and setting up their own networks. NB: This is not a bad thing for people who value the free flow of information that the internet makes possible.
This is the second post I've seen in as many days on Green Bank, and no mention of the fact that the NSF is planning on closing the facility to save money. Green Bank is the largest movable radio telescope in the world. If you feel--like I do--that this would be a detriment to the nation, please sign the petition or, even better, write your Congressperson.
I saw your post only after I made a similar post about GBT losing funding (so much for my karma, damn it.) I'm wondering about the timing of this controversy over RF emission constraints, if the GBT has indeed lost funding. I echo your concern, and hope many, many tax-payers sign on to the petition.
The telescope has been recommended for defunding by the NSF's radio astronomy committee (along with five other radio telescope programs) according to this six-month-old article at Physics World. It's been around and doing great science for over half a century. For me, as a nerdy kid in the Sixties, Green Bank was the stuff of legends, with the added bonus of being real. A sensitive, steerable antenna is an amazingly powerful tool for doing radio astronomy, and it has more than justified its existence. I'll be sad if and when it is defunded by the NSF, but why the sudden concern over RF emission constraints that people near the site have been *voluntarily* living under for the last fifty-odd years? The GBT and the other five programs (including the VLBA!) that have been recommended for defunding by the NSF can (in theory, anyway) still get alternative funding from other sources than the NSF. This controversy over the RF emission constraints doesn't make any sense to me, unless there is somebody trying to discourage those other sources of funding, by creating a public controversy. Tin foil hat aside, who stands to benefit by seeing GBT closed down?
(I know, I'm feeding this obTroll, but hey, it's 3am here, and I'm waiting for a render to complete!) Chromebook is a laptop, not a tablet. And why do you need "external media" to boot (indeed, you seem to think "booting" is something all devices do in the same way.) I'm getting the impression you really don't understand the differences between a laptop and a tablet. Fwiw, my Nexus 10 is a tablet, but it is not "locked down." Unlocking it and reflashing it with cyanogen's excellent mod took all of five minutes. I spent US $5 to get an adapter that lets me have "access" to external media. Finding a convenient way to store that dongle, though, has proven to be almost more trouble than it was worth. Almost. Damn you, Google, for annoying me like that.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have a few observations of my own, so I'm returning the favor.:) The ability to acquire experience, and the capacity to choose an informed course of action (judgment) is a very useful trait, indeed. But let me ask you this: What does a pilot do after bringing experience and judgment to bear on an in-flight situation? The pilot implements a procedure calculated to address the situation. The situations a pilot can encounter can be very diverse, as you indicated -- weather, equipment failure modes, other traffic, etc -- and a pilot has a finite number of ways to acquire information about the situation (instruments, ATC, and his own eyes and ears.) There are a finite number of combinations of control inputs that a pilot has at his disposal to resolve those situations. It's choosing which ones and when to apply them that becomes the key issue, and human pilots rely (as you point out) on their experience to make a judgment about that.
AI is a crapshoot, to be sure, but there is a class of AI that has a lot of potential (IMHO) to mimic the human capacity to learn and to make decisions based on that acquired knowledge. This is called an expert system, in AI-speak. An expert system can be trained (think of it as acquiring experience in a domain) and then use a decision tree to implement some course of action based on input from that acquired experience. They have to be trained (just like you and I do) and their responses are constrained by the limits imposed by the domain, just like ours are in the cockpit. Expert systems are already used in medicine, finance, and the military to make very sophisticated judgments based on what they know to implement procedures to reach desirable outcomes.
For example, military sonar systems use an expert system to discriminate between all the objects detected near the hull of a ship. They can determine which objects more than likely pose a hazard (like a mine, or a torpedo) and ones that don't (like a discarded beer can or a friendly ship) and take the appropriate action. (NB: The potential for "collateral damage" that you allude to is the same whether you have a human or a computer in the loop. Learning to recognize the potential for collateral damage is within the capability of an expert system. Human pilots can learn how to do this, so the expert system can, too.)
Training an expert system to fly is not trivial, but not impossible either. Anecdotally, I have a camera-equipped quadcopter that is controlled by an expert system that has been trained to stay a given distance from a given object while avoiding collisions. It can also launch and land autonomously. When I'm riding my Ducati, it sends a bird's-eye view of the road ahead of me to a tablet computer bungeed to my tank. I use it to detect roadside revenue squads before they can detect me. Training the system to chop my throttle when it detects a roadside revenue squad is what I'm doing every time I chop my throttle when I see that squad car appear on my tablet. The expert system remembers what I did, and can respond the same way when it detects those circumstances in the future. Replace "chop the throttle" with "launch an RPG" in the decision tree, and I think you can see that transferring my expert system's capabilities in the domain of a guy trying to avoid a traffic citation to the domain of a military strike aircraft trying to neutralize a ground target *is* very possible, if not as trivial. As we have both noted, it already is being done.
The Dali Llama recently answered this question pretty succinctly -- ""If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." I'd be really curious how other theists rationalize the existence of their various deities, given that the very definition of faith makes a mockery of the scientific method. Ontology is not the answer, btw -- god is not a falsifiable hypothesis, so the assumption that a deity must exist means that religious belief will never be compatible with the scientific method.
The part about caffeine that is dangerous is that, like other stimulants, it gives the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it. A fatigued person propped up with caffeine still makes mistakes related to fatigue. The other effects like jitters and palpitations is probably harmful to the heart in the long term also but it's less of a hazard to others.
The assertion that caffeine is dangerous because it gives only the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it is categorically false. Caffeine use happens to be great for activities that require heightened awareness of your immediate circumstances, like driving, flying, combat, and certain sports. It's why caffeine (ab)use is considered to be doping, and is screened for by athletic commissions. 84% of the caffeine in your body metabolizes into a pCyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) booster called paraxanthine, which directly affects your prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is associated with long term goal-directed planning and behavior modeling, which can be (and often are) in conflict with the short term needs of the moment. Paraxanthine interferes with the ability of neurons in the prefrontal cortex to maintain communication with other parts of the brain, freeing up your cognitive resources for use on what's happening right now. Seriously -- thinking about what you are going to have for dinner tonight is kinda pointless when some competitor has decided that you are going to be his lunch right now. Caffeine really delivers improved brain performance in a measurable way, by adjusting the brain's chemistry in a manner that helps you to focus on what you are doing right now.
I'm a private pilot with a multi-engine rating. Simulators seem to be a good way to rehearse cockpit procedures, but unless they figure out a way to simulate g-forces, that's about the limit of their usefulness. Simulating a spin recovery procedure is one thing, doing it for real with a two- or three-g load from the spin is another. With that said, I don't think commercial and military pilots are going to have a viable career field for much longer. Military pilots are already being replaced by drone operators, and I think the rate of replacement is going to accelerate if the drone program keeps posting the kind of successes it has enjoyed so far. Unmanned vehicles seem to be the future of military aviation. Commercial pilots will probably last longer, because commercial airlines have to convince a skeptical public that airliners are going to be as safe with a computer at the stick as they are right now with a human. Realistically, commercial pilots have a hand on the stick only during takeoffs and landings, but all modern heavies can land and take off under autopilot, and have been able to for about thirty years. IIRC, a Douglas Skymaster made a transatlantic flight completely on autopilot, including the take-off and landing, even farther back than that (late 1940s? have to google that) so the technology is definitely out there. IMHO, pilots are still in commercial cockpits (and will be there for a while) because the paying public wants them there, not because they need to be there.
Sorry, liberals don't like it when the churches do things like "donating free space" to help people. They throw hissy fits, and start screaming about a separation of church and state. Well at least they do in the US, never mind that in Canada that churches and synagogues have been doing this up here for the better part of a decade already and it's open to the public.
We only care when government money is used to maintain such services, or are the only places for those public services to be available.
How comfortable would you be if the only place in your town that had free internet was a mosque?
Hmmm. Don't think you are a troll, so I'm going to toss you a peanut or two to munch on. Haven't you heard of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, created by Bush II more than a decade ago? True, Bush used it as a sly way to fund get-out-the-vote programs targeted at GOP constituencies and faced some serious blowback when his first director of the office, John Dilulio, resigned in protest over the political agenda that permeated an ostensibly apolitical office. The office was expanded and renamed the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships by that arch-liberal, Obama. The OFBNP has funneled billions of dollars of tax money into exactly the kind of social services that you are referring to, via competitive contracts awarded and monitored by a council of secular and religious leaders from around the country.
I don't think liberals care much at all about *who* is helping redistribute the nation's wealth, as long as it gets redistributed in a way that benefits all, and not just a few. It's a great idea, really, letting churches help. Conservatives who don't like to redistribute wealth in any direction but upwards would look pretty silly if they tried to block money doing God's work, wouldn't you agree?
22 states in the US have already decided that photo-enforcement of traffic laws is unconstitutional. My home state of Arizona is going to be joining them soon. There is a case before the Arizona supreme court that appears be poised to make the same determination, after nearly four years in the system.
I don't think photo-enforcement was about creating a safer environment for motoring as much as it was about revenue enhancement for the municipality that purchased the systems. If you look at how the $67M cost to the Arizona tax-payer was justified in the appropriations bill, it was all about ROIs and projected revenue streams, and very little about lowering accident rates at intersections.
But I think that somebody didn't think it through, and now they are abandoning it. Four years ago, the city of Scottsdale abandoned photo-enforcement. Three years ago, the Arizona Department of Public Safety (the highway patrol) announced that the maintenance contract for the fifteen mobile units they were using would not be offered again after the current one expired and that they would be taking the mobile units out of service at the end of 2011. I've noticed only a couple of places where the cameras still seem to be active here in Tucson where I live, out of the seventeen or so that were installed. Many cameras that flashed me as recently as a couple months ago no longer seem to be working, though the one at the major intersection near my house still seems to be functional. Friends in the Phoenix metro area tell me that they've noticed pretty much the same thing, with the only active cameras seeming to be in Chandler. A couple of years ago, a disclaimer started showing up on mailed photo-citations, informing you that you were under no obligation to respond to the citation in any way, that it was not a summons. I've heard anecdotal evidence about mailed tickets being followed up with a process server, but I've never seen a process server, and I've had *many* of those mailed tickets. I shit-canned them all on the advice of my attorney, who advised me the first time I got one that a camera can't make a PC call the way a cop has to; his theory was that a judge would have to shit-can it too, if our 4th amendment guarantees of due process are still valid. One more bit of anecdotal evidence: on the rare occasion that a real cop cites me for something, I've never been hauled off to jail -- somebody with that many *valid* outstanding traffic citations would have been, I think.
All of this would suggest to me that municipalities are stepping away from the photo-enforcement revenue trough because there may be serious legal implications if they don't.
I'm surprised nobody has made any 'Dysan' style bladeless computer fans. Probably higher power, but close to silent. Based on Apple's slimy patenting of magnetic power cord attachment (which had been used in other places for many years), it's probably patentable.
not really bladeless. It's only bladeless if you include "can't see the blades that are there" as part of your definition of bladeless. There is an impeller fan concealed in the base of every dyson air mover.
Though I hate the term "brogramming" and think it's completely stupid to try to program while drunk, I believe there is room for what used to be called the "heroic" model of software development in certain circumstances. The fact is that the technology world is fast paced, and often the product that becomes dominant (makes the most money) is not the one that's the most well engineered. It is the one that works well enough, has features people like, and makes it to the market first. A few very good coders with good domain knowledge and broad skills working heads down on such a project can absolutely run circles around (iterate faster) a large engineering team of siloed engineers focusing on requirements and architecture.
That is not to say that proper software engineering is dead... quite the opposite. In most industries and once a product reaches a certain size - quality, security, etc. are expected. You need a combination of good engineers and the right processes in place to make that happen. You cannot substitute processes for good engineers. As for waterfall vs agile... neither is perfect.... but Agile is better when requirements tend to change. It's bad to be dogmatic about either one though.
this. security is a system-level concept, not app-level. apps are insecure because the system allows them to be insecure, period. When it comes to trying to make an app secure when the underlying system may not be, you are *at best* reinventing the wheel, at worst you are tilting at windmills. When it comes to app engineering, focusing on app security is like trying to improve medical care by teaching ambulance drivers how to drive faster.
Microsoft is in bed with the US government at high levels so i don't think your letter will go anywhere.
This is significant. What is the difference between having your computer pwned by some kind of boot-time virus that feeds your info to criminals, to having your computer pwned by some kind of government official who is also a criminal?
There is no other way to look at this situation than to accept that it is an abrogation of a basic freedom - to run whatever the hell we want on hardware we paid for
Your heart is in the right place, but I think you are missing an important piece of the big picture. You do not have any basic freedoms -- you have only those freedoms that the law allows you to have, along with the the ones you choose to exercise in defiance of the law. Your freedoms change as the law changes, so the idea of a "basic" freedom is a bit of what Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake -- it's a non-starter if you are trying to premise an argument with it. That is reality. You certainly can choose to exercise your freedom to *attempt* to run whatever the hell you want on the hardware you paid for -- and that choice is *always* available to you -- but you don't automatically have the corresponding freedom to be successful at it, especially if society (corporations and their bottom-line thinking are legally classed in the US as people thanks to Citizens United, so they are by definition part of society) decides that it is in society's best interest (read: bad for the bottom line) that you should not have the freedom to be successful at it.
Hmmm...excellent point. The assertion that a victim can't be blamed reduces to an absurdity, and I'm glad somebody around here had the guts to point that out. There are degrees of victimhood just like there are degrees of homicide. Somebody who knowingly puts themselves in harm's way is culpable for the harm they experience, and should therefore not be considered a blameless victim. A woman who dresses provocatively and then voluntarily and knowingly ingests chemicals that impair her judgment is one kind of victim if she is assaulted on her way home from the bar. She's a different kind of victim than, say, a woman who gets assaulted on her way home from the grocery store who isn't drunk and isn't trying to catch a man's eye. NB: I'm not saying the attacker in either case is guilt-free; the attacker should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and if found guilty, be punished as harshly as the law allows. My point is that there is a legally recognized spectrum of victims. From an objective viewpoint, the drunk, provocatively-dressed woman's assault is a self-inflicted wound -- she does not deserve special status simply because somebody assaulted her, because that would ignore her own part in the assault. To hammer this point home (as a law professor once did for our benefit) what if she kills her attacker while defending herself? Does she really get a pass for killing someone because she had the poor judgment to dress provocatively and get drunk? The legal answer is no -- she can still be charged with some form of homicide and be punished if found guilty. If the woman coming home from the grocery store kills her attacker, she also will be charged with homicide, but she will be charged in a way that *allows* her to make the affirmative defense that it was a justifiable homicide, a defense that would be denied to the drunk, provocatively-dressed woman.
One more NB: If you think I'm splitting legal hairs here, you are right. Justice must depend on the differences between victims, if the crime is identical.
As a wise man once pointed out, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Rupert Murdoch's news empire has made a fortune for him by following this dictum to the letter. Murdoch has figured out which people he can fool all the time -- angry white males who live in the US. And as another wise man once pointed out, a man will hear what he wants to hear, and disregard the rest. Murdoch isn't worried about his angry white male revenue stream abandoning him simply because somebody fact-checked his propaganda -- Murdoch knows that angry white males will ignore anything that disrupts their vision of the world, and embrace anything that endorses it.
And -- just to affirm the Rule of Three -- another wise man once pointed out that the truth is out there. We already have fantastic sites like snopes and factcheck that eviscerate Murdoch's untruth stream in near real-time. People who can't be fooled all of the time and who don't always disregard what they don't want to hear can take comfort in the fact that sites like these are out there and are accessible to them any time their common sense alerts on one of Murdoch's "facts."
Why haven't you actively encouraged religious leaders to accept your challenge? Seems to me they are the biggest paranormal fraudsters on the planet but you seem to give them a pass. I'd pay cold, hard cash to see you and Richard Dawkins tag-teaming Ratzinger and Khamenei...
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More than half of the population in the US still thinks the planet is between six and ten thousand years old. That level of irrationality is a very viable target for politicians, especially those politicians that rely on irrationality in their constituents to keep them in office. The problem with the US is not religion, per se, but the stubborn irrationality that many US citizens cling to.
Seriously -- if they are willing to pass legislation that alters science, why not help out our engineers too? Granted, I wouldn't be wanting to ride over any bridges in Missouri if they did, but it's the thought that counts, no? The best I can see coming out of this legislation (if it passes) will be when the combined forces of rationality and reason get this whole religion in public schools thing to SCOTUS and we get a precedent setting-decision that will clearly define for the rest of the planet exactly where the US stands on this whole Enlightenment thing.
> Not once have I seen one where you could actually use the online system to arbitrarily move money outside the account owner's accounts.
Huh? Just go to "transfer money", write the account number of the receiver and the amount, and off the money goes.
At least that is how it works here in Denmark. Very handy, too. Is the US still using personal paper checks?
Out of curiosity, what is the fee structure? I have on- and off-shore US, Mexican, and Costa Rican accounts, and can do EFT from the bank's web interface to any financial institution that supports EFT from any of them. They just charge me an arm and a leg to do it, but the convenience definitely outweighs the expense for me. Btw, I've never done any business with an entity that didn't have access to EFT, so I'm skeptical of the GP's claim.
interesting history. One can certainly believe without proof (this is faith in a bucket, and why all religions are, by definition, irrational) but -- agnosticism implies that there is something to know (or not know.) There isn't. I'll stick with atheist as a label. Seems to capture the non-existence of gods in a more rigorous way. :)
I'm an atheist the same way I'm amoral. IMHO, morals are way too multi-valued to be a useful guide to modulating my behavior. I'm not anti-moral, or even immoral (how can I be immoral if I don't use any morals?) I'm just amoral, without morals.
I'm not sure if this is a sublte Jesuitical troll, or whether you're a bit thick.
Being an atheist is orthoganol to being a good or bad (moral or immoral) person. Only psychopaths and animals are truly amoral. It is not a good thing in a rational human being.
heh. probably a bit thick. It was a bad analogy. Thanks for the correction.
Hmmm...assuming that national pride is going to be a motivator ("no way in hell..." is how you actually phrased it) then we can restate the problem in terms of preserving national pride. When you look at the problem from that perspective, it becomes a matter of *preventing* the Chinese from getting to Mars before the US does. In order to prevent the Chinese from getting to Mars, the US will have to be able to project their national will on the Chinese, and the way one nation projects its will on another nation is by force. This force is applied by military and economic might. Finding funding for military might (at least in the US) has been pretty much independent of political or economic issues. Defense budgets routinely survive presidential and congressional elections, and are less affected by economic slumps. (Not untouched by, but certainly don't suffer as much as other government programs do.) So -- in a bucket, beating the Chinese to Mars becomes a matter of delaying the Chinese long enough for the US to get there first. Overt or covert military ops, industrial espionage and economic warfare to sabotage the Chinese Mars effort become plausible when you look at the problem this way. I'm not saying I want it to happen this way, or that it will happen this way, but it is a plausible scenario that is fairly independent of politics and economics in the US. It only requires that the US be more concerned about national pride than the consequences of using military or economic force. As events have showed us over the past dozen years, the US seems to be more than willing to go to war (on multiple fronts, if necessary, and at a severe cost to their economy) when their national pride has been damaged, so I would conclude that some kind of action by the US to prevent the Chinese from reaching Mars first has a probability approaching unity of occurring.
People are still making references to the mythical Great Catholic Altar Boy Molestation Conspiracy Project?
Oh the "mythical conspiracy project"? Hmmm, let's see from the laundry list of cases we find:
In July 2010, the Vatican doubled the length of time after the 18th birthday of the victim that clergymen can be tried in a church court and streamlined the processes for removing "pedophile priests."
So they streamlined a process to cater to a "mythical conspiracy project?" People like you are what's wrong with organized religion and one of the primary reasons of why I am atheist. The people that run the Vatican and those in the past that have stood up and protected that power structure at all costs are fallible mortals. Shut up and deal with it or I'll throw you in with Scientology. And all those cases have dried up, right? Right? If you give money to the Roman Catholic church, that's what you're paying for, in part.
Dude -- The "a" in "atheist"means without or lacking. I'm an atheist the same way I'm amoral. IMHO, morals are way too multi-valued to be a useful guide to modulating my behavior. I'm not anti-moral, or even immoral (how can I be immoral if I don't use any morals?) I'm just amoral, without morals. Ditto atheism -- since I know there is no way to demonstrate the existence of a god, I am, by definition, without a god -- an atheist. I am also without all the associated baggage that theists have to trundle around, which seems to be your point of friction, here. You should seriously consider rebranding yourself, if what's wrong with religion is one of your primary reasons for calling yourself an atheist. Try anti-theist for starts. You don't like the way theists behave, so the label you choose for yourself should reflect that dislike. You can label yourself an atheist when you realize that there were no gods, are no gods and never can be gods. Incidentally, being honest and transparent in this manner allows you to cooperate with theists when their goals happen to align with yours (and to dispatch them without remorse when they don't.)
Just don't post location data or activities if you're engaging in protests... disable location services on your phone. You're giving data to a public database and then crying about privacy... just don't give them information.
Indeed. Terrorists hide their activity from the authorities by concealing themselves within the populace. This is the first rule of asymmetric warfare. And it still holds, whether you are hiding within a city's population being surveilled by cameras operated by the authorities, or within the statistical bubble that the authorities are able to track via software like RIOT. The nature of the battles may change, but the nature of warfare doesn't.
The internet is a tool for moving information around. Keeping the internet functional means that all information riding around on it has to be treated the same way; that is the nature of a packet-switched protocol. The protocol has to be pretty much blind to the constraints imposed on the information. The net neutrality problem is that information with a value (for what ever definition of value that you want to use) riding on the internet means content providers have to armor their information to keep that value from leaking away as it transits the internet -- that armor invalidates the idea of the neutral nature of the information, and therefore compromises the usefulness of the internet for the content providers. I'm pretty sure that having open spectrum that content providers can grab up and use as their distribution channel will fix this problem. A distribution channel that they own and control means that they can armor their information in whatever way they want to, and to brick any device on the network (including the end-points) while only minimally compromising their ability to deliver content, which is what their business is supposed to profit by. They cannot control the internet in this way, and that's why I see them grabbing up the spectrum and setting up their own networks. NB: This is not a bad thing for people who value the free flow of information that the internet makes possible.
This is the second post I've seen in as many days on Green Bank, and no mention of the fact that the NSF is planning on closing the facility to save money. Green Bank is the largest movable radio telescope in the world. If you feel--like I do--that this would be a detriment to the nation, please sign the petition or, even better, write your Congressperson.
I saw your post only after I made a similar post about GBT losing funding (so much for my karma, damn it.) I'm wondering about the timing of this controversy over RF emission constraints, if the GBT has indeed lost funding. I echo your concern, and hope many, many tax-payers sign on to the petition.
The telescope has been recommended for defunding by the NSF's radio astronomy committee (along with five other radio telescope programs) according to this six-month-old article at Physics World. It's been around and doing great science for over half a century. For me, as a nerdy kid in the Sixties, Green Bank was the stuff of legends, with the added bonus of being real. A sensitive, steerable antenna is an amazingly powerful tool for doing radio astronomy, and it has more than justified its existence. I'll be sad if and when it is defunded by the NSF, but why the sudden concern over RF emission constraints that people near the site have been *voluntarily* living under for the last fifty-odd years? The GBT and the other five programs (including the VLBA!) that have been recommended for defunding by the NSF can (in theory, anyway) still get alternative funding from other sources than the NSF. This controversy over the RF emission constraints doesn't make any sense to me, unless there is somebody trying to discourage those other sources of funding, by creating a public controversy. Tin foil hat aside, who stands to benefit by seeing GBT closed down?
(I know, I'm feeding this obTroll, but hey, it's 3am here, and I'm waiting for a render to complete!) Chromebook is a laptop, not a tablet. And why do you need "external media" to boot (indeed, you seem to think "booting" is something all devices do in the same way.) I'm getting the impression you really don't understand the differences between a laptop and a tablet. Fwiw, my Nexus 10 is a tablet, but it is not "locked down." Unlocking it and reflashing it with cyanogen's excellent mod took all of five minutes. I spent US $5 to get an adapter that lets me have "access" to external media. Finding a convenient way to store that dongle, though, has proven to be almost more trouble than it was worth. Almost. Damn you, Google, for annoying me like that.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have a few observations of my own, so I'm returning the favor. :) The ability to acquire experience, and the capacity to choose an informed course of action (judgment) is a very useful trait, indeed. But let me ask you this: What does a pilot do after bringing experience and judgment to bear on an in-flight situation? The pilot implements a procedure calculated to address the situation. The situations a pilot can encounter can be very diverse, as you indicated -- weather, equipment failure modes, other traffic, etc -- and a pilot has a finite number of ways to acquire information about the situation (instruments, ATC, and his own eyes and ears.) There are a finite number of combinations of control inputs that a pilot has at his disposal to resolve those situations. It's choosing which ones and when to apply them that becomes the key issue, and human pilots rely (as you point out) on their experience to make a judgment about that.
AI is a crapshoot, to be sure, but there is a class of AI that has a lot of potential (IMHO) to mimic the human capacity to learn and to make decisions based on that acquired knowledge. This is called an expert system, in AI-speak. An expert system can be trained (think of it as acquiring experience in a domain) and then use a decision tree to implement some course of action based on input from that acquired experience. They have to be trained (just like you and I do) and their responses are constrained by the limits imposed by the domain, just like ours are in the cockpit. Expert systems are already used in medicine, finance, and the military to make very sophisticated judgments based on what they know to implement procedures to reach desirable outcomes.
For example, military sonar systems use an expert system to discriminate between all the objects detected near the hull of a ship. They can determine which objects more than likely pose a hazard (like a mine, or a torpedo) and ones that don't (like a discarded beer can or a friendly ship) and take the appropriate action. (NB: The potential for "collateral damage" that you allude to is the same whether you have a human or a computer in the loop. Learning to recognize the potential for collateral damage is within the capability of an expert system. Human pilots can learn how to do this, so the expert system can, too.)
Training an expert system to fly is not trivial, but not impossible either. Anecdotally, I have a camera-equipped quadcopter that is controlled by an expert system that has been trained to stay a given distance from a given object while avoiding collisions. It can also launch and land autonomously. When I'm riding my Ducati, it sends a bird's-eye view of the road ahead of me to a tablet computer bungeed to my tank. I use it to detect roadside revenue squads before they can detect me. Training the system to chop my throttle when it detects a roadside revenue squad is what I'm doing every time I chop my throttle when I see that squad car appear on my tablet. The expert system remembers what I did, and can respond the same way when it detects those circumstances in the future. Replace "chop the throttle" with "launch an RPG" in the decision tree, and I think you can see that transferring my expert system's capabilities in the domain of a guy trying to avoid a traffic citation to the domain of a military strike aircraft trying to neutralize a ground target *is* very possible, if not as trivial. As we have both noted, it already is being done.
...but I really don't see the problem.
The Dali Llama recently answered this question pretty succinctly -- ""If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." I'd be really curious how other theists rationalize the existence of their various deities, given that the very definition of faith makes a mockery of the scientific method. Ontology is not the answer, btw -- god is not a falsifiable hypothesis, so the assumption that a deity must exist means that religious belief will never be compatible with the scientific method.
The part about caffeine that is dangerous is that, like other stimulants, it gives the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it. A fatigued person propped up with caffeine still makes mistakes related to fatigue. The other effects like jitters and palpitations is probably harmful to the heart in the long term also but it's less of a hazard to others.
The assertion that caffeine is dangerous because it gives only the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it is categorically false. Caffeine use happens to be great for activities that require heightened awareness of your immediate circumstances, like driving, flying, combat, and certain sports. It's why caffeine (ab)use is considered to be doping, and is screened for by athletic commissions. 84% of the caffeine in your body metabolizes into a pCyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) booster called paraxanthine, which directly affects your prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is associated with long term goal-directed planning and behavior modeling, which can be (and often are) in conflict with the short term needs of the moment. Paraxanthine interferes with the ability of neurons in the prefrontal cortex to maintain communication with other parts of the brain, freeing up your cognitive resources for use on what's happening right now. Seriously -- thinking about what you are going to have for dinner tonight is kinda pointless when some competitor has decided that you are going to be his lunch right now. Caffeine really delivers improved brain performance in a measurable way, by adjusting the brain's chemistry in a manner that helps you to focus on what you are doing right now.
I'm a private pilot with a multi-engine rating. Simulators seem to be a good way to rehearse cockpit procedures, but unless they figure out a way to simulate g-forces, that's about the limit of their usefulness. Simulating a spin recovery procedure is one thing, doing it for real with a two- or three-g load from the spin is another. With that said, I don't think commercial and military pilots are going to have a viable career field for much longer. Military pilots are already being replaced by drone operators, and I think the rate of replacement is going to accelerate if the drone program keeps posting the kind of successes it has enjoyed so far. Unmanned vehicles seem to be the future of military aviation. Commercial pilots will probably last longer, because commercial airlines have to convince a skeptical public that airliners are going to be as safe with a computer at the stick as they are right now with a human. Realistically, commercial pilots have a hand on the stick only during takeoffs and landings, but all modern heavies can land and take off under autopilot, and have been able to for about thirty years. IIRC, a Douglas Skymaster made a transatlantic flight completely on autopilot, including the take-off and landing, even farther back than that (late 1940s? have to google that) so the technology is definitely out there. IMHO, pilots are still in commercial cockpits (and will be there for a while) because the paying public wants them there, not because they need to be there.
Sorry, liberals don't like it when the churches do things like "donating free space" to help people. They throw hissy fits, and start screaming about a separation of church and state. Well at least they do in the US, never mind that in Canada that churches and synagogues have been doing this up here for the better part of a decade already and it's open to the public.
We only care when government money is used to maintain such services, or are the only places for those public services to be available.
How comfortable would you be if the only place in your town that had free internet was a mosque?
Hmmm. Don't think you are a troll, so I'm going to toss you a peanut or two to munch on. Haven't you heard of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, created by Bush II more than a decade ago? True, Bush used it as a sly way to fund get-out-the-vote programs targeted at GOP constituencies and faced some serious blowback when his first director of the office, John Dilulio, resigned in protest over the political agenda that permeated an ostensibly apolitical office. The office was expanded and renamed the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships by that arch-liberal, Obama. The OFBNP has funneled billions of dollars of tax money into exactly the kind of social services that you are referring to, via competitive contracts awarded and monitored by a council of secular and religious leaders from around the country.
I don't think liberals care much at all about *who* is helping redistribute the nation's wealth, as long as it gets redistributed in a way that benefits all, and not just a few. It's a great idea, really, letting churches help. Conservatives who don't like to redistribute wealth in any direction but upwards would look pretty silly if they tried to block money doing God's work, wouldn't you agree?
22 states in the US have already decided that photo-enforcement of traffic laws is unconstitutional. My home state of Arizona is going to be joining them soon. There is a case before the Arizona supreme court that appears be poised to make the same determination, after nearly four years in the system.
I don't think photo-enforcement was about creating a safer environment for motoring as much as it was about revenue enhancement for the municipality that purchased the systems. If you look at how the $67M cost to the Arizona tax-payer was justified in the appropriations bill, it was all about ROIs and projected revenue streams, and very little about lowering accident rates at intersections.
But I think that somebody didn't think it through, and now they are abandoning it. Four years ago, the city of Scottsdale abandoned photo-enforcement. Three years ago, the Arizona Department of Public Safety (the highway patrol) announced that the maintenance contract for the fifteen mobile units they were using would not be offered again after the current one expired and that they would be taking the mobile units out of service at the end of 2011. I've noticed only a couple of places where the cameras still seem to be active here in Tucson where I live, out of the seventeen or so that were installed. Many cameras that flashed me as recently as a couple months ago no longer seem to be working, though the one at the major intersection near my house still seems to be functional. Friends in the Phoenix metro area tell me that they've noticed pretty much the same thing, with the only active cameras seeming to be in Chandler. A couple of years ago, a disclaimer started showing up on mailed photo-citations, informing you that you were under no obligation to respond to the citation in any way, that it was not a summons. I've heard anecdotal evidence about mailed tickets being followed up with a process server, but I've never seen a process server, and I've had *many* of those mailed tickets. I shit-canned them all on the advice of my attorney, who advised me the first time I got one that a camera can't make a PC call the way a cop has to; his theory was that a judge would have to shit-can it too, if our 4th amendment guarantees of due process are still valid. One more bit of anecdotal evidence: on the rare occasion that a real cop cites me for something, I've never been hauled off to jail -- somebody with that many *valid* outstanding traffic citations would have been, I think.
All of this would suggest to me that municipalities are stepping away from the photo-enforcement revenue trough because there may be serious legal implications if they don't.
I'm surprised nobody has made any 'Dysan' style bladeless computer fans. Probably higher power, but close to silent. Based on Apple's slimy patenting of magnetic power cord attachment (which had been used in other places for many years), it's probably patentable.
not really bladeless. It's only bladeless if you include "can't see the blades that are there" as part of your definition of bladeless. There is an impeller fan concealed in the base of every dyson air mover.
Though I hate the term "brogramming" and think it's completely stupid to try to program while drunk, I believe there is room for what used to be called the "heroic" model of software development in certain circumstances. The fact is that the technology world is fast paced, and often the product that becomes dominant (makes the most money) is not the one that's the most well engineered. It is the one that works well enough, has features people like, and makes it to the market first. A few very good coders with good domain knowledge and broad skills working heads down on such a project can absolutely run circles around (iterate faster) a large engineering team of siloed engineers focusing on requirements and architecture.
That is not to say that proper software engineering is dead... quite the opposite. In most industries and once a product reaches a certain size - quality, security, etc. are expected. You need a combination of good engineers and the right processes in place to make that happen. You cannot substitute processes for good engineers. As for waterfall vs agile... neither is perfect.... but Agile is better when requirements tend to change. It's bad to be dogmatic about either one though.
this. security is a system-level concept, not app-level. apps are insecure because the system allows them to be insecure, period. When it comes to trying to make an app secure when the underlying system may not be, you are *at best* reinventing the wheel, at worst you are tilting at windmills. When it comes to app engineering, focusing on app security is like trying to improve medical care by teaching ambulance drivers how to drive faster.
Microsoft is in bed with the US government at high levels so i don't think your letter will go anywhere.
This is significant. What is the difference between having your computer pwned by some kind of boot-time virus that feeds your info to criminals, to having your computer pwned by some kind of government official who is also a criminal?
There is no other way to look at this situation than to accept that it is an abrogation of a basic freedom - to run whatever the hell we want on hardware we paid for
Your heart is in the right place, but I think you are missing an important piece of the big picture. You do not have any basic freedoms -- you have only those freedoms that the law allows you to have, along with the the ones you choose to exercise in defiance of the law. Your freedoms change as the law changes, so the idea of a "basic" freedom is a bit of what Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake -- it's a non-starter if you are trying to premise an argument with it. That is reality. You certainly can choose to exercise your freedom to *attempt* to run whatever the hell you want on the hardware you paid for -- and that choice is *always* available to you -- but you don't automatically have the corresponding freedom to be successful at it, especially if society (corporations and their bottom-line thinking are legally classed in the US as people thanks to Citizens United, so they are by definition part of society) decides that it is in society's best interest (read: bad for the bottom line) that you should not have the freedom to be successful at it.
Hmmm...excellent point. The assertion that a victim can't be blamed reduces to an absurdity, and I'm glad somebody around here had the guts to point that out. There are degrees of victimhood just like there are degrees of homicide. Somebody who knowingly puts themselves in harm's way is culpable for the harm they experience, and should therefore not be considered a blameless victim. A woman who dresses provocatively and then voluntarily and knowingly ingests chemicals that impair her judgment is one kind of victim if she is assaulted on her way home from the bar. She's a different kind of victim than, say, a woman who gets assaulted on her way home from the grocery store who isn't drunk and isn't trying to catch a man's eye. NB: I'm not saying the attacker in either case is guilt-free; the attacker should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and if found guilty, be punished as harshly as the law allows. My point is that there is a legally recognized spectrum of victims. From an objective viewpoint, the drunk, provocatively-dressed woman's assault is a self-inflicted wound -- she does not deserve special status simply because somebody assaulted her, because that would ignore her own part in the assault. To hammer this point home (as a law professor once did for our benefit) what if she kills her attacker while defending herself? Does she really get a pass for killing someone because she had the poor judgment to dress provocatively and get drunk? The legal answer is no -- she can still be charged with some form of homicide and be punished if found guilty. If the woman coming home from the grocery store kills her attacker, she also will be charged with homicide, but she will be charged in a way that *allows* her to make the affirmative defense that it was a justifiable homicide, a defense that would be denied to the drunk, provocatively-dressed woman.
One more NB: If you think I'm splitting legal hairs here, you are right. Justice must depend on the differences between victims, if the crime is identical.
As a wise man once pointed out, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Rupert Murdoch's news empire has made a fortune for him by following this dictum to the letter. Murdoch has figured out which people he can fool all the time -- angry white males who live in the US. And as another wise man once pointed out, a man will hear what he wants to hear, and disregard the rest. Murdoch isn't worried about his angry white male revenue stream abandoning him simply because somebody fact-checked his propaganda -- Murdoch knows that angry white males will ignore anything that disrupts their vision of the world, and embrace anything that endorses it.
And -- just to affirm the Rule of Three -- another wise man once pointed out that the truth is out there. We already have fantastic sites like snopes and factcheck that eviscerate Murdoch's untruth stream in near real-time. People who can't be fooled all of the time and who don't always disregard what they don't want to hear can take comfort in the fact that sites like these are out there and are accessible to them any time their common sense alerts on one of Murdoch's "facts."
Why haven't you actively encouraged religious leaders to accept your challenge? Seems to me they are the biggest paranormal fraudsters on the planet but you seem to give them a pass. I'd pay cold, hard cash to see you and Richard Dawkins tag-teaming Ratzinger and Khamenei...