Fewer than 60% of the tech professionals (IT, sysadmins, network engineers, and programmers) at my company have degrees in technical fields. Some have grad degrees in CS, some just bachelors' degrees, some have bachelors' in unrelated fields, and some (like me) have no degree at all. The only noticable salary distinctions are for people with VERY specific skills, and that doesn't mean "SQL". We employ PhD statisticians, and they make bank. The programmers with MAs in CS don't make more money than I do, and I'm a server app designer who spent five years in school (no degree) studying Poli. Sci.
Here's what I did: I Learned how to fix, build, work on computers as a hobby, which eventually became a serious interest. Then, I found a $15/hour job doing basic tech support for a very small, fast-growing startup. As the company grew, I gained responsibilities and eventually was the go-to technical person for a company of 30 or so. In the process, I learned a *lot* more than I knew when I'd started--specifically, I got really good at working with Linux. I got too big for my britches, and eventually moved on to a different place (startup again) where they needed someone who knew a lot of Linux. Better money, too. Fast forward a couple of jobs, and I make really good money at a really interesting job, with less than four years of real job experience.
The helpful tricks are:
1) If you sound like you know what you're talking about in an interview, you can overcome a lot of degree biases. Make sure you talk to tech people, not HR bimbos, and when they start throwing technical questions at you, hit some home runs. You'd be surprised how many people can't pull this off, even those with degrees.
2) Spend a LOT of time outside of work/school on your own projects. Build Linux/BSD boxes out of old desktops, and try to do clever things with them. Knowing how to build a web server from bare metal and a Debian CD is a big plus for an entry-level job, and the only way to learn it is to do it. Once you do have a job, make opportunities for yourself to try new things, play with interesting technologies, and do whatever it takes to expand your skillset.
3) Get your ass to a big city, where there are gazillions of jobs and lots of turnover. Move to San Franciso, Seattle, LA, Chicago, New York, etc. Hard, true, but absolutely necessary if you're going to get enough interviews to find the one guy out of ten who'll take a chance on you. Craigslist is your friend--most places, you can get a crappy job and a crappy apartment overnight, and a decent job/apartment in two weeks, tops.
4) Make friends with everybody at every job you work. Be happy, helpful, and fun to work with, and people will remember you. When they hear about interesting opportunities, they'll let you know and they'll put in a good word for you. Bosses who are leaving for other companies will call you from their new jobs and ask you to come interview.
Good luck. It can be done--this is America, after all.
You aren't talking about what is normally referred to in the literature as "disabling raw sockets". You're talking about enforcing source-based filters on edge routers. Disabling raw sockets usually refers to implementations at the OS level that hide or control access to the API of the lower levels of the network stack.
But this is beside the point, really: The problem is a human one, not a technological one. You can't force enough ISPs to implement source-checking filters to make a dent. You'd have to pass a law, in every country with significant Internet penetration, or come up with some similar enforcement mechanism to mandate these policies. Unfortunately, world Internet regulation as currently constituted does not lend itself to these kinds of things.
Essentially, you're arguing that "We could stop all motor vehicle speed violations if everybody just stopped speeding." Well, duh. We want to, and we try, but the problem is one of enforcement.
Umm... Denmark's economy is pretty socialist. Many of the corporations, especially the ones providing core economic functions, are state-owned (wholly or partially). This is true of many European countries, to a greater or lesser degree.
You want to talk about regulatory capture? Imagine just how much the lawmakers are in bed with the corporations when they OWN them.
So Scientology is a "UFO religion"? Heaven's Gate, yeah... but I think that's the first time I've heard of Hubbard's club referred to that way. Who knows, it might catch on?
Anyway... The scientific references in Star Trek (pick your series) are just as specious and mythological as the two religious movements that you cited. There is nothing, dear Trekkie, NOTHING about Star Trek that is inherently less fantastic, less supernatural, and more scientifically grounded than stories about Xenu, spaceships shaped like DC-10s, and the flying saucer inside Hale-Bopp.
You wanna argue this? You REALLY want to argue this? Fine. I have ONE LETTER for you:
I think I see what you're saying, here. These issues can be discussed in technical legal terms, or they can be phrased in the language of the larger moral and societal implications of intellectual property. You were aiming for the latter, and I mistook some phrases like "illegal" and "contract" for their technical usages.
You make a very good point that the original legal justifaction for copyright (the constitutional clause) seems to be at odds with some of the specific statutory implementations of copyright law. Specifcally, the DCMA (which isn't copyright law per se, but whatever) has mixed with the realities of technology to yield a situation that greatly extends the practical rights of copyright owners, and greatly diminishes the rights of consumers.
However... These are policy questions, and not legal questions. The copyright clause in the U.S. Constitution is vague--some would argue, deliberately so. It proposes a general justification for the Congress to implement certain types of IP laws in statues, but it *doesn't* try to specifically define the boundaries of what rights those laws should preserve for consumers. Really, this is how most of the Constitution works, although it is certainly more specific in some places than in others. Even the phrase "limited monopoly", which is all over the place in the legal literature on the subject, is something that emerges from interpretating the original words.
So I guess the only point I can make is that the "contract with the government" that you describe, which guarantees fair use rights to the public in exchange for a limited monopoly, is a matter of interpretation. I happen to believe that it's a sound one, so we probably agree in principle. But the Constitution and the law are not written as a contract--they're written as black-letter law. And as long as it's within reasonable interpretation of the Constitution and the text of statutory law, Congress basically gets to make the rules as they see fit. It may be bad policy, but it's how this works, legally.
If you want a great example of how this normally operates, check out the U.S.S.C. decision in the suit from last year about copyright extensions. (I'm too lazy to look up the cite for you, but it made Slashdot because Lawrence Lessig was on the briefs, and handled the oral arguments.) Lessig's argument (well put, I think) was that Congress was selling out the spirit of copyright even though it wasn't violating the letter of the Constitution. The Court's response was, basically, that it was a question of policy--50 years versus 75 years, I think--and not one of legal principle. Which, in turn, means that the Court doesn't have a mandate to overturn the law.
Legally, this leaves us with the same old option--write your representative and senators, and make your case to them. Unlikely, I know, but that's how the U.S. of A. works.
DRM that refuses to allow this is illegal, as it infringes on a legal right.
Copyright law allows limited copying for educational use, true. But that just means that the content producer can't use copyright law to forbid people from making class handouts. It may be possible to use some other means, and the copyright owner isn't violating the law.
For instance, I could just choose not to distribute my copyrighted material. That would keep people from making class handouts, because they never possess the original to make copies of, and it would be perfectly legal. Or, let's say that I have an independent contract with that professor that says "in exchange for me doing XXX, you agree never to use my copyrighted material in your class handouts". That's perfectly legal.
The ONLY legality question around DRM relates to laws like the DMCA and its fellows, which make it illegal to break encryption to make copies of copyrighted data, even if the subsequent copying would otherwise be legal (educational handouts, legit backup copies, whatever).
Maybe I'm dense, but what, exactly, is the problem the poster is trying to solve?
Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.
Plus, what does it mean to use "all" of the RFC1918 IP ranges? Does that mean they're using every IP in every range, or every prefix in every range, or does it just mean that they don't understand subnetting?
I'm sure someone has made this point already, but technological advances have a way of finding their maximum profitable use, regardless of how the original inventors intended their innovations to be used. I think these botnets are a similar phenomenon.
Case in point: Thomas Edison originally conceived of the phonograph as a tool for dictation, teaching children from recorded lessons, and a few other specific apps. You know what he never, ever thought of? Recorded music. And yet, that is the killer app that made his invention a common household object and birthed one of the most successful commercial fields of the 20th century--the whole music industry as we know it wouldn't exist without the phonograph.
We saw the same thing with the Internet, when a bunch or DARPA eggheads (no offense, I love you guys) built an academic network that turned into what may prove to be the newest and most effective mass media tool in the history of the human race. I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the original research, or even anyone engineering TCP/IP networks in the 70s and 80s, imagined what would happen after 1990.
In the same fashion, botnets manage to apply the same basic technologies pioneered by Seti@home, distributed folding, and all of the other "beneficial" distributed computing projects that have wrung work out of the combination of 1) the popularity of the Internet, and 2) the unharnessed cycles, disk, and network I/O bandwidth of all those overpowered word processors around the world. And it's arguable that the economic productivity (at least to a few criminal types) of the botnets is overwhelmingly more than the cash made by all the originators of the concepts (yeah, I know, they're nonprofits, sheesh).
It's kind of a shame that the killer app of distributed ad-hoc networks is so generally harmful, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Get a firewall, install you patches, and hope to God that nobody targets you with a DoS attack.
There has been some recent trending toward the thinking that recent human history (the past few millenia, that is) involves our genetic history. Most of it is cited in the article, though--it's a pretty scant number studies willing to even look in that direction. As the article notes, Western societies tend to be pretty sensitive to suggestions that genes predispose behavior or personality traits, because it has so recently been the justification for war, mass murder, and horrific social policies (eugenics).
BUT... the problem, from a scientific perspective, is that the more we learn about genetics the more evidence exists that there ARE behavioral and personality traits linked to our genes. Nobody's talking about master races or anything like that, but there's still a morally offensive (to some, at least) supposition there: Not all men are created equal.
This is a big moral problem for liberal Western democracies. Most European and North American states, and a good portion of nations in the rest of the world, are founded on the basis that every person is entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
Although I'm behind scientific inquiry 100%, and I don't think that these researchers should ever compromise their work for political purposes (well-intentioned or not!), I am a little worried about how this kind of work will affect the new few centuries of government and political thought.
The price of a good or service is set based on what the market will bear, not based on the costs of producing it.
Marx got this one way wrong. Value is defined by what you're willing to accept to part with it, and what I'm willing to part with the get it. When we're talking about mass-market items that take years to design, produce, and bring to market, this gets complicated.
Apple (or any other manufacturer) does all the math about expected costs and expected retail pricing way before the units hit the shelves. They have an equation: one side has the price they think they can sell the device for, times the number of units they think that can ship at that price (total revenue); the other side has the cost per unit times the number of units they expect to ship (costs), *plus* a big X-factor we'll call "profit".
Usually, shipping more units results in lower costs per unit, so there is probably some critical value for units shipped/sold where they will turn enough profit to hit the magic number. If you're good at playing around with equations and you understand your market enough (you know roughly how many people will buy it at any given price), you can try to maximize the profit component.
(This is the reason why they invented the spreadsheet, BTW--most businesses do this operation all the time.)
If they trust their assumptions in that equation, and the profit value looks to be positive enough to make the whole affair worth their time, they'll build it based on that equation: build this many, at that cost per unit, and sell them at some retail price.
The only influence that the costs of production have are in terms of how it shapes their profit: if the costs are higher than the revenues no matter how many units you ship, or if you can't possibly ship/sell enough units to bring the costs down enough, then you just won't build it at all.
Even if your assumptions are wrong, you still can't just raise the retail price to try to force it to work. Let's say that costs suddenly rise (the price of RAM spikes overnight): if you try to pass the costs on to the retail customer, less people will be willing to buy it at the higher price and you decrease your total profits. Also, if you're wrong about marketing and consumers aren't buying as many as you expect at a given retail price point, your only option is to lower the price--you've already spent the money to produce the units, so it's better to move them and take a loss than let them go unsold.
Sometimes for whatever reason, a nation might produce fewer skilled workers per capita in an industry than another nation does. But the fact is that a nation does need to protect its citizens, and an unmitigated deluge of skilled workers in an area from a nation with great capacity to produce them (perhaps they have a population that is 30 times larger) can be devastating to the local economy.
I like this post, because you actually display more sophisicated reasoning here than most of the talk-radio types that usually complain about this phenomenon. But I would like to point out something important.
The costs of producing something have an impact of the price of what's produced. If steel suddenly becomes more expensive, you can expect to pay more for refrigerators and cars--not quite as much more as the literal cost impact, but something approaching it. (There's some economic analysis that underlies this, but it's not important.) If the costs of production decrease, you have the opposite effect, where the cost of the product/service decreases.
Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.
So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).
Since IT services are a cost of doing other types of business, the costs of producing everything that relies on IT will tend to fall, too. Whether and how much depends on those particular markets and how much of their total costs are IT-related, but there will be an effect. In the end, the costs to end-consumers across the economy will go down. And it doesn't take an economist to realize that to the consumer, lower costs are the same thing as having more money.
Like you pointed out (and this is the part I liked), this can be pretty messy if it happens overnight, because the original IT workers who are losing jobs and seeing less in their paychecks will just be SOL. Costs might be lower for everybody, but it may be a net loss the the family depending on a sysadmin's (now decreased) income. The breadwinner might have to retrain or change jobs into a new field in order to get back his/her original income level.
But modern, 1st-world economies can absorb these changes decently well. As long as the percentage of IT workers in your work force isn't too high, and the change doesn't come too quickly, the retraining and job-switching will happen incrementally and people will have time to adjust. And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.
Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices. If you let the market do what it wants to do, you let the IT people take a hit in the short-medium term in exchange for greater prosperity in the economy as a whole.
Ooh, dammit--I forgot about that one! Good call. Assuming that the Curie temperature of the metal is less than the melting point (which is true for all ferromagnetic materials, I believe) that would happen first.
This is SOOO true, and so many UI designers forget about it. Household devices, especially, need to be brutally simple, or at least self-explanatory, or else they won't get used as often.
Case in point: I was at my new girlfriend's house, where her father has set up a wonderful entertainment center (CD/DVD, VCR, Big Ass HDTV, receiver, satellite tuner, PVR, etc.). There is an equally massive collection of remotes to go with this bunch. The GF knows how to operate most of it, because she lives there and has been on the learning curve for a while.
While she was making dinner, I tried to get things set up to watch a DVD. It took me so long to figure it out that she finished the food, brought it in, and grabbed the remotes from me and set it up herself. That's not just annoying, that's emasculating!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but iirc uranium won't dissolve in your stomach acids, much less the more benign fluids in your body, so if ingested in powder form, it would simply pass (relatively) harmlessly through your system.
It doesn't have to dissolve during ingestion to be harmful. Metal particulate will pass, but depending on the size of the particles, it may stick around a bit longer than your next bowel movement. The longer it stays, the more damage it can do. Likely causes of death would be organ failures in the GI tract as the tissues die.
While ingestion would be a slight risk in the situation I described above, I wouldn't be too worried about it. I think inhalation (lung tissue damage, plus it kills a lot of red/white blood cells) would be the worst, followed by the possibility of skin absorption.
Electromagnetic radiation is a propagating wave in space with electric and magnetic components.
I think you do not understand electromagnetic radiation as well as you think you do.
True, light waves are made up of oscillating magnetic and electric fields. But whether the material and the wave interact in the way that you suggest depends entirely on the material in question, and the wavelength of the EMR.
Light waves, for instance, interact with shiny metal things by either bouncing off them and scattering or being absorbed as thermal energy. Usually its some combination of the two. No matter how powerful of a light you shine on a piece of metal, you're not going to affect it magnetically. You may melt it, if the light is bright enough, or possibly induce an electric charge due to the photoelectric effect (depends on the wavelength and the metal), but you're not going to alter the magenetic domains that store data on a hard drive platter.
This may not have been a criticality event, although I'm not saying you're wrong.
Uranium is pyrophoric--it has a tendency to ignite and combust on contact with oxygen, which is one reason why depleted uranium is so useful in armor-piercing antitank weapons. This tendency is aggravated when uranium metal is granulated or powdered.
It's possible that an ordinary U+O combustion reaction (I don't remember the exact proportion, sorry) happened, and scattered radioactive particles through the air in the room. Anybody breathing in a significant amount of those, or absorbing them through the skin, could have potentially fatal side-effects.
Part of what makes me doubt that they were irradiated is that radiation exposure tends to lead to acute illness. You get exposed, and you get sick rather quickly (a few hours to a few weeks), and then you either die or you get better. There is an increased cancer risk after that, but its not so likely to kill you inside of two years--it often takes decades for the cancers to develop.
With radioactive particulate ingestion/inhalation, though, the effects could well be more like what you described--no immediate sickness, but the toll of the constant ionizing radiation on the body (bone marrow cell death, most likely) would eventually kill.
Seriously, dude, you sound like somebody who brags about how they don't own a television. The fact that you don't personally see the fun/benefit in a particular activity doesn't mean that it's worthless, or unmarketable, or that the rest of the human race won't care, either. This simple but subtle truth of the human condition gets hammered home to me every Superbowl Sunday, and it cannot be denied.
Or are you so self-absorbed that you assume that your own biases and foibles are representative of the entire first-world population?
That is surely more comfortable than my couch! Why didn't I think of that.
So, is this yet another subway or public transportation thing in lieu of whatever misery you suffer on the way to and from work?
You didn't think of it because it didn't occur to you that it would be interesting/useful. So far, the market seems to be responding somewhat to the mobile video feed offerings by Verizon and other cellular providers, so maybe they're on to a demographic that doesn't happen to include you....I would not feel comfortable
Again, don't you have anything to say here except to mouth off about your personal preferences?
First, there is no news that needs to be acquired in realtime...
Okay, here you just miss the point entirely. Maybe you should go back and read the GP to get a clue, and then come back again: We're talking about allowing random individuals to COLLECT original video and audio on-the-go, in an instant. (This is what the explosive decompression point referred to--go google it.) People already can, and do, get news feeds on their mobiles, and without the need for massive bandwidth.
Basically, think of the random videotaped moments that are collected by the news media from amateurs: The Rodney King beating, some of those police chases you see on Fox, wicked tornados, that sort of thing. Regardless of whether YOU feel that these amateur video captures have value, the rest of the world's behavior would suggest that they at least have some entertainment value, if nothing else. I think they may have even more.
Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
See #1
Again with the point-missing, you! There are a number of actual jobs that require, or benefit from, mobile wearable computer devices. Surgeons, for instance, use artificial vision overlays to view MRI, CAT, and ultrasound overlays in their field of view during surgery. There are other examples, most of them in industry. These devices tend to be proprietary, highly customized, and VERY expensive. A high-bandwidth cellphone could replace many of these functions with a much cheaper alternative.
If I could have a wireless, reliable net connection anywhere and only pay about $50 a month and be able to ditch my land line (~$30 a month) and my home internet (~$40 a month), yeah I would like to hook this thing up to my laptop.
Somehow, I don't believe I would be able to have my home PC downloading or serving stuff while my portable phone is with me though.
And now we're back to our original logical fallacy, "assuming that the world revolves around me" (it has a Latin name, but I forget it). YOU would only buy this thing if you could ditch your landline. But what about all the people buying EVDO cards for mobile cellular broadband already? Doesn't that kind of prove that there's already a market for this sort of thing, even at a lower bandwidth?
Hell, I can be the counterexample: If I could replace my landline broadband, AND get mobile broadband, I'd do it in a heartbeat at twice the price. Know why? Because my laptop goes everywhere I go. Maybe that's not true of you, but as we've already discussed, your own personal biases (and mine, true) mean exactly dick in the grand scheme of things.
Learn it and learn it well: The rest of the world does not think exactly like you, and they pay in cash money, too.
"Not useful" is some pretty strong language. You're just not being imaginative.
- Streaming high resolution video and high-quality audio to a cellphone might not seem useful on a tiny little LCD with a crappy speaker, but what about to a phone that has an external "eye-projector" thingamajig and a nice headphone jack? You could watch HDTV on your mobile, reveling in the privacy of the eye screen.
- Streaming similar audio/video FROM the cellphone, LIVE, to remote locations. Can you say "instant news feed"? I knew you could. (And you thought the guy with the pics from the explosive decompression on the airplane was cool?!)
- Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
And come on, don't you think that one of the primary intended uses IS to connect to a laptop? Sheesh, they let you post any old thing on Slashdot these days, don't they?
...although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct......an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear?...nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears.
doesn't the shape of the bullet also come into play?
Among other things, yes. The number of variables that influence the behavior of firearms and projectiles is just astounding--it's a HELL of a lot more than caliber, which is usually all the most people think of. There's a reason why ballistics research has its own scholarly journals.
Your point about velocity is taken, though, since delivering the same number of Joules in less time can make a difference in how well the impactee material holds up.
An often-overlooked point about ballistics. How quickly and efficiently the projectile's energy is transferred into the target is a huge determining factor in how damaging it is. If you shoot someone with a.44 magnum and the lead bullet flies through the torso and out the other side, you're not getting the most efficient impact possible, because the slug hasn't transferred all of its energy into the target (it still has enough KE left to fly out the exit wound). If the bullet were aluminum, for instance, it would have less mass and more velocity, AND it would probably stop in the target, thereby causing more trauma.
Whether the armor can resist WP or DP has nothing to do with its chemical sensitivities. "Chemical proof"? What is that supposed to mean, anyway.
Depleted Uranium rounds have efficacy because uranium is extremely hard, strong, and dense. A DU round at a given velocity carries more kinetic energy than a projectile of the same volume and velocity that's made of steel or lead, so it hurts more when it hits. Since it's hard, it doesn't deform easily when it hits, and so more of the KE is transferred into the target more quickly, which increases the peak pressure of the impact substantially. And since we're talking about a strong, hard material, instead of something that's brittle, it also won't dissipate energy by shattering.
There is a secondary effect of DU projectiles where the intense pressure of impact converts into a lot of thermal energy very quickly, which raises the temperature at the impact site to a few thousand degrees. This causes the uranium at the leading edge of the projectile to vaporize and oxidize (which releases even more heat). The effect on steel armor plating is to punch a hole and spew plamsa-temperature, gaseous uranium oxide into the interior of the target, which is pretty much an instant kill (tank crew dies horribly, fuel and ammo explode, et cetera). Coincidentally, this is also why DU rounds are bad for the environment--all that vaporized uranium oxide gets scattered around the battlefield, which can be toxic.
BUT... the secondary effect of DU won't manifest unless you're talking about an extremely high velocity round (like an APFSDS antitank round), AND it's hitting thick steel armor. This would never occur in a situation involving personal body armor, because a projectile with that kind of velocity would tear right through the front and out the back without transferring much energy to the target. Unless you're wearing an inch-thick steel plate on your chest and happen to take an antitank round.
WP is a completely different story. WP is just an incendiary, like napalm or gasoline. Sure, it burns a lot hotter, but resisting its effects is just about resisting heat. It has nothing to do with chemical sensitivities.
OTOH, the Old Testament past Genesis is consistent with archeology.
Right, but why do you get to conveniently edit Genesis out when asking whether Christian, Jewish, and Muslim beliefs are demonstrably false?
And COME ON, do we really need to argue over whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ is demonstrably false? At the very least, it's not empirically proven--absent pure religious faith, what rational observer would accept it as historical fact? (Not to harsh on Christians, here--I'm just saying that if you want to believe it, it's purely a matter of faith in a God that can defy physics and biology. It can't be justified outside of that.)
Fact is, ALL supernatural beliefs are in this category, because by definition they defy everything that we can prove about the physical world. The only possible exception is the Platonic concept of God, which is so abstract that it avoids all interaction with the physical world. And even then, if you believe in a Platonic God, or some kind of Watchmaker God who set the Universe in motion and deigns not to interfere, you're still in the realm of things that are not provable by definition.
So, really, what's the point of distinguishing them?
Slashdot Mirror
Fewer than 60% of the tech professionals (IT, sysadmins, network engineers, and programmers) at my company have degrees in technical fields. Some have grad degrees in CS, some just bachelors' degrees, some have bachelors' in unrelated fields, and some (like me) have no degree at all. The only noticable salary distinctions are for people with VERY specific skills, and that doesn't mean "SQL". We employ PhD statisticians, and they make bank. The programmers with MAs in CS don't make more money than I do, and I'm a server app designer who spent five years in school (no degree) studying Poli. Sci.
Here's what I did: I Learned how to fix, build, work on computers as a hobby, which eventually became a serious interest. Then, I found a $15/hour job doing basic tech support for a very small, fast-growing startup. As the company grew, I gained responsibilities and eventually was the go-to technical person for a company of 30 or so. In the process, I learned a *lot* more than I knew when I'd started--specifically, I got really good at working with Linux. I got too big for my britches, and eventually moved on to a different place (startup again) where they needed someone who knew a lot of Linux. Better money, too. Fast forward a couple of jobs, and I make really good money at a really interesting job, with less than four years of real job experience.
The helpful tricks are:
1) If you sound like you know what you're talking about in an interview, you can overcome a lot of degree biases. Make sure you talk to tech people, not HR bimbos, and when they start throwing technical questions at you, hit some home runs. You'd be surprised how many people can't pull this off, even those with degrees.
2) Spend a LOT of time outside of work/school on your own projects. Build Linux/BSD boxes out of old desktops, and try to do clever things with them. Knowing how to build a web server from bare metal and a Debian CD is a big plus for an entry-level job, and the only way to learn it is to do it. Once you do have a job, make opportunities for yourself to try new things, play with interesting technologies, and do whatever it takes to expand your skillset.
3) Get your ass to a big city, where there are gazillions of jobs and lots of turnover. Move to San Franciso, Seattle, LA, Chicago, New York, etc. Hard, true, but absolutely necessary if you're going to get enough interviews to find the one guy out of ten who'll take a chance on you. Craigslist is your friend--most places, you can get a crappy job and a crappy apartment overnight, and a decent job/apartment in two weeks, tops.
4) Make friends with everybody at every job you work. Be happy, helpful, and fun to work with, and people will remember you. When they hear about interesting opportunities, they'll let you know and they'll put in a good word for you. Bosses who are leaving for other companies will call you from their new jobs and ask you to come interview.
Good luck. It can be done--this is America, after all.
You aren't talking about what is normally referred to in the literature as "disabling raw sockets". You're talking about enforcing source-based filters on edge routers. Disabling raw sockets usually refers to implementations at the OS level that hide or control access to the API of the lower levels of the network stack.
But this is beside the point, really: The problem is a human one, not a technological one. You can't force enough ISPs to implement source-checking filters to make a dent. You'd have to pass a law, in every country with significant Internet penetration, or come up with some similar enforcement mechanism to mandate these policies. Unfortunately, world Internet regulation as currently constituted does not lend itself to these kinds of things.
Essentially, you're arguing that "We could stop all motor vehicle speed violations if everybody just stopped speeding." Well, duh. We want to, and we try, but the problem is one of enforcement.
Umm... Denmark's economy is pretty socialist. Many of the corporations, especially the ones providing core economic functions, are state-owned (wholly or partially). This is true of many European countries, to a greater or lesser degree.
You want to talk about regulatory capture? Imagine just how much the lawmakers are in bed with the corporations when they OWN them.
So Scientology is a "UFO religion"? Heaven's Gate, yeah... but I think that's the first time I've heard of Hubbard's club referred to that way. Who knows, it might catch on?
Anyway... The scientific references in Star Trek (pick your series) are just as specious and mythological as the two religious movements that you cited. There is nothing, dear Trekkie, NOTHING about Star Trek that is inherently less fantastic, less supernatural, and more scientifically grounded than stories about Xenu, spaceships shaped like DC-10s, and the flying saucer inside Hale-Bopp.
You wanna argue this? You REALLY want to argue this? Fine. I have ONE LETTER for you:
Q.
I win.
I think I see what you're saying, here. These issues can be discussed in technical legal terms, or they can be phrased in the language of the larger moral and societal implications of intellectual property. You were aiming for the latter, and I mistook some phrases like "illegal" and "contract" for their technical usages.
You make a very good point that the original legal justifaction for copyright (the constitutional clause) seems to be at odds with some of the specific statutory implementations of copyright law. Specifcally, the DCMA (which isn't copyright law per se, but whatever) has mixed with the realities of technology to yield a situation that greatly extends the practical rights of copyright owners, and greatly diminishes the rights of consumers.
However... These are policy questions, and not legal questions. The copyright clause in the U.S. Constitution is vague--some would argue, deliberately so. It proposes a general justification for the Congress to implement certain types of IP laws in statues, but it *doesn't* try to specifically define the boundaries of what rights those laws should preserve for consumers. Really, this is how most of the Constitution works, although it is certainly more specific in some places than in others. Even the phrase "limited monopoly", which is all over the place in the legal literature on the subject, is something that emerges from interpretating the original words.
So I guess the only point I can make is that the "contract with the government" that you describe, which guarantees fair use rights to the public in exchange for a limited monopoly, is a matter of interpretation. I happen to believe that it's a sound one, so we probably agree in principle. But the Constitution and the law are not written as a contract--they're written as black-letter law. And as long as it's within reasonable interpretation of the Constitution and the text of statutory law, Congress basically gets to make the rules as they see fit. It may be bad policy, but it's how this works, legally.
If you want a great example of how this normally operates, check out the U.S.S.C. decision in the suit from last year about copyright extensions. (I'm too lazy to look up the cite for you, but it made Slashdot because Lawrence Lessig was on the briefs, and handled the oral arguments.) Lessig's argument (well put, I think) was that Congress was selling out the spirit of copyright even though it wasn't violating the letter of the Constitution. The Court's response was, basically, that it was a question of policy--50 years versus 75 years, I think--and not one of legal principle. Which, in turn, means that the Court doesn't have a mandate to overturn the law.
Legally, this leaves us with the same old option--write your representative and senators, and make your case to them. Unlikely, I know, but that's how the U.S. of A. works.
Whoa, there... Since when does this follow?
DRM that refuses to allow this is illegal, as it infringes on a legal right.
Copyright law allows limited copying for educational use, true. But that just means that the content producer can't use copyright law to forbid people from making class handouts. It may be possible to use some other means, and the copyright owner isn't violating the law.
For instance, I could just choose not to distribute my copyrighted material. That would keep people from making class handouts, because they never possess the original to make copies of, and it would be perfectly legal. Or, let's say that I have an independent contract with that professor that says "in exchange for me doing XXX, you agree never to use my copyrighted material in your class handouts". That's perfectly legal.
The ONLY legality question around DRM relates to laws like the DMCA and its fellows, which make it illegal to break encryption to make copies of copyrighted data, even if the subsequent copying would otherwise be legal (educational handouts, legit backup copies, whatever).
I don't know where you got your idea from.
Maybe I'm dense, but what, exactly, is the problem the poster is trying to solve?
Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.
Plus, what does it mean to use "all" of the RFC1918 IP ranges? Does that mean they're using every IP in every range, or every prefix in every range, or does it just mean that they don't understand subnetting?
I'm sure someone has made this point already, but technological advances have a way of finding their maximum profitable use, regardless of how the original inventors intended their innovations to be used. I think these botnets are a similar phenomenon.
Case in point: Thomas Edison originally conceived of the phonograph as a tool for dictation, teaching children from recorded lessons, and a few other specific apps. You know what he never, ever thought of? Recorded music. And yet, that is the killer app that made his invention a common household object and birthed one of the most successful commercial fields of the 20th century--the whole music industry as we know it wouldn't exist without the phonograph.
We saw the same thing with the Internet, when a bunch or DARPA eggheads (no offense, I love you guys) built an academic network that turned into what may prove to be the newest and most effective mass media tool in the history of the human race. I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the original research, or even anyone engineering TCP/IP networks in the 70s and 80s, imagined what would happen after 1990.
In the same fashion, botnets manage to apply the same basic technologies pioneered by Seti@home, distributed folding, and all of the other "beneficial" distributed computing projects that have wrung work out of the combination of 1) the popularity of the Internet, and 2) the unharnessed cycles, disk, and network I/O bandwidth of all those overpowered word processors around the world. And it's arguable that the economic productivity (at least to a few criminal types) of the botnets is overwhelmingly more than the cash made by all the originators of the concepts (yeah, I know, they're nonprofits, sheesh).
It's kind of a shame that the killer app of distributed ad-hoc networks is so generally harmful, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Get a firewall, install you patches, and hope to God that nobody targets you with a DoS attack.
The OP is just on crack, man (although you're right on about the Marshall Plan). He's arguing two mutually contradictory theses:
1) France has been an economic powerhouse in the second half of the 20th Century; AND
2) In France, commerce and business pursuits are reviled and seen as dirty.
How do those two add up, again? They don't--they contradict. And the OP is an idiot.
There has been some recent trending toward the thinking that recent human history (the past few millenia, that is) involves our genetic history. Most of it is cited in the article, though--it's a pretty scant number studies willing to even look in that direction. As the article notes, Western societies tend to be pretty sensitive to suggestions that genes predispose behavior or personality traits, because it has so recently been the justification for war, mass murder, and horrific social policies (eugenics).
BUT... the problem, from a scientific perspective, is that the more we learn about genetics the more evidence exists that there ARE behavioral and personality traits linked to our genes. Nobody's talking about master races or anything like that, but there's still a morally offensive (to some, at least) supposition there: Not all men are created equal.
This is a big moral problem for liberal Western democracies. Most European and North American states, and a good portion of nations in the rest of the world, are founded on the basis that every person is entitled to the same basic rights as the rest. The philosophical rhetoric that underlies these claims needs the postulate that all human beings are somewhat equal--nobody is so much better equipped, morally or intellectually or otherwise, that he can take away the political rights of self determination from other men.
Although I'm behind scientific inquiry 100%, and I don't think that these researchers should ever compromise their work for political purposes (well-intentioned or not!), I am a little worried about how this kind of work will affect the new few centuries of government and political thought.
The price of a good or service is set based on what the market will bear, not based on the costs of producing it.
Marx got this one way wrong. Value is defined by what you're willing to accept to part with it, and what I'm willing to part with the get it. When we're talking about mass-market items that take years to design, produce, and bring to market, this gets complicated.
Apple (or any other manufacturer) does all the math about expected costs and expected retail pricing way before the units hit the shelves. They have an equation: one side has the price they think they can sell the device for, times the number of units they think that can ship at that price (total revenue); the other side has the cost per unit times the number of units they expect to ship (costs), *plus* a big X-factor we'll call "profit".
Usually, shipping more units results in lower costs per unit, so there is probably some critical value for units shipped/sold where they will turn enough profit to hit the magic number. If you're good at playing around with equations and you understand your market enough (you know roughly how many people will buy it at any given price), you can try to maximize the profit component.
(This is the reason why they invented the spreadsheet, BTW--most businesses do this operation all the time.)
If they trust their assumptions in that equation, and the profit value looks to be positive enough to make the whole affair worth their time, they'll build it based on that equation: build this many, at that cost per unit, and sell them at some retail price.
The only influence that the costs of production have are in terms of how it shapes their profit: if the costs are higher than the revenues no matter how many units you ship, or if you can't possibly ship/sell enough units to bring the costs down enough, then you just won't build it at all.
Even if your assumptions are wrong, you still can't just raise the retail price to try to force it to work. Let's say that costs suddenly rise (the price of RAM spikes overnight): if you try to pass the costs on to the retail customer, less people will be willing to buy it at the higher price and you decrease your total profits. Also, if you're wrong about marketing and consumers aren't buying as many as you expect at a given retail price point, your only option is to lower the price--you've already spent the money to produce the units, so it's better to move them and take a loss than let them go unsold.
Capitalism is tough business, no doubt.
Sometimes for whatever reason, a nation might produce fewer skilled workers per capita in an industry than another nation does. But the fact is that a nation does need to protect its citizens, and an unmitigated deluge of skilled workers in an area from a nation with great capacity to produce them (perhaps they have a population that is 30 times larger) can be devastating to the local economy.
I like this post, because you actually display more sophisicated reasoning here than most of the talk-radio types that usually complain about this phenomenon. But I would like to point out something important.
The costs of producing something have an impact of the price of what's produced. If steel suddenly becomes more expensive, you can expect to pay more for refrigerators and cars--not quite as much more as the literal cost impact, but something approaching it. (There's some economic analysis that underlies this, but it's not important.) If the costs of production decrease, you have the opposite effect, where the cost of the product/service decreases.
Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.
So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).
Since IT services are a cost of doing other types of business, the costs of producing everything that relies on IT will tend to fall, too. Whether and how much depends on those particular markets and how much of their total costs are IT-related, but there will be an effect. In the end, the costs to end-consumers across the economy will go down. And it doesn't take an economist to realize that to the consumer, lower costs are the same thing as having more money.
Like you pointed out (and this is the part I liked), this can be pretty messy if it happens overnight, because the original IT workers who are losing jobs and seeing less in their paychecks will just be SOL. Costs might be lower for everybody, but it may be a net loss the the family depending on a sysadmin's (now decreased) income. The breadwinner might have to retrain or change jobs into a new field in order to get back his/her original income level.
But modern, 1st-world economies can absorb these changes decently well. As long as the percentage of IT workers in your work force isn't too high, and the change doesn't come too quickly, the retraining and job-switching will happen incrementally and people will have time to adjust. And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.
Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices. If you let the market do what it wants to do, you let the IT people take a hit in the short-medium term in exchange for greater prosperity in the economy as a whole.
Ooh, dammit--I forgot about that one! Good call. Assuming that the Curie temperature of the metal is less than the melting point (which is true for all ferromagnetic materials, I believe) that would happen first.
This is SOOO true, and so many UI designers forget about it. Household devices, especially, need to be brutally simple, or at least self-explanatory, or else they won't get used as often.
Case in point: I was at my new girlfriend's house, where her father has set up a wonderful entertainment center (CD/DVD, VCR, Big Ass HDTV, receiver, satellite tuner, PVR, etc.). There is an equally massive collection of remotes to go with this bunch. The GF knows how to operate most of it, because she lives there and has been on the learning curve for a while.
While she was making dinner, I tried to get things set up to watch a DVD. It took me so long to figure it out that she finished the food, brought it in, and grabbed the remotes from me and set it up herself. That's not just annoying, that's emasculating!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but iirc uranium won't dissolve in your stomach acids, much less the more benign fluids in your body, so if ingested in powder form, it would simply pass (relatively) harmlessly through your system.
It doesn't have to dissolve during ingestion to be harmful. Metal particulate will pass, but depending on the size of the particles, it may stick around a bit longer than your next bowel movement. The longer it stays, the more damage it can do. Likely causes of death would be organ failures in the GI tract as the tissues die.
While ingestion would be a slight risk in the situation I described above, I wouldn't be too worried about it. I think inhalation (lung tissue damage, plus it kills a lot of red/white blood cells) would be the worst, followed by the possibility of skin absorption.
Electromagnetic radiation is a propagating wave in space with electric and magnetic components.
I think you do not understand electromagnetic radiation as well as you think you do.
True, light waves are made up of oscillating magnetic and electric fields. But whether the material and the wave interact in the way that you suggest depends entirely on the material in question, and the wavelength of the EMR.
Light waves, for instance, interact with shiny metal things by either bouncing off them and scattering or being absorbed as thermal energy. Usually its some combination of the two. No matter how powerful of a light you shine on a piece of metal, you're not going to affect it magnetically. You may melt it, if the light is bright enough, or possibly induce an electric charge due to the photoelectric effect (depends on the wavelength and the metal), but you're not going to alter the magenetic domains that store data on a hard drive platter.
This may not have been a criticality event, although I'm not saying you're wrong.
Uranium is pyrophoric--it has a tendency to ignite and combust on contact with oxygen, which is one reason why depleted uranium is so useful in armor-piercing antitank weapons. This tendency is aggravated when uranium metal is granulated or powdered.
It's possible that an ordinary U+O combustion reaction (I don't remember the exact proportion, sorry) happened, and scattered radioactive particles through the air in the room. Anybody breathing in a significant amount of those, or absorbing them through the skin, could have potentially fatal side-effects.
Part of what makes me doubt that they were irradiated is that radiation exposure tends to lead to acute illness. You get exposed, and you get sick rather quickly (a few hours to a few weeks), and then you either die or you get better. There is an increased cancer risk after that, but its not so likely to kill you inside of two years--it often takes decades for the cancers to develop.
With radioactive particulate ingestion/inhalation, though, the effects could well be more like what you described--no immediate sickness, but the toll of the constant ionizing radiation on the body (bone marrow cell death, most likely) would eventually kill.
If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?
Seriously, dude, you sound like somebody who brags about how they don't own a television. The fact that you don't personally see the fun/benefit in a particular activity doesn't mean that it's worthless, or unmarketable, or that the rest of the human race won't care, either. This simple but subtle truth of the human condition gets hammered home to me every Superbowl Sunday, and it cannot be denied.
...I would not feel comfortable
Or are you so self-absorbed that you assume that your own biases and foibles are representative of the entire first-world population?
That is surely more comfortable than my couch! Why didn't I think of that.
So, is this yet another subway or public transportation thing in lieu of whatever misery you suffer on the way to and from work?
You didn't think of it because it didn't occur to you that it would be interesting/useful. So far, the market seems to be responding somewhat to the mobile video feed offerings by Verizon and other cellular providers, so maybe they're on to a demographic that doesn't happen to include you.
Again, don't you have anything to say here except to mouth off about your personal preferences?
First, there is no news that needs to be acquired in realtime...
Okay, here you just miss the point entirely. Maybe you should go back and read the GP to get a clue, and then come back again: We're talking about allowing random individuals to COLLECT original video and audio on-the-go, in an instant. (This is what the explosive decompression point referred to--go google it.) People already can, and do, get news feeds on their mobiles, and without the need for massive bandwidth.
Basically, think of the random videotaped moments that are collected by the news media from amateurs: The Rodney King beating, some of those police chases you see on Fox, wicked tornados, that sort of thing. Regardless of whether YOU feel that these amateur video captures have value, the rest of the world's behavior would suggest that they at least have some entertainment value, if nothing else. I think they may have even more.
Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
See #1
Again with the point-missing, you! There are a number of actual jobs that require, or benefit from, mobile wearable computer devices. Surgeons, for instance, use artificial vision overlays to view MRI, CAT, and ultrasound overlays in their field of view during surgery. There are other examples, most of them in industry. These devices tend to be proprietary, highly customized, and VERY expensive. A high-bandwidth cellphone could replace many of these functions with a much cheaper alternative.
If I could have a wireless, reliable net connection anywhere and only pay about $50 a month and be able to ditch my land line (~$30 a month) and my home internet (~$40 a month), yeah I would like to hook this thing up to my laptop.
Somehow, I don't believe I would be able to have my home PC downloading or serving stuff while my portable phone is with me though.
And now we're back to our original logical fallacy, "assuming that the world revolves around me" (it has a Latin name, but I forget it). YOU would only buy this thing if you could ditch your landline. But what about all the people buying EVDO cards for mobile cellular broadband already? Doesn't that kind of prove that there's already a market for this sort of thing, even at a lower bandwidth?
Hell, I can be the counterexample: If I could replace my landline broadband, AND get mobile broadband, I'd do it in a heartbeat at twice the price. Know why? Because my laptop goes everywhere I go. Maybe that's not true of you, but as we've already discussed, your own personal biases (and mine, true) mean exactly dick in the grand scheme of things.
Learn it and learn it well: The rest of the world does not think exactly like you, and they pay in cash money, too.
"Not useful" is some pretty strong language. You're just not being imaginative.
- Streaming high resolution video and high-quality audio to a cellphone might not seem useful on a tiny little LCD with a crappy speaker, but what about to a phone that has an external "eye-projector" thingamajig and a nice headphone jack? You could watch HDTV on your mobile, reveling in the privacy of the eye screen.
- Streaming similar audio/video FROM the cellphone, LIVE, to remote locations. Can you say "instant news feed"? I knew you could. (And you thought the guy with the pics from the explosive decompression on the airplane was cool?!)
- Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
And come on, don't you think that one of the primary intended uses IS to connect to a laptop? Sheesh, they let you post any old thing on Slashdot these days, don't they?
...although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct... ...an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear? ...nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears.
What in the heck is an "ice bear"?
doesn't the shape of the bullet also come into play?
Among other things, yes. The number of variables that influence the behavior of firearms and projectiles is just astounding--it's a HELL of a lot more than caliber, which is usually all the most people think of. There's a reason why ballistics research has its own scholarly journals.
Your point about velocity is taken, though, since delivering the same number of Joules in less time can make a difference in how well the impactee material holds up.
.44 magnum and the lead bullet flies through the torso and out the other side, you're not getting the most efficient impact possible, because the slug hasn't transferred all of its energy into the target (it still has enough KE left to fly out the exit wound). If the bullet were aluminum, for instance, it would have less mass and more velocity, AND it would probably stop in the target, thereby causing more trauma.
An often-overlooked point about ballistics. How quickly and efficiently the projectile's energy is transferred into the target is a huge determining factor in how damaging it is. If you shoot someone with a
Whether the armor can resist WP or DP has nothing to do with its chemical sensitivities. "Chemical proof"? What is that supposed to mean, anyway.
Depleted Uranium rounds have efficacy because uranium is extremely hard, strong, and dense. A DU round at a given velocity carries more kinetic energy than a projectile of the same volume and velocity that's made of steel or lead, so it hurts more when it hits. Since it's hard, it doesn't deform easily when it hits, and so more of the KE is transferred into the target more quickly, which increases the peak pressure of the impact substantially. And since we're talking about a strong, hard material, instead of something that's brittle, it also won't dissipate energy by shattering.
There is a secondary effect of DU projectiles where the intense pressure of impact converts into a lot of thermal energy very quickly, which raises the temperature at the impact site to a few thousand degrees. This causes the uranium at the leading edge of the projectile to vaporize and oxidize (which releases even more heat). The effect on steel armor plating is to punch a hole and spew plamsa-temperature, gaseous uranium oxide into the interior of the target, which is pretty much an instant kill (tank crew dies horribly, fuel and ammo explode, et cetera). Coincidentally, this is also why DU rounds are bad for the environment--all that vaporized uranium oxide gets scattered around the battlefield, which can be toxic.
BUT... the secondary effect of DU won't manifest unless you're talking about an extremely high velocity round (like an APFSDS antitank round), AND it's hitting thick steel armor. This would never occur in a situation involving personal body armor, because a projectile with that kind of velocity would tear right through the front and out the back without transferring much energy to the target. Unless you're wearing an inch-thick steel plate on your chest and happen to take an antitank round.
WP is a completely different story. WP is just an incendiary, like napalm or gasoline. Sure, it burns a lot hotter, but resisting its effects is just about resisting heat. It has nothing to do with chemical sensitivities.
OTOH, the Old Testament past Genesis is consistent with archeology.
Right, but why do you get to conveniently edit Genesis out when asking whether Christian, Jewish, and Muslim beliefs are demonstrably false?
And COME ON, do we really need to argue over whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ is demonstrably false? At the very least, it's not empirically proven--absent pure religious faith, what rational observer would accept it as historical fact? (Not to harsh on Christians, here--I'm just saying that if you want to believe it, it's purely a matter of faith in a God that can defy physics and biology. It can't be justified outside of that.)
Fact is, ALL supernatural beliefs are in this category, because by definition they defy everything that we can prove about the physical world. The only possible exception is the Platonic concept of God, which is so abstract that it avoids all interaction with the physical world. And even then, if you believe in a Platonic God, or some kind of Watchmaker God who set the Universe in motion and deigns not to interfere, you're still in the realm of things that are not provable by definition.
So, really, what's the point of distinguishing them?