Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science?
That's genius. You can just casually drop at an interview, "And, of course, I've been published in Nature and Science," and sound like a total BAMF. What a brilliant scam.
What you've described is certainly the model that is used at many schools, however it's not applicable everywhere. I've attended several schools with strong honor codes, and which allow students to self-schedule their exams within certain windows of time. At my current professional school, for example, we typically have a three day window in which to take an exam. We can show up at one of several exam locations at any point in time, day or night, within that window, sit down, take it, and leave. This is a very convenient system, and I greatly appreciate the flexibility that comes with it. However, when I walk out of the exam room, the exam most certainly does not become public information. This system absolutely depends on the rules of the exam extending outside of the exam room. If I could talk to one of the students who took the exam earlier than me about what was on it, that would absolutely be cheating.
I was going to post the exact same things. If getting information about previous exams is cheating, it's cheating. The people designing a test get to define the parameters of what's cheating and what's not. On some tests you can use a calculator. Some tests are open book. For others tests you aren't allowed to look at previous administrations.
Now, the question of what's legal is a separate issue. You can cheat on an exam without falling afoul of the law. Depending on the exam, you could follow the rules of the exam while breaking the law. The issue of cheating is exactly orthogonal to any questions of legality (excepting possibly exams with legal consequences - so your Step I and II exams might be a different story).
People have long assumed that vaccinia was cowpox, but modern biotechnology makes it clear that they are two different viruses. Intriguingly, no one knows where vaccinia came from. It's a total mystery.
This is a _terrible_ idea. If voters walk out of the voting booth with a receipt that says how they voted, you've just enabled everyone who might want to pressure, bribe, or influence voters. Domineering husbands will demand that their cowed wives vote the "right" way, and then offer proof of it when they get home. Employers will give bonuses to employees who proove they voted a certain way. Religious figures will deny services to people who voted "wrong". In areas with a poor police presence, gangs will demand to see your receipt and beat you up if you can't prove you voted the way they want.
It's a deliberate feature of our voting system that after you leave the voting booth, there is no way that anyone can gain knowledge of how you voted. This enables people to vote their concience. It makes it almost impossible to harass or reward someone based on how they voted. To change this would be a disaster.
You seem to be assuming that the only reason one would have for not having a computer at home is that they don't like computers, or doesn't like to program. This is incorrect.
I don't have a computer at home, nor a TV for that matter. The problem isn't that I dislike these things, it's actually quite the opposite. I find when I have access to a computer, all I will do is sit in front of the computer. Taking the larger view of my life, I don't want to sit in front of a computer all the time. A convenient way to do this is to not bother buying a computer for my home.
My not having a computer at home may not add balance to my life, per se, but it sure does make it easier for me to live a balanced life. It makes it harder for me to loose track of time and blow a whole evening. It makes it easier for me to do a wider variety of the stuff I'd like to do, instead of doing a whole lot of just one thing.
You seem to be claiming that no one who really likes technology or computers could possibly burn out on them. Consider that perhaps some people are burning out not because of the actual tech, but because of the blowhards like yourself that infest the field.
While the numbers do sound suprisingly large, they do not imply that every other business of Sony's was losing money.
Say I run a business with 4 arms. Arms 1, 2, and 3 makes $1,000 this year. Arm 4 looses $2,000. My net profit is $1,000. This means it is accurate to say that Arm 1 made %100 of my profit. Nonetheless, most of the arms of my business are making money.
All it takes is for them to write off a bunch of loses at some point for this to be feasible. I'm not too familiar with Sony's business, but it wouldn't suprise me if, say, they wrote off a bunch of loses because of overpriced aquisitions they made during the tech boom that subsequenty dropped in value. If this write-off was as big as their profits from all non-PS businesses, that would make the quoted figure correct.
The astronomers said that an Earthlike planet _could_ survive in an orbit between the two large ones. Given a choice between your guess that it would get ripped to shreds, and the opinions of professional astronomers who've studied this specific solar system, and concluded that an Earthlike planet could be there, I'm going to side with the astronomers.
Your information is out of date. If you're going to be pedantic and correct people on stupid trivia, at least get it right. The British government officially adopted the US meanings for million and billion in 1974. That's right, 1974, almost 30 years ago. Now, I'm willing to cut you some slack if you're at least 50 years old, as it might then be understandable for you to have such ludicrously dated info. However, as I suspect you are not 50, I think you should stop passing on random factoids with no actual verification of their correctness.
Quick use of google reveals many US based web sites that vector this dated information. All of the UK based web sites I can find that use "million" and "billion" use them with the standard meanings of 10^6 and 10^9 respectively. See http://www.zoo.co.uk/~z0001246/visnum.html for example.
The article actually doesn't really hint that 'c' is changing, which is good, because it's not clear what would be meant by that. The article says that several physicists have previously wondered if it could change. It then goes on to quote a modern physicist as saying that they were wrong.
I think c is best thought of as a man made constant. Just as I might say that there are 2.54 centimetres per inch, I can say that there are ~3*10^8 metres per second. Neither of these really contains any information about the universe outside of our perception of it. It is simply a statement of how one one system of measurement compares to another. 2.54 centimetres per second evaluates to unity (the number 1, with no units) if you actually evaluate it. Likewise, physicists commonly use unity as the speed of light, because in a very meaningful way, it is.
If I suddenly magically increased c by 10%, that would be indisinguishable from stretching the universe by 10% in every spacial direction. Consider that the speed of light it essentially unity, and that expressing it otherwise is really more a statement of our systems of measurement that we use than of physical reality. This makes it seem silly to say that I have magically increased c by 10% and makes it seem more reasonable to say that I have stretched the universe by 10% in every direction.
This is an issue anytime evidence is aquired from someone who isn't law enforcement. This doesn't totally invalidate the evidence. It does, as you note, give the defense a new argument, namely that the ISP may have fabricated the evidence.
However, for most ISPs and most potential cases, I think the police would likely conclude that this is such a weak defense that they are better off spending the manpower in other places, and not having an officer stand around and watch the search. If there is some reason to suspect the ISP of being dishonest, they can send someone to supervise. I don't see why it shouldn't be at their discretion to decide if it's needed or not.
What the hell? If I have some information, or access to information, that might help in solving a crime, and I give said information to the police, the fact that I, myself, am not a law enforcement officer is more or less irrelevant.
The police get information from private citizens all the time. They ask if you saw someone in a certain place at a certain time. They ask an airline about whether or not a suspect was on a plane, or at a conference. They ask employers if an employee has a record of acting strangely or violently. They ask banks if someone had an unusually large deposit. They ask phone companies for records of phone calls to or from a given number.
All of this information is provided by non law enforcement. I don't think this invalidates any of it.
The defendant in the case subsequently sought to have that evidence suppressed, arguing that his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure was violated because it was conducted by civilians.
This is just stupid. If the ISP wants to cooperate with law enforcement, they could do so even without a search warrant. Once the search warrant has been drawn up, if the ISP wants to cooperate in the manner most convenient for them, and the law enforcement folks agree, there's no problem. I mean, given that the ISP is legally required to cough up the info, and given that they don't even really want to put up a fight about it, what does it matter whether or not some police officer is standing there scratching his ass while someone pulls up the data? It doesn't matter at all.
Things might be different if there was a legal concept of strong privacy between an ISP and its customers, as with Attorney-Client Privilege, confidential medical info, or communications between spouses. The fact is that there isn't, though.
This is something that people constantly point out here on Slashdot, so here it goes again. The courts have found the Microsoft is a monopoly. This places them under extra obligations that other businesses are not under. Amongst other things, it limits how they are allowed to compete. Trying to crush a competitor by throwing around their monopoly power is totally different than claiming that your product is better than the product of one of your competitors.
One of the things they talk about here is dragging their feet with hardware companies that support Linux, and giving more favorable deals to those who don't. I'd say that's an abuse of monopoly power.
Keep in mind that the site is designed to handle, say, our civilization collapsing.
If you want to make sure people don't forget that we put the shit there, Nevada isn't a good site. There aren't all that many people in Nevada, and the people that are there would probably mostly die and/or leave if civiliation (and therefor the ability to provide them with water) collapsed. Walla, no one is still in the area, and everyone else has more important shit to do than tell their kids about some nuclear waste site they heard about once, which is a couple thousand miles away.
If you want actual people to remember what the deal is with the site, you need to put it somewhere where people won't forget about it. This means putting it somewhere that is almost guaranteed to continue to have some sort of a population for a long time, and making sure that they know what's up. I'd recommend putting it in some big population centre that will probably remain populated even if they loose the ability to pump in water from elsewhere, or if the sea levels rise a couple hundred feet. I don't know where this place is. Maybe Denver, I have no idea.
Then, you'd want to make sure that everyone knew what was up with the place as long as civilization continues. Make it a museum. Get kids to go on field trips there. Once civilization does collapse, the native population will be thoroughly familiar with the site, and will be likely to pass this knowledge on through the generations.
Another recommendation I would make is to design the site to kill (via radiation poisoning) anyone who manages to break in past some certain point. Idealy, you could design it so that there is ~0 radiation that makes it to the surface, but so that once you entered the bad areas, the radiation would suddenly kick in at a level that causes dramatic and visible radiation sickness within a matter of an hour or so. Design the site so that it will take much more than an hour for any reasonable group of people to chisel the stuff out of the walls.
This means that, while a few curious explorers will die every once in a while, the stuff will not be brought to the surface by some idiot, and then irradiate everyone in the area. Ultimately, this is really what we are trying to prevent after all. And it's probably for the best if every couple of years a couple explorers stumble out, sick as a dog, and then die. That should keep all right-thinking people from entertaining notions of organizing a serious expedition to go inside and bring anything out.
Most existing Earth niches would already be filled by organisms that are well adapted to them. However, the various niches that consist of living inside of some organism, and using it as a source of food are different. Here, being well suited to the niche largely consists not so much of any trait the bacteria in question has, but more in those traits that the host does not have - namely some way of fighting off the bacteria.
As such, a hypothetical Martian bacteria that was simply able to survive inside of a person would likely be at a great advantage compared to Earth bacteria. Again, this is not because of the traits that it has adapted to deal with its enviornment (which are few to non-existent), but those traits that its enviornment has not adapted to deal with it.
Granted, it seems unlikely a Martian bacteria would be capable of living inside of a human, or almost any other Earth life form, for that matter. But if one of them can, it will be at an immense advantage over other Earth bacteria.
A lot of Indians were killed by the various diseases Europeans brought to the New World with them. But the problem wasn't just that the Indians were completely unadapted to the bacteria.
The bacteria were designed to infect people. The bacteria were designed to infect even people whose immune systems were highly tuned to fight them off. When these bacteria found a group of people who had no specific defenses, they ran rough shod over the whole continent.
There's no reason to expect that any hypothetical Martian bacteria will be quite that virulent if they infected Earth creatures. One half of the equation would be the same - the Earth stuff would not be adapted to deal with the Martian bacteria. But the other side of the equation is very different from the plagues in the New World - the Martian bacteria would not be highly tuned to screw over Earth creatures.
The fact that bacteria on Earth have evolved to deal with Earth organisms is true. But evolution is a two way street - us large Earth organisms have evolved to deal with Earth bacteria just as much as they've evolved to us.
Any hypothetical Mars bacteria, then, will be at a disadvantage insofar as they won't be adapted specifically to screw over Earth plants and animals. This means it's unlikely that they'll be doing anything really complex, like hijacking our own cellular systems to help them reproduce, or disguising themselves as something they're not. But they can still reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, consume nutrients (especially the super-rich nutrients you tend to find in a large plant or animal), and spit out lots of potentially toxic waste material. This can be plently deadly, especially if your immune system doesn't even notice the bacteria in question because it is totally unlike anything it's designed to deal with.
It probably _is_ unlikely that we'll get screwed over by some errant Martian microbe. But if it does happen, it could be totally catastrophic. So it behooves us to be careful, don't you think?
Are you serious? If the freshman in question can actually be reasonably considered to have cheated, this would be ridiculous. The penalty for cheating needs to be more than not granting credit for the portion that was cheated upon. Otherwise, in many situations, you provide students with an incentive to cheat.
Say a student is in a position where they have no possibility of turning in a decent assignment on their own, either because they ran out of time, they're stupid or drunk, or just plain don't know the material. If by turning in a copied assignment they stand to get credit for the whole thing, but will at worst fail to get credit for that one assignment (or piece of an assignment), they will have an incentive to cheat.
One particular use of oil I suspect isn't going away any time soon is synthesizing organic compounds. Any organic compound (in the sense of containing carbon, not in the sense of being grown on a farm that doesn't use pesticides) comes from either biomass or oil. And oil is generally a lot easier to use, unless you are synthesizing something really similar in structure to what you get out of the biomass.
When you think of all of the new plastics (remember the quote from The Graduate) and drugs and everything else organic that has yet to be invented, it's a crying shame to be wasting all this oil by burning it shuttling SUVs back and forth on the highways.
So I don't doubt that oil use wouldn't drop off to zero, even if we did have alternate energy source. In fact, it's probably better that we move towards this situation sooner rather than later.
Re:Of all the billions of stars to choose...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
One in a billion? Where did you get that from? Sounds like you're even more full of hot air than you are claiming these astrophysicists are.
It seems quite reasonable that they should be able to get an approximate age for the star. The size of the expanding cloud of debris around it, for one, should allow them to make a very good estimate. So I would imagine they used this, or some other method, to determine that the supernova happened about 800 years ago. So if they know the approximate age of the star, and what part of the sky it's in, and they know that it's close enough to the Earth that it's supernova would have been visible to everyone, and they know that there was one supernova witnessed by people on Earth at that time in that part of the sky, you still think the probability is 1 in a billion?
Hahah, I'd like you to re-read that statement. It's a logically impossible.
Perhaps I should have put parentheses in. "... than all those people who have (lived and died) in the history of the earth". Not all of the people who have lived plus all of the people who have died. And I don't think it takes much of a sea level rise to accomplish this.
As far as changing policy before firm conclusions are reached, I think you would do well to consider the expected return. Say scientists are studying something, and they have some preliminary results saying that if we continue on our current course of action, there's a 50% chance something catastrophic will happen, but they won't be certain until they've done another 20 years of study, by which time said catastrophe might be too late to avert. Do you insist on waiting for the final, conculsive results?
Well, that depends on the cost of changing the course of action. If it's less than half of the cost of the catastrophe, we should probably start making changes now.
I'm not saying that this is the real situation, just that your stance on conclusivity of studies probably isn't as flexible as it ought to be.
When you complain that maybe we aren't causing global warming, you may have a point. However, if global warming is happening in a serious way, it is of vital importance that we try to figure out as much about it as possible, regardless of who or what is responsible.
Major global warming could impact our lives in so many catastrophic ways. I won't even bother going into them all here, but I think it suffices to say that more people could be displaced from their homes than all of the people who have lived and died in the entire history of the world.
Now, don't you think it is important to study something that could have this effect? To try to figure out whether or not it's happening, and if so, how quickly, and how far it's likely to go? The world may not revolve around humans, but we do have to live in the world, and as such it behooves us to figure out what is happening to us, even if it is natural, or part of some giant cycle that has been going on for eons.
I think it's worth going into more detail on these, because I suspect most people don't know much about them. I won't try to explain Shor's factoring algorithm, because I never really managed to get it all in my head at once. It might have helped if I wasn't trying to carry 4 technical classes on top of my brutal physics lab when I was trying to understand it.
Grover's search algorithm, though, I remember quite well. It's beautiful in its simplicity and elegance (which is a large part of why I still remember it), yet quite powerful. Here's what it does:
We have some function F returns 1 on exactly one out of its n inputs. Grover's search algorithm lets us find the value x such that F(x) = 1, and it lets us do that in order sqrt(n) time. Classically you can't do any better than just searching through the space of inputs, trying each one, which takes order n time.
Damn.
So, having covered the fact that it is mighty powerful, I'll say a little about how it works. First, we construct an input x which is a superposition of all possible inputs. In particular, this means it is fractionally 1/n the right answer, but is (n-1)/n some wrong answer. We pump this x through f (and a few other operations) and then combine the output with the input. Each wrong answer suffers a little bit of destructive interference, while the right answer undergoes constructive interference. Rather, rinse, repeat, and after a number of steps that goes like sqrt(n), all of the wrong answers have completely cancelled out, and all that is left is the right answer!
Yeah, so I know this is hard to get across in this kind of short text dohickey, but this is such a cool algorithm, I had to try anyway. My success... well, I guess that depends on how cool you think the Grover algorithm is now.
I don't know what people you live with, but I think "bugs" in humans have been visible for quite some time now. Think of all of the phobias that people suffer from. Think about all of the times that you've said, "Why'd I do that, I should've known better." Just turn on your TV and watch the Jerry Springer show. I mean, come _on_, we're so full of bugs it's ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science?
That's genius. You can just casually drop at an interview, "And, of course, I've been published in Nature and Science," and sound like a total BAMF. What a brilliant scam.
What you've described is certainly the model that is used at many schools, however it's not applicable everywhere. I've attended several schools with strong honor codes, and which allow students to self-schedule their exams within certain windows of time. At my current professional school, for example, we typically have a three day window in which to take an exam. We can show up at one of several exam locations at any point in time, day or night, within that window, sit down, take it, and leave. This is a very convenient system, and I greatly appreciate the flexibility that comes with it. However, when I walk out of the exam room, the exam most certainly does not become public information. This system absolutely depends on the rules of the exam extending outside of the exam room. If I could talk to one of the students who took the exam earlier than me about what was on it, that would absolutely be cheating.
I was going to post the exact same things. If getting information about previous exams is cheating, it's cheating. The people designing a test get to define the parameters of what's cheating and what's not. On some tests you can use a calculator. Some tests are open book. For others tests you aren't allowed to look at previous administrations.
Now, the question of what's legal is a separate issue. You can cheat on an exam without falling afoul of the law. Depending on the exam, you could follow the rules of the exam while breaking the law. The issue of cheating is exactly orthogonal to any questions of legality (excepting possibly exams with legal consequences - so your Step I and II exams might be a different story).
People have long assumed that vaccinia was cowpox, but modern biotechnology makes it clear that they are two different viruses. Intriguingly, no one knows where vaccinia came from. It's a total mystery.
This is a _terrible_ idea. If voters walk out of the voting booth with a receipt that says how they voted, you've just enabled everyone who might want to pressure, bribe, or influence voters. Domineering husbands will demand that their cowed wives vote the "right" way, and then offer proof of it when they get home. Employers will give bonuses to employees who proove they voted a certain way. Religious figures will deny services to people who voted "wrong". In areas with a poor police presence, gangs will demand to see your receipt and beat you up if you can't prove you voted the way they want.
It's a deliberate feature of our voting system that after you leave the voting booth, there is no way that anyone can gain knowledge of how you voted. This enables people to vote their concience. It makes it almost impossible to harass or reward someone based on how they voted. To change this would be a disaster.
You seem to be assuming that the only reason one would have for not having a computer at home is that they don't like computers, or doesn't like to program. This is incorrect.
I don't have a computer at home, nor a TV for that matter. The problem isn't that I dislike these things, it's actually quite the opposite. I find when I have access to a computer, all I will do is sit in front of the computer. Taking the larger view of my life, I don't want to sit in front of a computer all the time. A convenient way to do this is to not bother buying a computer for my home.
My not having a computer at home may not add balance to my life, per se, but it sure does make it easier for me to live a balanced life. It makes it harder for me to loose track of time and blow a whole evening. It makes it easier for me to do a wider variety of the stuff I'd like to do, instead of doing a whole lot of just one thing.
You seem to be claiming that no one who really likes technology or computers could possibly burn out on them. Consider that perhaps some people are burning out not because of the actual tech, but because of the blowhards like yourself that infest the field.
While the numbers do sound suprisingly large, they do not imply that every other business of Sony's was losing money.
Say I run a business with 4 arms. Arms 1, 2, and 3 makes $1,000 this year. Arm 4 looses $2,000. My net profit is $1,000. This means it is accurate to say that Arm 1 made %100 of my profit. Nonetheless, most of the arms of my business are making money.
All it takes is for them to write off a bunch of loses at some point for this to be feasible. I'm not too familiar with Sony's business, but it wouldn't suprise me if, say, they wrote off a bunch of loses because of overpriced aquisitions they made during the tech boom that subsequenty dropped in value. If this write-off was as big as their profits from all non-PS businesses, that would make the quoted figure correct.
The astronomers said that an Earthlike planet _could_ survive in an orbit between the two large ones. Given a choice between your guess that it would get ripped to shreds, and the opinions of professional astronomers who've studied this specific solar system, and concluded that an Earthlike planet could be there, I'm going to side with the astronomers.
Your information is out of date. If you're going to be pedantic and correct people on stupid trivia, at least get it right. The British government officially adopted the US meanings for million and billion in 1974. That's right, 1974, almost 30 years ago. Now, I'm willing to cut you some slack if you're at least 50 years old, as it might then be understandable for you to have such ludicrously dated info. However, as I suspect you are not 50, I think you should stop passing on random factoids with no actual verification of their correctness.
Quick use of google reveals many US based web sites that vector this dated information. All of the UK based web sites I can find that use "million" and "billion" use them with the standard meanings of 10^6 and 10^9 respectively. See http://www.zoo.co.uk/~z0001246/visnum.html for example.
The article actually doesn't really hint that 'c' is changing, which is good, because it's not clear what would be meant by that. The article says that several physicists have previously wondered if it could change. It then goes on to quote a modern physicist as saying that they were wrong.
I think c is best thought of as a man made constant. Just as I might say that there are 2.54 centimetres per inch, I can say that there are ~3*10^8 metres per second. Neither of these really contains any information about the universe outside of our perception of it. It is simply a statement of how one one system of measurement compares to another. 2.54 centimetres per second evaluates to unity (the number 1, with no units) if you actually evaluate it. Likewise, physicists commonly use unity as the speed of light, because in a very meaningful way, it is.
If I suddenly magically increased c by 10%, that would be indisinguishable from stretching the universe by 10% in every spacial direction. Consider that the speed of light it essentially unity, and that expressing it otherwise is really more a statement of our systems of measurement that we use than of physical reality. This makes it seem silly to say that I have magically increased c by 10% and makes it seem more reasonable to say that I have stretched the universe by 10% in every direction.
This is an issue anytime evidence is aquired from someone who isn't law enforcement. This doesn't totally invalidate the evidence. It does, as you note, give the defense a new argument, namely that the ISP may have fabricated the evidence.
However, for most ISPs and most potential cases, I think the police would likely conclude that this is such a weak defense that they are better off spending the manpower in other places, and not having an officer stand around and watch the search. If there is some reason to suspect the ISP of being dishonest, they can send someone to supervise. I don't see why it shouldn't be at their discretion to decide if it's needed or not.
What the hell? If I have some information, or access to information, that might help in solving a crime, and I give said information to the police, the fact that I, myself, am not a law enforcement officer is more or less irrelevant.
The police get information from private citizens all the time. They ask if you saw someone in a certain place at a certain time. They ask an airline about whether or not a suspect was on a plane, or at a conference. They ask employers if an employee has a record of acting strangely or violently. They ask banks if someone had an unusually large deposit. They ask phone companies for records of phone calls to or from a given number.
All of this information is provided by non law enforcement. I don't think this invalidates any of it.
This is just stupid. If the ISP wants to cooperate with law enforcement, they could do so even without a search warrant. Once the search warrant has been drawn up, if the ISP wants to cooperate in the manner most convenient for them, and the law enforcement folks agree, there's no problem. I mean, given that the ISP is legally required to cough up the info, and given that they don't even really want to put up a fight about it, what does it matter whether or not some police officer is standing there scratching his ass while someone pulls up the data? It doesn't matter at all.
Things might be different if there was a legal concept of strong privacy between an ISP and its customers, as with Attorney-Client Privilege, confidential medical info, or communications between spouses. The fact is that there isn't, though.
This is something that people constantly point out here on Slashdot, so here it goes again. The courts have found the Microsoft is a monopoly. This places them under extra obligations that other businesses are not under. Amongst other things, it limits how they are allowed to compete. Trying to crush a competitor by throwing around their monopoly power is totally different than claiming that your product is better than the product of one of your competitors.
One of the things they talk about here is dragging their feet with hardware companies that support Linux, and giving more favorable deals to those who don't. I'd say that's an abuse of monopoly power.
Keep in mind that the site is designed to handle, say, our civilization collapsing.
If you want to make sure people don't forget that we put the shit there, Nevada isn't a good site. There aren't all that many people in Nevada, and the people that are there would probably mostly die and/or leave if civiliation (and therefor the ability to provide them with water) collapsed. Walla, no one is still in the area, and everyone else has more important shit to do than tell their kids about some nuclear waste site they heard about once, which is a couple thousand miles away.
If you want actual people to remember what the deal is with the site, you need to put it somewhere where people won't forget about it. This means putting it somewhere that is almost guaranteed to continue to have some sort of a population for a long time, and making sure that they know what's up. I'd recommend putting it in some big population centre that will probably remain populated even if they loose the ability to pump in water from elsewhere, or if the sea levels rise a couple hundred feet. I don't know where this place is. Maybe Denver, I have no idea.
Then, you'd want to make sure that everyone knew what was up with the place as long as civilization continues. Make it a museum. Get kids to go on field trips there. Once civilization does collapse, the native population will be thoroughly familiar with the site, and will be likely to pass this knowledge on through the generations.
Another recommendation I would make is to design the site to kill (via radiation poisoning) anyone who manages to break in past some certain point. Idealy, you could design it so that there is ~0 radiation that makes it to the surface, but so that once you entered the bad areas, the radiation would suddenly kick in at a level that causes dramatic and visible radiation sickness within a matter of an hour or so. Design the site so that it will take much more than an hour for any reasonable group of people to chisel the stuff out of the walls.
This means that, while a few curious explorers will die every once in a while, the stuff will not be brought to the surface by some idiot, and then irradiate everyone in the area. Ultimately, this is really what we are trying to prevent after all. And it's probably for the best if every couple of years a couple explorers stumble out, sick as a dog, and then die. That should keep all right-thinking people from entertaining notions of organizing a serious expedition to go inside and bring anything out.
Most existing Earth niches would already be filled by organisms that are well adapted to them. However, the various niches that consist of living inside of some organism, and using it as a source of food are different. Here, being well suited to the niche largely consists not so much of any trait the bacteria in question has, but more in those traits that the host does not have - namely some way of fighting off the bacteria.
As such, a hypothetical Martian bacteria that was simply able to survive inside of a person would likely be at a great advantage compared to Earth bacteria. Again, this is not because of the traits that it has adapted to deal with its enviornment (which are few to non-existent), but those traits that its enviornment has not adapted to deal with it.
Granted, it seems unlikely a Martian bacteria would be capable of living inside of a human, or almost any other Earth life form, for that matter. But if one of them can, it will be at an immense advantage over other Earth bacteria.
A lot of Indians were killed by the various diseases Europeans brought to the New World with them. But the problem wasn't just that the Indians were completely unadapted to the bacteria.
The bacteria were designed to infect people. The bacteria were designed to infect even people whose immune systems were highly tuned to fight them off. When these bacteria found a group of people who had no specific defenses, they ran rough shod over the whole continent.
There's no reason to expect that any hypothetical Martian bacteria will be quite that virulent if they infected Earth creatures. One half of the equation would be the same - the Earth stuff would not be adapted to deal with the Martian bacteria. But the other side of the equation is very different from the plagues in the New World - the Martian bacteria would not be highly tuned to screw over Earth creatures.
The fact that bacteria on Earth have evolved to deal with Earth organisms is true. But evolution is a two way street - us large Earth organisms have evolved to deal with Earth bacteria just as much as they've evolved to us.
Any hypothetical Mars bacteria, then, will be at a disadvantage insofar as they won't be adapted specifically to screw over Earth plants and animals. This means it's unlikely that they'll be doing anything really complex, like hijacking our own cellular systems to help them reproduce, or disguising themselves as something they're not. But they can still reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, consume nutrients (especially the super-rich nutrients you tend to find in a large plant or animal), and spit out lots of potentially toxic waste material. This can be plently deadly, especially if your immune system doesn't even notice the bacteria in question because it is totally unlike anything it's designed to deal with.
It probably _is_ unlikely that we'll get screwed over by some errant Martian microbe. But if it does happen, it could be totally catastrophic. So it behooves us to be careful, don't you think?
Are you serious? If the freshman in question can actually be reasonably considered to have cheated, this would be ridiculous. The penalty for cheating needs to be more than not granting credit for the portion that was cheated upon. Otherwise, in many situations, you provide students with an incentive to cheat.
Say a student is in a position where they have no possibility of turning in a decent assignment on their own, either because they ran out of time, they're stupid or drunk, or just plain don't know the material. If by turning in a copied assignment they stand to get credit for the whole thing, but will at worst fail to get credit for that one assignment (or piece of an assignment), they will have an incentive to cheat.
One particular use of oil I suspect isn't going away any time soon is synthesizing organic compounds. Any organic compound (in the sense of containing carbon, not in the sense of being grown on a farm that doesn't use pesticides) comes from either biomass or oil. And oil is generally a lot easier to use, unless you are synthesizing something really similar in structure to what you get out of the biomass.
When you think of all of the new plastics (remember the quote from The Graduate) and drugs and everything else organic that has yet to be invented, it's a crying shame to be wasting all this oil by burning it shuttling SUVs back and forth on the highways.
So I don't doubt that oil use wouldn't drop off to zero, even if we did have alternate energy source. In fact, it's probably better that we move towards this situation sooner rather than later.
One in a billion? Where did you get that from? Sounds like you're even more full of hot air than you are claiming these astrophysicists are.
It seems quite reasonable that they should be able to get an approximate age for the star. The size of the expanding cloud of debris around it, for one, should allow them to make a very good estimate. So I would imagine they used this, or some other method, to determine that the supernova happened about 800 years ago. So if they know the approximate age of the star, and what part of the sky it's in, and they know that it's close enough to the Earth that it's supernova would have been visible to everyone, and they know that there was one supernova witnessed by people on Earth at that time in that part of the sky, you still think the probability is 1 in a billion?
Hahah, I'd like you to re-read that statement. It's a logically impossible.
Perhaps I should have put parentheses in. "... than all those people who have (lived and died) in the history of the earth". Not all of the people who have lived plus all of the people who have died. And I don't think it takes much of a sea level rise to accomplish this.
As far as changing policy before firm conclusions are reached, I think you would do well to consider the expected return. Say scientists are studying something, and they have some preliminary results saying that if we continue on our current course of action, there's a 50% chance something catastrophic will happen, but they won't be certain until they've done another 20 years of study, by which time said catastrophe might be too late to avert. Do you insist on waiting for the final, conculsive results?
Well, that depends on the cost of changing the course of action. If it's less than half of the cost of the catastrophe, we should probably start making changes now.
I'm not saying that this is the real situation, just that your stance on conclusivity of studies probably isn't as flexible as it ought to be.
When you complain that maybe we aren't causing global warming, you may have a point. However, if global warming is happening in a serious way, it is of vital importance that we try to figure out as much about it as possible, regardless of who or what is responsible.
Major global warming could impact our lives in so many catastrophic ways. I won't even bother going into them all here, but I think it suffices to say that more people could be displaced from their homes than all of the people who have lived and died in the entire history of the world.
Now, don't you think it is important to study something that could have this effect? To try to figure out whether or not it's happening, and if so, how quickly, and how far it's likely to go? The world may not revolve around humans, but we do have to live in the world, and as such it behooves us to figure out what is happening to us, even if it is natural, or part of some giant cycle that has been going on for eons.
I think it's worth going into more detail on these, because I suspect most people don't know much about them. I won't try to explain Shor's factoring algorithm, because I never really managed to get it all in my head at once. It might have helped if I wasn't trying to carry 4 technical classes on top of my brutal physics lab when I was trying to understand it.
Grover's search algorithm, though, I remember quite well. It's beautiful in its simplicity and elegance (which is a large part of why I still remember it), yet quite powerful. Here's what it does:
We have some function F returns 1 on exactly one out of its n inputs. Grover's search algorithm lets us find the value x such that F(x) = 1, and it lets us do that in order sqrt(n) time. Classically you can't do any better than just searching through the space of inputs, trying each one, which takes order n time.
Damn.
So, having covered the fact that it is mighty powerful, I'll say a little about how it works. First, we construct an input x which is a superposition of all possible inputs. In particular, this means it is fractionally 1/n the right answer, but is (n-1)/n some wrong answer. We pump this x through f (and a few other operations) and then combine the output with the input. Each wrong answer suffers a little bit of destructive interference, while the right answer undergoes constructive interference. Rather, rinse, repeat, and after a number of steps that goes like sqrt(n), all of the wrong answers have completely cancelled out, and all that is left is the right answer!
Yeah, so I know this is hard to get across in this kind of short text dohickey, but this is such a cool algorithm, I had to try anyway. My success... well, I guess that depends on how cool you think the Grover algorithm is now.
I don't know what people you live with, but I think "bugs" in humans have been visible for quite some time now. Think of all of the phobias that people suffer from. Think about all of the times that you've said, "Why'd I do that, I should've known better." Just turn on your TV and watch the Jerry Springer show. I mean, come _on_, we're so full of bugs it's ridiculous.