We have very stiff laws that punish people who threaten the health of our young people by selling them alcohol, tobacco, or pornography...
One of these things is not like the others.
Go to any hospital and you will find plenty of people who have been put there by alcohol and tobacco. But I challenge you to find a single hospital where more than 1% of the beds are occupied by people who were put there by pornography.
Which leads to the question: what definition of "health" are you using such that something that puts virtually no one in hospital is in the same category for you as two things that, along with obesity and failure to wear a seatbelt, are the strongest contenders for membership in the four horse-people of the modern apocalypse?
What makes everyone think that the NSA is stupid enough to limit their search to that specific pattern?
The problem is that the NSA thinks this stupid pattern is even very slightly specific to terrorists. I have never seen any suggested "pattern indicative of potential terrorist activity" that I can't imagine far being commonly caused by innocent reasons. Every non-empirically-validated pattern will have a huge false-positive rate. In fact there is no evidence at all that any pattern-finding methodology will have a false postive rate of less than 99%. That means that for every genuinely suspect individual, hundreds of innocent Americans will be targeted and harrassed because they fit some spook's idea of a "suspected terrorist pattern."
As to your final question, perhaps there haven't been any more terrorist attacks in the U.S. because the terrorist threat is really rather low. Terrorism has never managed to kill a tenth as many people as automobiles, even in the peak years like 2001. Terrorist activity just isn't that much of a threat, and the response to it is vastly disproportionate.
The Brazillian guy in London who was killed because he was mistaken for a terrorist suspect is just one of the many martyrs to people's inability to appreciate that the threat from terrorism is just not that high.
In the mid-90s, I took a course in Introduction to International Terrorism. The professor's master's thesis was on terrorist funding resources in the United States. He told us the story of how his thesis came together and the argument he got into with his advisor.
Well I heard it from some guy that...
That is all your argument amounts to without the name of the prof and in the best case the title of the thesis. What you're saying may well be true, but if it is you need to provide some substantive citation, not just your recollection of a story told in a course a decade ago.
But it can identify people with large extended families who have relatives overseas and get an important call about a death in the family, notify all their North American relatives, and then have government agents show up on their door.
Every single pattern-based terrorist screening method I have heard about sounds like something dreamed up in an air-conditioned office by some dork who never gets out very much and thinks all people are basically like him (and anyone who isn't ought to be subject to government investigation.)
Hanging around public buildings taking pictures? Must be a terrorist. As opposed to say, just interested in taking pictures of public buildings because modern-day monumental architecture happens to turn you on.
Want to learn to fly a 747 but don't have any interest in a career as a pilot? Must be a terrorist. Unless you happen to be fascinated by aircraft and think that a few weeks of flight school would give you bragging rights to die for at your local RC club.
Like to pay with cash, even for purchases in the thousands like furniture or maybe a car? Must be a terrorist. Or maybe you don't qualify for a chequing account, or are just a little bit paranoid, or just don't fucking feel like doing anything else.
These sorts of unvalidated, non-empirical, "feels like the right thing to me", ad hoc, imaginary "patterns of suspicious activity" are a major threat to freedom because they demonize and may even criminalize deviancy from the norm. It is a characteristic of unfree societies that deviancy from the norm is not just looked at asscance by the majority of the population, but is viewed as grounds for suspicion of the most heinious acts.
Furthermore, such datamining solutions are not able to identify terrorists reliably even when they have all kinds of intelligence data entered into them. A report on the chilling-named MATRIX system indicates that the system was only able to identify 5 of the original 9/11 hijackers in a retrospective test, a 75% false negative rate, and it further identifed 120,000 other Americans who had a "high terrorism factor." Supposedly "scores of arrests" resulted from that list, although no one knows what the arrests were for or how many of those were sucessfully prosecuted. The odds are most of them were for drug possession charges that were laid as a result of the increased scrutiny certain individuals got by virtue of wholey baseless suspicions of terrorism. But let us grant 60 successful prosecutions for terrorist-related activities. That's a false positive rate of over 99.9%
And that was when the system was loaded with specific intelligence data, which is no longer the case.
Given the complete failure of such systems to detect terrorists in retrospective studies, and the horrifically high false positive rate, and the chilling effect such programs have on the freedom to be different, it is very hard to believe that their real purpose is to spy on Americans and impose a high degree of conformity on American society.
(Or is it the whole "Death to Israel! Death to America!" thing that does it? I suppose I can see how that might affect matters...)
It certainly doesn't help, but the Bush Administration's utterly dishonest response to nations like Iran doesn't help either. Brazil is a more-or-less paid-up member of the modern international system. Iran is not. That is a problem, regardless of whether or not Iran has nuclear weapons. To focus the issue on nominal nuclear capability simply increases Iran's alienation.
It would be far better to start with the statement, "Iran is not a fully-engaged member of the modern international system. That is a problem for the United States and we would like to change it. We recognize that you don't much like us and to be honest, we don't much like you. But we recognize that the world is a better place if we can co-exist peacefully with each other and with our neighbours, including Israel. I mean, c'mon guys, we've co-existed peacefully with some real nitwits and nasties over the years. Surely we can figure out how to get along with you. So let's sit down and talk, and not about nukes. About trade and scholarly exchange programs and baseball."
This is exactly why we need our shipping containers (every one of them) scanned through some massive system to detect radioactivity!
Which is why when a bomb is smuggled in to your country, it will be delivered in a bale of marijuana dropped somewhere along one of the coasts, or detonated on a ship in a harbour, or wafted across the border on a balloon. Draconian measures to improve security never work.
You are correct, though, that it is far easier to get bomb material from the former USSR or other existing sources than refining your own. However, it is worth noting that in the West at least the vast majority of fission bombs are plutonium bombs, not uranium bombs. Uranium bombs are sufficiently rare in the West that most of the data we have is from 1945--there is an ongoing project to track health effects of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and one of the issues is that the detailed (person-by-person) irradiation estimates for Hiroshima are relatively poor because uranium bombs are relatively less-well-understood (at least, this is how the situation stood in 1992, the last time I heard a talk on the project).
Plutonium is much, much harder to detonate than uranium, which is what makes uranium enrichment so attractive to relatively low-tech bomb-makers.
Strangely, the article fails to mention that enriched uranium "can be used for nuclear weapons". It is almost as if the editors understood that reactor-grade uranium cannot be used for nuclear weapons, and therefore did not include this misleading phrase in the article.
Which begs the question as to why they do it in every single story on that other nation's enrichment experiments.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads [usec.com], all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium.
But the authors/editors of every single story on the Iranian enrichment program has felt it necessary and not misleading at all to employ the phrase, "enriched uranium, which can be used for nuclear weapons..." Don't you realize how important it is to keep this mythology going?
How dare you write something in plain English that makes it clear that not all enriched uranium is suitable for nuclear weapons and in fact there is more than an order of magnitude difference in the degree of enrichment between weapons-grade uranium and (typical PWR) reactor-grade uranium.
You aren't some kind of terrorist sympathizer, are you?
Go read your Adam Smith: "Never do two or three men of the same profession sit down for a pot of ale together that it does not end up as a conspiracy against the rest of mankind" (quoted from memory but the gist is correct). He knew perfectly well that combines and associations (trusts) were possible and dangerous in a market that was not designed or regulated to prevent them, although he didn't live to see just how monsterous they could become.
Markets are machines like any other, human-made artefacts intended to fulfill particular needs. "Free markets" should really be called "low-regulation markets" or something--the myth of the "natural" free market should be dead by now, as it has been shown empirically time and again that there is an optimal non-zerol level of regulation that is required to generate the benefits we want from the market-machine.
I think it's theoretically part of a goal to do a "technology transfer" from the DoD to the private sector.
Which is what leads to the demise of public science: at the end of the day the public only owns the stuff that doesn't work. Everything else is sold off--or issued under exclusive license, which amounts to the same thing--to the private sector as rapidly as possible, and government labs become focused on doing applied research, and all that very expensive public infrastructure becomes nothing but a surrogate research lab for the private sector.
At the very least, no government lab should ever be permitted to engage in exclusive licensing, and ideally license terms should be directly tied to profitabilty, so that non-profit enterprises can exploit such technologies at no cost, while for-profit enterprises pay a nominal cost. The whole point and justification of publically funded research is that it produces a wide range of side-benefits, such as training students who will go on to do more economically interesting things, and creating basic knowledge.
While a modicum of economic discipline is no bad thing because irresponsible governments and voters will spend their children into poverty if given the opportunity, at the same time there must be a place in the public discourse for activities that are not driven by economics alone.
How sad that you have to troll for karma like this
"Expecting the neo-con mod down in 3..2..1"
It's possible he has seen the same phenomenon I have, where for a while all of my posts that had any positive moderation had at least one "over-rated" mod as well. My.sig at the time was explicitly anti-Bush (as opposed to my current.sig, which is merely a statement of fact.)
This occurred on some posts that weren't overtly political, and in several years of posting I had never had an over-rated mod before, which suggested to anyone wearing the appropriate aluminum headgear that there might be a horde of neo-cons out there down-modding liberals. Or maybe it just was random--I dunno. It stopped after a while, although I'm sure some joker will give this post an over-rated mod just to mess with my mind. Thanks guys.
In some countries, the military and police are not fully funded by the government. The government requires them to develop a means to fund themselves
I believe you'll find this is still common in the U.S., where in some states people suspected (not convicted or in some cases even charged) of drug-related crimes can have their property seized and sold at auction, with most of the proceeds going to the law-enforcement organization responsbile for the seizure.
More recently, this website says, "Our large Drug Seizure Auction Program has auctioned off more than 75,000 vehicles in the State of Texas. Our Seizure Auctions consist of automobiles, trucks, semi-tractors, boats, motorcycles, and surplus items (jewelry, VCRS, televisions, air conditioners, lawn mowers, and many more)."
On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why?
Because the U.S. is in the grip of a fairly major bout of xenophobia just now. This is something that overtakes all human groups every once in a while, where suddenly anyone who is remotely outside the mainstream is automatically suspect and "other".
This kind of thinking can be seen all over the current immigration reform in the U.S., as well as border security generally. It creates massive distortions in thinking--for example, President Bush's proposal for a "tamperproof" ID for foreigners working in the U.S. only makes sense if you somehow mentally categorize outsiders in such a way that they are inherently different from Americans. Otherwise the obvious work-around of foreigners using fake American IDs is, well, obvious. Without this kind of unconscious mental distortion it is clear that foreigners are indistinguishable from Americans.
We see the same kind of thinking amongst the people who say that various illegal and unconstitutional measures will only be used against "terrorists", as if that was an unabiguously distinct, knowable category of person. By reconceptualizing terrorists as inherently "other" they are able to perform this nasty mental trickery of reassuring themselves that only bad people will be affected by the draconian powers being granted spies and miliary officials, despite the glaring epistemological problems with such beliefs.
In such a social climate, xenophobia has a lot of political value, and gestures of solidarity with the group (flag waving, declarations of patriotic feeling, signs posted on businesses declaring they hire only documented legal workers) are highly valued. Those things by themselves are relatively benign, but the flip-side is the tendency to demonize anyone outside of the group.
Personally, I would think that no closed-source application should ever be used in a secure network environment. That includes the OS, obviously. There's just too much stuff that a closed-source application could be doing that isn't good, even if there was no malicious intent.
The cancellation fee is on top of what they nick you for hardware. I returned everything, and didn't get the hardware fee back despite promises to the contrary. They also charged me the cancellation fee, which I fought through my credit card company and won, like the OP.
I have never heard of a Vonage customer who cancelled the service and didn't get nailed with both fees for hardware that was correctly and completely returned, and a cancellation fee on top of that. They are just not a good company to deal with.
I signed up for the Vonage service, tried it, didn't like it, tried to leave. I went through a bit of a nightmare trying to cancel the service
This is consistent with my experience with Vonage. I signed up because they told me I could keep my old number. This turned out not to be the case. They told me they would return my sign-up fee when I returned their hardware, which I did. Not only have they never returned my sign-up fee, they tried to charge me a cancellation fee, although their customer service manager had assured me there would be no problem with cancellation because of the original problem, which was clearly their fault (some numbers in my area code were portable, others were not, their web app was incorrectly reporting all numbers in my area code as portable.)
I disputed the cancellation charge via my credit card company, and won. But they kept the sign-up fee despite assurances to the contrary.
Vonage is hands-down the worst business I have ever dealt with, including various flakey eBay sellers. Their customer service is simply terrible, even by online business standards.
If you're paying any attention to this story beyond simple partisan axe grinding, you'll find that people like Bush's arch-nemises in the house and senate (like Nancy Pelosi) have been briefed on these exact NSA programs since 2001, just weeks after 9/11. Why do you think that only the wingnuts, and not the actual-in-the-know political opposition (which would love to do anything to embarass Bush) aren't being very vocal on this particular subject? Because they know what it really does, have known about it for years, and recognize what a serious breach it is to have it spilling about in the news. Of course they don't mind the political damage it's causing when it's absurdly, factlessly spun in the media, but people like Pelosi know better than to directly attack on this subject - because she's in the same loop and has been for years.
You're missing your own point--she's in the same loop and has been for years. You appear to be engaged in more than a little partisan axe-grinding of your own.
What the Democrats have to say about this is irrelevant. They could be all for it, and indeed there is every indication that most of them are, just as a few Republicans appear to be against it. It would still be unconstitutional, un-American, and un-quite-a-few-other-things too. Introducing the undoubted fact of Democratic support for such illegal activities on the part of the Bush administration is entirely irrelevant to the illegality of those activities.
You are fighting the wrong war and making the wrong argument against the wrong opponent. If the ongoing fiasco of leaks regarding illegal and unconstitutional surveilance activity by the NSA and others reveals anything, it is the absolute corruption of the Democrats, who have been easily and successfully co-opted by the Republican instigators of the programs.
This is a battle between those close to the centers of power in both parties, and the people.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment
Especially when it's an experiment that begins with the hypothesis, "That hot person of the complimentary sexual orientation over there will go out with me if I ask them."
To say that Iraq never had WMD is pure non-sense. Ask the thousands of living Iranian widows or the Kurdish what gas they or their loved ones were exposed to and when.
Arguing with bellicose right-wingnuts is starting to feel a lot like arguing with Soviet appoligists back in the day. They reply to perfectly ordinary claims of fact--that Bush & co. lied about Iraq's WMDs and much else as a pretext for war--with a completely irrelevant non sequitur.
For those lacking basic English comprehension skills, no one claimed that Iraq never had WMDs, and trying to twist the argument to answer that premise is nothing more than an obvious admission of that fact.
This non sequitur was quickly followed by another: invoking the Ghost of Presidents Past in the form of Bill Clinton. Bellicose right-wingnuts have reached the bottom of the polemical barrel--they are now reduced to waving a stuffed scarecrow of a man from the better part of a decade ago in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the uncontroversial fact that they and theirs have lied American into a pointless and stupid war that has killed thousands of Americans for no discernible purpose.
Give it up guys--every time one of you clowns mentions Clinton it's just more proof that you have lost. Your time is done.
You have a very active imagination there... You know what would really happen? The guys would show up, interview you and maybe ask if you could help them catch the guy.
I'm afraid you're the one with the active imagination, and your head firmly in teh sand.
The case of Maher Arar suggests no such restrictions encumber U.S. efforts. In September 2002, Arar was returning to Canada from Tunisia when he was detained by U.S. immigration authorities while in transit at JFK. He was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for 12 days and interrogated, he said, by FBI and immigration officials. Then he was put on a small plane, and after a stopover in Washington, flown to Amman, Jordan, where Arar was handed over to Jordanian authorities. He said the Jordanians beat him for hours, and then took him to Syria. His Syrian captors tortured him, beating him on the palms, hips, and lower back with electric cables.
After Arar's release, which caused a storm in Canada but barely raised a whisper in the U.S., Syrian authorities said they had no interest in him, and had interrogated him in a show of goodwill towards the U.S. Arar believed his interrogation was largely related to a casual acquaintance, a terrorism suspect who has also been released from jail in Syria.
I know, I know... why bother to stand up for this guy? After all, he's a friend of a criminal, right? Except that he was an acquaintance, not a friend, and the other guy wasn't a criminal. But then, he's a foreigner, and you're not a foreigner, so you have nothing to worry about.
Just don't wonder why there is no one left to stand up when they finally come for you...
These diagrams tell you at a glance who are the most influential people. In this diagram, 'Ron' and 'Patti' are highly connected people. It's likely they are in a close relationship with each other.
This seems to me to be highly problematic. The fact that Ron and Patti are highly connected does not make them highly influential. It makes them highly connected.
You have assumed that there is a relationship between the number of connections and the weight of those connections. Is there any data that proves this? That is: do people who have more contacts at a completely superficial level (we're taking phone calls here) have more influence with the people they call than those who have fewer such contacts? I talk to very, very few people on the phone, but have lots and lots of influence with those people--close friends and family.
Furthermore, the assumption that killing Ron and Patti would separate the two groups they interconnect is based on the false belief that the network would remain roughly static after their removal. While this may be the case for cell-based terrorist organizations, it is certainly not the case for normal social networks.
The degree to which this kind of data analysis can be abused by analysts using assumptions that are probably false is enormous. In all the discussion I have seen there has been little or no mention of just how problematic the assumptions are that you need to make to draw any interesting conclusions from such data.
This is one of the two things about this experiment is interesting, as by the old-fashioned definition you are championing, information has just been transmitted faster than the speed of light (as has been done before [2], although I believe it was generally in quantum-tunneling type situations, rather than something as normal-seeming as a optical fibre.)
Thanks for the clarification--you are correct that my identification of group velocity with information propogation is a little archaic. The very idea of "group velocity" is of course approximate, as it starts to break down in dispersive media, for example.
The analysis of quantum tunnelling situations you refer to goes back to the 1930's. Under some interpretations there is an imaginary propogation time under the barrier. You can even find papers arguing for superluminal group velocities, although it's notable that in the orginal work (citation long lost, I'm afraid--Phys. Rev. 1932-ish, I think) the author is careful to demonstrate that no information is propogated faster than light.
My preferred approach is not to use the term "group velocity" due to these ambiguities. But this is/., and I was in a rush, and at least I sparked a discussion that has hopefully clarified matters for the average reader.
This nonsense depends on an equivocation on "velocity". It is easy to get phase velocities that are not just faster than light, but infinite. It is impossible to get group velocities that are faster than c (the speed of light in a free vacuum, a universal constant.) Information travels with the group velocity.
For a scientist to report this as "faster than light" is simply dishonest, a means of grabbing headlines and attention in the hopes that it will bolster the next grant application.
The world is full of (mostly uninteresting) phenomena that travel "faster than light" by this definition. This is just one more. It is always a worthy effort to test established theory in regimes it has not been tested in before, but the odds of it producing any interesting results are staggeringly small. Absent the "faster than light" hook this story wouldn't be given any notice at all.
The honest headline would be, "Scientist tests well-established theory under extreme conditions and finds full agreement with predictions." Yawn.
Slashdot Mirror
We have very stiff laws that punish people who threaten the health of our young people by selling them alcohol, tobacco, or pornography...
One of these things is not like the others.
Go to any hospital and you will find plenty of people who have been put there by alcohol and tobacco. But I challenge you to find a single hospital where more than 1% of the beds are occupied by people who were put there by pornography.
Which leads to the question: what definition of "health" are you using such that something that puts virtually no one in hospital is in the same category for you as two things that, along with obesity and failure to wear a seatbelt, are the strongest contenders for membership in the four horse-people of the modern apocalypse?
What makes everyone think that the NSA is stupid enough to limit their search to that specific pattern?
The problem is that the NSA thinks this stupid pattern is even very slightly specific to terrorists. I have never seen any suggested "pattern indicative of potential terrorist activity" that I can't imagine far being commonly caused by innocent reasons. Every non-empirically-validated pattern will have a huge false-positive rate. In fact there is no evidence at all that any pattern-finding methodology will have a false postive rate of less than 99%. That means that for every genuinely suspect individual, hundreds of innocent Americans will be targeted and harrassed because they fit some spook's idea of a "suspected terrorist pattern."
As to your final question, perhaps there haven't been any more terrorist attacks in the U.S. because the terrorist threat is really rather low. Terrorism has never managed to kill a tenth as many people as automobiles, even in the peak years like 2001. Terrorist activity just isn't that much of a threat, and the response to it is vastly disproportionate.
The Brazillian guy in London who was killed because he was mistaken for a terrorist suspect is just one of the many martyrs to people's inability to appreciate that the threat from terrorism is just not that high.
In the mid-90s, I took a course in Introduction to International Terrorism. The professor's master's thesis was on terrorist funding resources in the United States. He told us the story of how his thesis came together and the argument he got into with his advisor.
Well I heard it from some guy that...
That is all your argument amounts to without the name of the prof and in the best case the title of the thesis. What you're saying may well be true, but if it is you need to provide some substantive citation, not just your recollection of a story told in a course a decade ago.
Can data mining identify terrorists?
No.
But it can identify people with large extended families who have relatives overseas and get an important call about a death in the family, notify all their North American relatives, and then have government agents show up on their door.
Every single pattern-based terrorist screening method I have heard about sounds like something dreamed up in an air-conditioned office by some dork who never gets out very much and thinks all people are basically like him (and anyone who isn't ought to be subject to government investigation.)
Hanging around public buildings taking pictures? Must be a terrorist. As opposed to say, just interested in taking pictures of public buildings because modern-day monumental architecture happens to turn you on.
Want to learn to fly a 747 but don't have any interest in a career as a pilot? Must be a terrorist. Unless you happen to be fascinated by aircraft and think that a few weeks of flight school would give you bragging rights to die for at your local RC club.
Like to pay with cash, even for purchases in the thousands like furniture or maybe a car? Must be a terrorist. Or maybe you don't qualify for a chequing account, or are just a little bit paranoid, or just don't fucking feel like doing anything else.
These sorts of unvalidated, non-empirical, "feels like the right thing to me", ad hoc, imaginary "patterns of suspicious activity" are a major threat to freedom because they demonize and may even criminalize deviancy from the norm. It is a characteristic of unfree societies that deviancy from the norm is not just looked at asscance by the majority of the population, but is viewed as grounds for suspicion of the most heinious acts.
Furthermore, such datamining solutions are not able to identify terrorists reliably even when they have all kinds of intelligence data entered into them. A report on the chilling-named MATRIX system indicates that the system was only able to identify 5 of the original 9/11 hijackers in a retrospective test, a 75% false negative rate, and it further identifed 120,000 other Americans who had a "high terrorism factor." Supposedly "scores of arrests" resulted from that list, although no one knows what the arrests were for or how many of those were sucessfully prosecuted. The odds are most of them were for drug possession charges that were laid as a result of the increased scrutiny certain individuals got by virtue of wholey baseless suspicions of terrorism. But let us grant 60 successful prosecutions for terrorist-related activities. That's a false positive rate of over 99.9%
And that was when the system was loaded with specific intelligence data, which is no longer the case.
Given the complete failure of such systems to detect terrorists in retrospective studies, and the horrifically high false positive rate, and the chilling effect such programs have on the freedom to be different, it is very hard to believe that their real purpose is to spy on Americans and impose a high degree of conformity on American society.
(Or is it the whole "Death to Israel! Death to America!" thing that does it? I suppose I can see how that might affect matters...)
It certainly doesn't help, but the Bush Administration's utterly dishonest response to nations like Iran doesn't help either. Brazil is a more-or-less paid-up member of the modern international system. Iran is not. That is a problem, regardless of whether or not Iran has nuclear weapons. To focus the issue on nominal nuclear capability simply increases Iran's alienation.
It would be far better to start with the statement, "Iran is not a fully-engaged member of the modern international system. That is a problem for the United States and we would like to change it. We recognize that you don't much like us and to be honest, we don't much like you. But we recognize that the world is a better place if we can co-exist peacefully with each other and with our neighbours, including Israel. I mean, c'mon guys, we've co-existed peacefully with some real nitwits and nasties over the years. Surely we can figure out how to get along with you. So let's sit down and talk, and not about nukes. About trade and scholarly exchange programs and baseball."
This is exactly why we need our shipping containers (every one of them) scanned through some massive system to detect radioactivity!
Which is why when a bomb is smuggled in to your country, it will be delivered in a bale of marijuana dropped somewhere along one of the coasts, or detonated on a ship in a harbour, or wafted across the border on a balloon. Draconian measures to improve security never work.
You are correct, though, that it is far easier to get bomb material from the former USSR or other existing sources than refining your own. However, it is worth noting that in the West at least the vast majority of fission bombs are plutonium bombs, not uranium bombs. Uranium bombs are sufficiently rare in the West that most of the data we have is from 1945--there is an ongoing project to track health effects of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and one of the issues is that the detailed (person-by-person) irradiation estimates for Hiroshima are relatively poor because uranium bombs are relatively less-well-understood (at least, this is how the situation stood in 1992, the last time I heard a talk on the project).
Plutonium is much, much harder to detonate than uranium, which is what makes uranium enrichment so attractive to relatively low-tech bomb-makers.
Strangely, the article fails to mention that enriched uranium "can be used for nuclear weapons". It is almost as if the editors understood that reactor-grade uranium cannot be used for nuclear weapons, and therefore did not include this misleading phrase in the article.
Which begs the question as to why they do it in every single story on that other nation's enrichment experiments.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads [usec.com], all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium.
But the authors/editors of every single story on the Iranian enrichment program has felt it necessary and not misleading at all to employ the phrase, "enriched uranium, which can be used for nuclear weapons..." Don't you realize how important it is to keep this mythology going?
How dare you write something in plain English that makes it clear that not all enriched uranium is suitable for nuclear weapons and in fact there is more than an order of magnitude difference in the degree of enrichment between weapons-grade uranium and (typical PWR) reactor-grade uranium.
You aren't some kind of terrorist sympathizer, are you?
The "free market" prevented competition? Huh?
Go read your Adam Smith: "Never do two or three men of the same profession sit down for a pot of ale together that it does not end up as a conspiracy against the rest of mankind" (quoted from memory but the gist is correct). He knew perfectly well that combines and associations (trusts) were possible and dangerous in a market that was not designed or regulated to prevent them, although he didn't live to see just how monsterous they could become.
Markets are machines like any other, human-made artefacts intended to fulfill particular needs. "Free markets" should really be called "low-regulation markets" or something--the myth of the "natural" free market should be dead by now, as it has been shown empirically time and again that there is an optimal non-zerol level of regulation that is required to generate the benefits we want from the market-machine.
I think it's theoretically part of a goal to do a "technology transfer" from the DoD to the private sector.
Which is what leads to the demise of public science: at the end of the day the public only owns the stuff that doesn't work. Everything else is sold off--or issued under exclusive license, which amounts to the same thing--to the private sector as rapidly as possible, and government labs become focused on doing applied research, and all that very expensive public infrastructure becomes nothing but a surrogate research lab for the private sector.
At the very least, no government lab should ever be permitted to engage in exclusive licensing, and ideally license terms should be directly tied to profitabilty, so that non-profit enterprises can exploit such technologies at no cost, while for-profit enterprises pay a nominal cost. The whole point and justification of publically funded research is that it produces a wide range of side-benefits, such as training students who will go on to do more economically interesting things, and creating basic knowledge.
While a modicum of economic discipline is no bad thing because irresponsible governments and voters will spend their children into poverty if given the opportunity, at the same time there must be a place in the public discourse for activities that are not driven by economics alone.
Wind turbines kill birds and look ugly. Dams flood areas. With fusion, they new complaint will be: "It still uses radioactive particles."
Oddly enough it would actually increase the degree of truthfulness to say: "Wind turbines are radioactive. Fusion looks ugly. Dams kill birds."
How sad that you have to troll for karma like this
"Expecting the neo-con mod down in 3..2..1"
It's possible he has seen the same phenomenon I have, where for a while all of my posts that had any positive moderation had at least one "over-rated" mod as well. My
This occurred on some posts that weren't overtly political, and in several years of posting I had never had an over-rated mod before, which suggested to anyone wearing the appropriate aluminum headgear that there might be a horde of neo-cons out there down-modding liberals. Or maybe it just was random--I dunno. It stopped after a while, although I'm sure some joker will give this post an over-rated mod just to mess with my mind. Thanks guys.
In some countries, the military and police are not fully funded by the government. The government requires them to develop a means to fund themselves
I believe you'll find this is still common in the U.S., where in some states people suspected (not convicted or in some cases even charged) of drug-related crimes can have their property seized and sold at auction, with most of the proceeds going to the law-enforcement organization responsbile for the seizure.
Here's a somewhat dated story about this kind of thing (from late 2001).
More recently, this website says, "Our large Drug Seizure Auction Program has auctioned off more than 75,000 vehicles in the State of Texas. Our Seizure Auctions consist of automobiles, trucks, semi-tractors, boats, motorcycles, and surplus items (jewelry, VCRS, televisions, air conditioners, lawn mowers, and many more)."
On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why?
Because the U.S. is in the grip of a fairly major bout of xenophobia just now. This is something that overtakes all human groups every once in a while, where suddenly anyone who is remotely outside the mainstream is automatically suspect and "other".
This kind of thinking can be seen all over the current immigration reform in the U.S., as well as border security generally. It creates massive distortions in thinking--for example, President Bush's proposal for a "tamperproof" ID for foreigners working in the U.S. only makes sense if you somehow mentally categorize outsiders in such a way that they are inherently different from Americans. Otherwise the obvious work-around of foreigners using fake American IDs is, well, obvious. Without this kind of unconscious mental distortion it is clear that foreigners are indistinguishable from Americans.
We see the same kind of thinking amongst the people who say that various illegal and unconstitutional measures will only be used against "terrorists", as if that was an unabiguously distinct, knowable category of person. By reconceptualizing terrorists as inherently "other" they are able to perform this nasty mental trickery of reassuring themselves that only bad people will be affected by the draconian powers being granted spies and miliary officials, despite the glaring epistemological problems with such beliefs.
In such a social climate, xenophobia has a lot of political value, and gestures of solidarity with the group (flag waving, declarations of patriotic feeling, signs posted on businesses declaring they hire only documented legal workers) are highly valued. Those things by themselves are relatively benign, but the flip-side is the tendency to demonize anyone outside of the group.
Personally, I would think that no closed-source application should ever be used in a secure network environment. That includes the OS, obviously. There's just too much stuff that a closed-source application could be doing that isn't good, even if there was no malicious intent.
The cancellation fee is on top of what they nick you for hardware. I returned everything, and didn't get the hardware fee back despite promises to the contrary. They also charged me the cancellation fee, which I fought through my credit card company and won, like the OP.
I have never heard of a Vonage customer who cancelled the service and didn't get nailed with both fees for hardware that was correctly and completely returned, and a cancellation fee on top of that. They are just not a good company to deal with.
I signed up for the Vonage service, tried it, didn't like it, tried to leave. I went through a bit of a nightmare trying to cancel the service
This is consistent with my experience with Vonage. I signed up because they told me I could keep my old number. This turned out not to be the case. They told me they would return my sign-up fee when I returned their hardware, which I did. Not only have they never returned my sign-up fee, they tried to charge me a cancellation fee, although their customer service manager had assured me there would be no problem with cancellation because of the original problem, which was clearly their fault (some numbers in my area code were portable, others were not, their web app was incorrectly reporting all numbers in my area code as portable.)
I disputed the cancellation charge via my credit card company, and won. But they kept the sign-up fee despite assurances to the contrary.
Vonage is hands-down the worst business I have ever dealt with, including various flakey eBay sellers. Their customer service is simply terrible, even by online business standards.
If you're paying any attention to this story beyond simple partisan axe grinding, you'll find that people like Bush's arch-nemises in the house and senate (like Nancy Pelosi) have been briefed on these exact NSA programs since 2001, just weeks after 9/11. Why do you think that only the wingnuts, and not the actual-in-the-know political opposition (which would love to do anything to embarass Bush) aren't being very vocal on this particular subject? Because they know what it really does, have known about it for years, and recognize what a serious breach it is to have it spilling about in the news. Of course they don't mind the political damage it's causing when it's absurdly, factlessly spun in the media, but people like Pelosi know better than to directly attack on this subject - because she's in the same loop and has been for years.
You're missing your own point--she's in the same loop and has been for years. You appear to be engaged in more than a little partisan axe-grinding of your own.
What the Democrats have to say about this is irrelevant. They could be all for it, and indeed there is every indication that most of them are, just as a few Republicans appear to be against it. It would still be unconstitutional, un-American, and un-quite-a-few-other-things too. Introducing the undoubted fact of Democratic support for such illegal activities on the part of the Bush administration is entirely irrelevant to the illegality of those activities.
You are fighting the wrong war and making the wrong argument against the wrong opponent. If the ongoing fiasco of leaks regarding illegal and unconstitutional surveilance activity by the NSA and others reveals anything, it is the absolute corruption of the Democrats, who have been easily and successfully co-opted by the Republican instigators of the programs.
This is a battle between those close to the centers of power in both parties, and the people.
Just tell then it's the area under a curve, or the volume under a sheet. Even the most pretentious manager will be able to grasp that
"It's the area under a curve, or the volume under a sheet."
"So that's like where they've banked the road to keep cars from flying off as they go 'round the curve? That's what an integral is?"
"Not that kind of curve!"
"And the volume under a sheet--isn't that zero? Unless somebody's lying under it. Or two somebody's. Lemme tell you about this girl I met..."
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment
Especially when it's an experiment that begins with the hypothesis, "That hot person of the complimentary sexual orientation over there will go out with me if I ask them."
To say that Iraq never had WMD is pure non-sense. Ask the thousands of living Iranian widows or the Kurdish what gas they or their loved ones were exposed to and when.
Arguing with bellicose right-wingnuts is starting to feel a lot like arguing with Soviet appoligists back in the day. They reply to perfectly ordinary claims of fact--that Bush & co. lied about Iraq's WMDs and much else as a pretext for war--with a completely irrelevant non sequitur.
For those lacking basic English comprehension skills, no one claimed that Iraq never had WMDs, and trying to twist the argument to answer that premise is nothing more than an obvious admission of that fact.
This non sequitur was quickly followed by another: invoking the Ghost of Presidents Past in the form of Bill Clinton. Bellicose right-wingnuts have reached the bottom of the polemical barrel--they are now reduced to waving a stuffed scarecrow of a man from the better part of a decade ago in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the uncontroversial fact that they and theirs have lied American into a pointless and stupid war that has killed thousands of Americans for no discernible purpose.
Give it up guys--every time one of you clowns mentions Clinton it's just more proof that you have lost. Your time is done.
I'm afraid you're the one with the active imagination, and your head firmly in teh sand.
I'm guessing you have never heard what your government did to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, a software developer who consulted with Mathworks, who was arrested, illegally detained and shipped off to Syria for torture at the behest of the American Government:
I know, I know... why bother to stand up for this guy? After all, he's a friend of a criminal, right? Except that he was an acquaintance, not a friend, and the other guy wasn't a criminal. But then, he's a foreigner, and you're not a foreigner, so you have nothing to worry about.
Just don't wonder why there is no one left to stand up when they finally come for you...
These diagrams tell you at a glance who are the most influential people. In this diagram, 'Ron' and 'Patti' are highly connected people. It's likely they are in a close relationship with each other.
This seems to me to be highly problematic. The fact that Ron and Patti are highly connected does not make them highly influential. It makes them highly connected.
You have assumed that there is a relationship between the number of connections and the weight of those connections. Is there any data that proves this? That is: do people who have more contacts at a completely superficial level (we're taking phone calls here) have more influence with the people they call than those who have fewer such contacts? I talk to very, very few people on the phone, but have lots and lots of influence with those people--close friends and family.
Furthermore, the assumption that killing Ron and Patti would separate the two groups they interconnect is based on the false belief that the network would remain roughly static after their removal. While this may be the case for cell-based terrorist organizations, it is certainly not the case for normal social networks.
The degree to which this kind of data analysis can be abused by analysts using assumptions that are probably false is enormous. In all the discussion I have seen there has been little or no mention of just how problematic the assumptions are that you need to make to draw any interesting conclusions from such data.
This is a terrible thing for America.
You read it here first; Bush is going to try to get a 3rd term.
Then it will be time to sing MacDonough's Song.
This is one of the two things about this experiment is interesting, as by the old-fashioned definition you are championing, information has just been transmitted faster than the speed of light (as has been done before [2], although I believe it was generally in quantum-tunneling type situations, rather than something as normal-seeming as a optical fibre.)
/., and I was in a rush, and at least I sparked a discussion that has hopefully clarified matters for the average reader.
Thanks for the clarification--you are correct that my identification of group velocity with information propogation is a little archaic. The very idea of "group velocity" is of course approximate, as it starts to break down in dispersive media, for example.
The analysis of quantum tunnelling situations you refer to goes back to the 1930's. Under some interpretations there is an imaginary propogation time under the barrier. You can even find papers arguing for superluminal group velocities, although it's notable that in the orginal work (citation long lost, I'm afraid--Phys. Rev. 1932-ish, I think) the author is careful to demonstrate that no information is propogated faster than light.
My preferred approach is not to use the term "group velocity" due to these ambiguities. But this is
This nonsense depends on an equivocation on "velocity". It is easy to get phase velocities that are not just faster than light, but infinite. It is impossible to get group velocities that are faster than c (the speed of light in a free vacuum, a universal constant.) Information travels with the group velocity.
For a scientist to report this as "faster than light" is simply dishonest, a means of grabbing headlines and attention in the hopes that it will bolster the next grant application.
The world is full of (mostly uninteresting) phenomena that travel "faster than light" by this definition. This is just one more. It is always a worthy effort to test established theory in regimes it has not been tested in before, but the odds of it producing any interesting results are staggeringly small. Absent the "faster than light" hook this story wouldn't be given any notice at all.
The honest headline would be, "Scientist tests well-established theory under extreme conditions and finds full agreement with predictions." Yawn.