Take this argument out of the airplane context, and think about it.
Ok, I have. I've particularly thought about all the accidental shootings and crimes of opportunity that have not happened because people are for the most part not carrying weapons on flights.
I agree with you that armed citizens are the best defence against nitwits... err... "terrorists" like this clown and the shoe-bomber.
But it is also the case that armed citizens are a far greater danger to each other, statistically speaking, than "terrorism" is. Terrorists hardly kill anybody. Accidental shootings and crimes of passion/opportunity resulting from the ubiquity of firearms in the US kill thousands of people every year.
If everyone carried weapons on planes their would be far more deaths than in the current situation, as angry and stupid people used them in ways that are all too predictable.
And those laws will work as well as all the other laws that tried to hold back technological improvements in productivity. You can tell how well those laws worked by noticing the number of garments you're wearing that were manufactured on a hand loom.
To my mind this very recent evolutional trait is what makes us unique.
If by "very recent" you mean "sometime in the past million years" you would be correct. Humans practice exogamy (mating outside our kin group) much more aggressively than other social primates, and this is the basis of our remarkable social flexibility.
Troops of humans have rich structure as well, as do troops of other social primates, such as chimps and bonobos, although we don't know nearly as much about them because we are killing them off too quickly. This combination of exogamy--which blurs the external boundary--and strong internal boundaries allows the kind of social flexibility that modern humans have. So while there is nothing very evolutionary in the Darwinian sense about the development of multiple troop affiliations, the behavioural basis for it is definitely a recent thing.
The rest of our body could have a role to play in cognition.
It cracks me up that AI people are just getting around to noticing this. I guess they've never ridden a bicycle, threaded a needle, or done any of the myriad other complex tasks that require intelligence in the fingers or other parts of the body: the processing power may be in the brain, but a huge amount of the work is being done via complex multi-sensorial feedback from the whole body.
It's also a little weird that all of these "do X with JUST your brain" stories have statements like this: "people with electrodes in their brains can 'type' using just their minds."
That's like saying, "People who are in automobiles can increase their speed by just flexing their toes." Sure they can, so long as they have a huge complex machine doing the work that the rest of the body would normally do.
Among the 2200 results are a number of studies on the influence of mobile phones on cells and EEG rhythms.
This is a great form of argument. "Somewhere in this mass of vaguely indicated text is a phrase or two that taken in the right way can support something I haven't clearly articulated, but that supports some political move that appears pointless and stupid to everyone else."
This can't be argued against because you a) haven't actually asserted any proposition other than "I think there should be a warning saying cell phones cause cancer" and b) you haven't given the slightest bit of evidence that would cause anyone to believe that cell phones cause cancer. For a start, you've given no reason to believe that cell phones having an effect on EEG might make anyone believe cell phones cause cancer, and you've also given no reason for anyone to believe that cell phones have an effect on EEGs. If anyone were to dig through the masses of vaguely indicated text you've waved them toward there's nothing to stop you from saying, "You haven't looked hard enough" or similar.
All you're doing is creating an artist's impression of an argument. To actually convince anyone of anything--and not look like a wanker--you have to do the work of creating a real argument, with a crisp empirical proposition and actual evidence to support it. Until then, you're not signal, just noise.
So to counter your position, I suggest you go here and type the words "wankers cause cancer" (without the quotes) and hit "Search". In the approximately 80,200 results you'll find some things suggest people like you have an effect on other people's EEGs.
Lastly: The earth is not cooling. No, it really isn't. You can say it is over and over, chanting it with the rest of your denier friends, as I'm sure doing so makes you feel better, not to mention so very superior, but it's a lie, plain and simple
The oceans appear to be warming, so if by "the heat content of the oceans and atmosphere is increasing" it is probably correct to say "the Earth is not cooling".
The "global dimming" question is a curious one. So far as I know the situation is still that earthshine measurements indicate the Earth's albedo is increasing, while satellite measurements over the same time suggest it is very slightly decreasing. Sometimes the fact is that we have two reasonably good measures of the same thing and they disagree with each other. In that case it is simply anti-scientific to assert that one or the other result is a fact and the other is not. Both are facts. We just don't know how to reconcile them.
My eyes must be playing tricks on me because I can't seem to find the sections in those links that discuss massive sea level rise occurring by 2009
Most of what is discussed in these articles is not prediction at all, but innuendo. I particularly like this snippet:
Warning signs today:
Global sea level has already risen by 4 to 8 inches in the past century, and the pace of sea level rise appears to be accelerating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise 10 to 23 inches by 2100, but in recent years sea levels have been rising faster than the upper end of the range predicted.
In the 1990s, the Greenland ice mass remained stable, but the ice sheet has increasingly declined in recent years. This melting currently contributes an estimated one-hundredth of an inch per year to global sea level rise.
Greenland holds 10 percent of the total global ice mass. If it melts, sea levels could increase by up to 21 feet.
The first bullet point is the required comment found in every pro-AGW story that the IPCC scientists have no clue at all what is going on with the Earth's climate, since their every prediction is wrong. For some reason I don't understand the entire incredibly complex system is reduced to a single axis labeled "worse" on one end and "better" on the other, with the errors always tending to be that the global aggregate situation is much further toward the "worse" end than the most carefully unphysical computational models suggest.
The second bullet point gives some relevant information without embellishment.
The third bullet point is pure speculation, and has as much to do with "Warning Signs Today" as would a comment that there is a 1:250000 chance of an asteroid impact in 2029. It is included purely for the scare value, as neither unphysical models nor actual data plausibly suggest that the Greenland icecap is likely to melt in the next 100 years, and even if they did the fact that it would raise sea levels by 23 meters is by no stretch of the imaginatoin related to any "Warning Signs Today." It is, like so much of the discussion related to AGW, simply thrown in as a scare tactic, like McCarthy talking about Communists.
Anti-AGW folks are afraid of economic risks, pro-AGW folks are afraid of climate risks. Both insist that the precautionary principle only be applied to the risks they care about, because who really gives a shit about what those liberal/fascist/pinko/greedy bastards on the other side want?
But it's estimated that this effect is only 25% of global warming.
The "new news" here apppears to be that it may be as much as half the effect, although those numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt: climate models are in general unphysical, and get more unphysical the larger the scale. So while smaller scale regional models may be more accurate, you're still comparing them to global models (to get the proportional contributions) that are only accurate by chance (and which have done rather poorly in recent comparisions to actual data on the ground.)
And in this particular case the regional models may not be so good either, precisely because they are dealing with a rich and complex geometry that is requires a lot more care that much of the globe (which is 70% water, after all, so the surface geometry is at least relatively straightforward, although the heat and mass transport at the interface is one of those places where unphysical assumptions creep in.)
Ergo, while these results are suggestive, as a basis for public policy they aren't a lot better than AGW itself.
People who believe that AGW is a scientific certainty are deluded. The W and Z bosons are scientific certainties. AGW is a plausible hypothesis. How one wants to respond to a plausible hypothesis with social and economic policy changes is far more dependent on one's political biases than on anything to do with the science.
Maybe we could call them buzzbombs or cruise missiles or intercontinental ballistic missiles or something.
Buzzbombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles don't make much use of computational intelligence.
Cruise missiles are similar to what I'm talking about, although the Wikipedia entry on them makes the useful point that they are distinct from UAVs because the warhead is integrated into the missile, they are always destroyed by successful completion of their mission, and they are never used for recon. That aside, my point--which I guess I didn't make sufficiently clear--is that I'm talking about seeing bomb-carrying (and drug-carrying) UAVs in the hands of non-governmental forces.
It is odd that we haven't, given how cheaply it could be done so long as one deviates from the integrated-systems design of cruise missiles, and avoids the dumb-trajectory aspects of buzz-bombs and ICBMs. In fact, so long as one builds autonomous general-purpose UAVs the cost is very low. Buying and modifying a typical light sport aircraft with a carrying capacity of a few hundred kg and a range of a thousand kilometers would run less than $100k, based on used aircraft prices.
That's a lot of cocaine, and a plane or two like that loaded with C4 and ball-bearings dropping into a random American city every couple of nights would create a huge amount of panic, which would probably result in the US invading Peru or someplace, just for the look of the thing. Admittedly the range would have to be increased to be able to reach the US from Saudia Arabia, which is where attacks like this would obviously originate, but that's a relatively minor technical problem given current materials and engine technologies.
These things are a terrorist's dream, and we've known since the '80's we were headed this way. Donald Kingsbury's novel "The Moon Goddess and the Son" describes the possibility, and it was published in '85 or so. Ergo, it should come as no surprise to anyone when the first use of UAVs by non-governmental criminal organizations comes to light.
the 7-foot-9-inch submersible robot from the stormy Atlantic off western Spain filled with cocaine.
I've been surprised we don't see autonomous drone aircraft being used for this purpose. It just isn't that hard.
And of course, it's also a good way to get nuclear weapons over cities before detonating them, which is really where you want them to be for maximum damage, which is caused by the firestorm they start, not blast or radiation damage (just ask the good people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima if you disagree.)
Despite the mystique of piloted vehicles, there is nothing very difficult, algorithmically, about running a sub or plane autonomously. The only reason we haven't done more of it yet is because we've only had sufficiently compact, powerful, computers for a decade or so. But I expect in the next decade we'll see a whole lot more of it, making nonsense of traditional notions of borders.
Stealth technologies are just too simple for vehicles that have no mission profile except to get from point A to point B. They can fly as low as they want and as slow as they want, unlike stealth fighters and bombers. So anyone who claims these things will be detectable is taking a whole lot on faith, whereas their existence is a matter of fact. How the technological fight between detection and penetration capabilities turns out will have a large effect on the future viability of nation-states.
Unlike idiotic movies (Terminator Salvation and later films in the Matrix trilogy come to mind) the real risk from autonomous machines is not that they will go rogue and take over the world, but that stupid human cowards will use them to randomly destroy stuff at a sufficiently high rate to endanger the large-scale structures that sustain what we are wont to call civilization.
Where, exactly, does Microsoft think it's going to get this stuff from? The summary actually makes reference to health records.
What stuff, and for what purpose? The only thing you can tell by reading the summary is that MS has filed a patent application for something. That something has a marginally-different-from-zero chance of being something to do with games and health, but you have to understand how/. patent stories are generated:
1) Find out about a patent application from an organization we all love to hate 2) Read the patent title and abstract 3) Publish a summary that badly distorts the information in the title and abstract 4) ??? 5) Profit!!!
I'm pretty sure the "???" in step 4 relates to getting lots of pageviews from/. readers who, despite having seen exactly the same process happen again and again and again, and having had explained to them repeatedly that the only thing that matters in a patent is the claims, not the title or abstract--much less the summary that has been spat out by the/. editors--still insist on reading the summary and responding as if it had something to do with the American patent system, which the/. editors love. We know they love it because they never attack it, and find it necessary to make stuff up about it for people to take offense at, because they think that if they told the truth about it everyone else would love it as much as they do (they'd be wrong about that, but that is clearly what they believe.)
The curious thing is: why do the/. editors love the American patent system so much?
Which is why we instinctually have men fight wars, hunt, crab fish, etc... the cost of a male life is (on a societal level) less than a females.
Evolution doesn't select for group survival, and you are making the very common mistake of invoking what amounts to a kin-selection argument without actually explaining how it works for the individuals involved. In this case, it must be that brothers (and fathers and uncles) who put themselves at risk had a higher chance of having more offspring than those in which males and females put themselves at risk equally. Given that one live male can impregnate a zillion females, and a dead male cannot impregnate any, this seems doubtful.
The very fact you invoke tells us that the loss (or gain) in reproductive potential for the male by the life or death of one close female relative is almost certainly going to be trivial compared to the gain (or loss) for the same male due to his own life or death. That is, males in groups where female kin died at the same rate as males would have a significant reproductive advantage over males in kin-groups where males died preferentially. After all, if males and females are dying at equal rates, there still won't be any shortage of potential mates for the surviving males, but there will be more surviving males who will therefore have more offspring than they would have otherwise. The group may suffer, but the individuals will benefit, which is all evolution knows about.
The role of "battle" and extreme risk in human life is a bizarre aberration that makes no evolutionary sense, except for the little fact that most women absolutely love violent, risk-taking men, so violent men get laid more. Male violence and recklessness is nothing but a product of female mate choice, and men's willingness to die has little or nothing to do with kin selection and everything to do with sexual selection.
So does our proclivity to rape, murder, commit genocide, etc. And no one shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, that's just the way evolution made us." We have the demonstrated capacity to subvert or suppress very significant evolutionary drives, so the claim that we just aren't able to value men's lives more is implausible at best.
Ultimately, that's instinct. There's nothing good or evil about it, it just is. Survival of the species, and so on.
You need to go back and read some anti-feminist comments from the first half of the 20th century. You sound just like those fusty old men claiming women "are just naturally" different from men in this or that respect so they shouldn't be allowed to vote, or drive cars, or be doctors or lawyers or politicians or whatever.
Claiming that status quo is the way it is because it has to be that way is never a good argument, and in this case it puts you in some really embarrassing company.
Don't mistake "scientific" journalists for scientists.
Yeah, this is typical distorted reporting. The paper is an entirely conventional one putting limits on mass and interaction strength. Some lying idiot in the press decided to hype up the "possibility dark matter has been dectected!" angle, demonstrating once again that no one hates science quite as much as "science journalists", who clearly don't trust that the subject matter is sufficiently interesting to warrant readers paying attention to it unless it is distorted beyond belief.
The details of this detection system and the quality of the analysis and results stand on their own, without needing any hype or misleading spin.
I can't remember personally using such activation process, but it wouldn't be shocking to me if one was able to download one of Eclipse's 3rd party proprietary plugins this way, or MS Visual Studio, some Adobe products.
That's an interesting question, but on my reading at least the patent would not cover plugins, as the clear implication is that the user can't do anything with the "shell" except enter license information etc. Ergo, a program that has functionality of its own would not constitute a "shell" in the relevant sense.
What a dishonest lawyer and idiot judge might agree is a fair reading of the patent, however, could be just about anything, so let's hope they aren't reading/.!
Men who work in IT, who should be asking themselves what is so terrible about IT careers that women, who are filling the ranks of doctors and lawyers with wild abandon, won't go near them.
If a job really sucks--especially if it can get you killed--it is done predominantly by men.
We are society that holds the call of "Men last!" to be honourable and good. It is usually phrased as "Everyone who is not a man first!" Or more specifically "Women and children first!" But semantically they all mean, "Men last!" That sucks. If you're a man.
Gender dominance in a particular field is more due to interest than anything else.
Right, just because if a person gets killed on the job there's a 98% chance they're a man doesn't prove anything about societal pressure, parental/spousal/peer-group expectations, childhood indoctrination, or anything. Men just like getting killed more than women. That also explains why men are the victims of murder and all violent crimes except (probably) rape than women: they just have a greater interest in getting attacked, beaten and killed.
Thanks for clearing that up! It's great to know that we live in a society with no social justice or equity problems at all!
If Herschel can can find matter previously unseen with other telescopes, can this be used to avoid the dark matter theory?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: there are multiple dark matter problems on multiple scales. Galactic dark matter, which is the only kind Hershel might be able to see, may be baryonic (made up of the same sorts of elementary particles as everything else we know about.) Even that is doubtful, based on dynamical analysis of galactic collisions, which strongly favour a non-baryonic component even on galactic scales. And the thing about non-baryonic dark matter is that whatever it is, it doesn't interact electro-magnetically, at least not to a significant degree. If it did, it would be scattered off ordinary matter and be detectable and visible and have pretty much the same spacial distribution as ordinary matter, which it observably does not in the case of galactic collisions.
On larger scales, we know with as much certainty as we know anything that dark matter must be non-baryonic, and therefore almost certainly won't be visible. The reason we know it must be non-baryonic is because the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the early universe, which we can calculate quite precisely based on the universe we see today, puts a strict limit on the amount of baryonic matter, and the extra-galactic dark matter exceeds that limit by a factor of ten or more.
Finally, "avoiding the dark matter theory" is a funny way of putting things, as if somehow dark matter was bad and it would be a good thing to avoid it. Dark matter is a perfectly sensible explanation some peculiar phenomena, and although it is not the only one, it has proven consistent with the experimental and observational tests that have been used to investigate it, particularly the galactic collision analysis mentioned above.
I did. There are two independent claims (1 and 9) both dealing with the generation of an "overlay" (shades of RT-11) that contains the actual program code based on information the user provides through a "shell" program that they run initially.
On my reading, this is irrelevant to any activation system that deals solely with the data segment, so almost all conventional licence management systems are not covered. Some stuff MS does might be, but I've never used a license manger that does anything remotely similar to what's described in this patent: these days we deliver the full program, and unlock it based on data, whereas the patent covers delivering a partial program and generating a new program based on user-supplied data. That's unrelated to software-as-service implementations because there is no new "overlay"--whatever that might be construed to mean in this context--being generated by the delivery process: when I run something in my browser it isn't a custom copy newly compiled from source incorporating information I've provided. It's a bog-standard copy that may have restricted functionality based on data that is downloaded with it, a totally different thing.
So yeah, there's not that much prior art, but there's not that much "posterior art", either.
Some idiot on the bench in Marshal, Texas may of course disagree with this view, but that's based on how corrupt they are, not on how the patent reads.
Well, it says in one of the Harry Potter books that the choices we make are more important than the talents we have, and that's as relevant to the patent as what's in the abstract, so why are you quoting what's in the abstract rather than J.K. Rowling?
Seriously: the claims are what matter, although in this case the claims do happen to be reflected in the abstract, which is true about half the time. The other half of the time the abstract appears to have been written by someone else, on another planet.
Thanks for the info! The article was unclear on that, as on much else. I particularly liked that "stars are really far away" was given as the second reason for this kind of imaging being difficult, as if the extreme distances didn't make this sort of thing completely impossible until a decade or so ago.
The video is wonderful, and accounting for the persistent asymmetry in the early expansion phase will no doubt result in a more detailed understanding of the oscillation mechanism of these stars. First rate science, badly mangled as usual by/. and the tabloid science press.
I'm eager to see how this trial's decisions will impact the trial against the LHC physicists team in a few months for causing rapid gravitational earth implosion
The what? Don't you mean the LHC physicists team turning everyone on on Earth into a penguin?
How is it that everyone who thinks the LHC might create black holes fails to notice the equally plausible grand unification of general relativity and evolution that could result in such mass cross-species conversion due to reprogramming of our DNA?
Yeah, I have to admit that's what I thought. when I read There is at present no way to contact the individual nor official word on why he was detained. Pretty much like a foreigner accused of "terrorism" in the US, then.
And for all the folks shouting up the way about the vacuity of moral equivalence arguments: the United States is holding innocent people today on such charges, and has been for years. The people responsible for that are evil, just as the people responsible for arresting this guy in Cuba are evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Take this argument out of the airplane context, and think about it.
Ok, I have. I've particularly thought about all the accidental shootings and crimes of opportunity that have not happened because people are for the most part not carrying weapons on flights.
I agree with you that armed citizens are the best defence against nitwits... err... "terrorists" like this clown and the shoe-bomber.
But it is also the case that armed citizens are a far greater danger to each other, statistically speaking, than "terrorism" is. Terrorists hardly kill anybody. Accidental shootings and crimes of passion/opportunity resulting from the ubiquity of firearms in the US kill thousands of people every year.
If everyone carried weapons on planes their would be far more deaths than in the current situation, as angry and stupid people used them in ways that are all too predictable.
Try writing a real article instead of just completely making shit up.
Hey, this is /,, where the only thing less true than the articles is the headlines and summaries.
A /. summary complaining about inaccuracies!? Now that's funny.
There will be laws against robots
And those laws will work as well as all the other laws that tried to hold back technological improvements in productivity. You can tell how well those laws worked by noticing the number of garments you're wearing that were manufactured on a hand loom.
To my mind this very recent evolutional trait is what makes us unique.
If by "very recent" you mean "sometime in the past million years" you would be correct. Humans practice exogamy (mating outside our kin group) much more aggressively than other social primates, and this is the basis of our remarkable social flexibility.
Troops of humans have rich structure as well, as do troops of other social primates, such as chimps and bonobos, although we don't know nearly as much about them because we are killing them off too quickly. This combination of exogamy--which blurs the external boundary--and strong internal boundaries allows the kind of social flexibility that modern humans have. So while there is nothing very evolutionary in the Darwinian sense about the development of multiple troop affiliations, the behavioural basis for it is definitely a recent thing.
The rest of our body could have a role to play in cognition.
It cracks me up that AI people are just getting around to noticing this. I guess they've never ridden a bicycle, threaded a needle, or done any of the myriad other complex tasks that require intelligence in the fingers or other parts of the body: the processing power may be in the brain, but a huge amount of the work is being done via complex multi-sensorial feedback from the whole body.
It's also a little weird that all of these "do X with JUST your brain" stories have statements like this: "people with electrodes in their brains can 'type' using just their minds."
That's like saying, "People who are in automobiles can increase their speed by just flexing their toes." Sure they can, so long as they have a huge complex machine doing the work that the rest of the body would normally do.
Among the 2200 results are a number of studies on the influence of mobile phones on cells and EEG rhythms.
This is a great form of argument. "Somewhere in this mass of vaguely indicated text is a phrase or two that taken in the right way can support something I haven't clearly articulated, but that supports some political move that appears pointless and stupid to everyone else."
This can't be argued against because you a) haven't actually asserted any proposition other than "I think there should be a warning saying cell phones cause cancer" and b) you haven't given the slightest bit of evidence that would cause anyone to believe that cell phones cause cancer. For a start, you've given no reason to believe that cell phones having an effect on EEG might make anyone believe cell phones cause cancer, and you've also given no reason for anyone to believe that cell phones have an effect on EEGs. If anyone were to dig through the masses of vaguely indicated text you've waved them toward there's nothing to stop you from saying, "You haven't looked hard enough" or similar.
All you're doing is creating an artist's impression of an argument. To actually convince anyone of anything--and not look like a wanker--you have to do the work of creating a real argument, with a crisp empirical proposition and actual evidence to support it. Until then, you're not signal, just noise.
So to counter your position, I suggest you go here and type the words "wankers cause cancer" (without the quotes) and hit "Search". In the approximately 80,200 results you'll find some things suggest people like you have an effect on other people's EEGs.
Lastly: The earth is not cooling. No, it really isn't. You can say it is over and over, chanting it with the rest of your denier friends, as I'm sure doing so makes you feel better, not to mention so very superior, but it's a lie, plain and simple
The oceans appear to be warming, so if by "the heat content of the oceans and atmosphere is increasing" it is probably correct to say "the Earth is not cooling".
The "global dimming" question is a curious one. So far as I know the situation is still that earthshine measurements indicate the Earth's albedo is increasing, while satellite measurements over the same time suggest it is very slightly decreasing. Sometimes the fact is that we have two reasonably good measures of the same thing and they disagree with each other. In that case it is simply anti-scientific to assert that one or the other result is a fact and the other is not. Both are facts. We just don't know how to reconcile them.
Science provides knowledge, not certainty.
My eyes must be playing tricks on me because I can't seem to find the sections in those links that discuss massive sea level rise occurring by 2009
Most of what is discussed in these articles is not prediction at all, but innuendo. I particularly like this snippet:
Warning signs today:
Global sea level has already risen by 4 to 8 inches in the past century, and the pace of sea level rise appears to be accelerating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise 10 to 23 inches by 2100, but in recent years sea levels have been rising faster than the upper end of the range predicted.
In the 1990s, the Greenland ice mass remained stable, but the ice sheet has increasingly declined in recent years. This melting currently contributes an estimated one-hundredth of an inch per year to global sea level rise.
Greenland holds 10 percent of the total global ice mass. If it melts, sea levels could increase by up to 21 feet.
The first bullet point is the required comment found in every pro-AGW story that the IPCC scientists have no clue at all what is going on with the Earth's climate, since their every prediction is wrong. For some reason I don't understand the entire incredibly complex system is reduced to a single axis labeled "worse" on one end and "better" on the other, with the errors always tending to be that the global aggregate situation is much further toward the "worse" end than the most carefully unphysical computational models suggest.
The second bullet point gives some relevant information without embellishment.
The third bullet point is pure speculation, and has as much to do with "Warning Signs Today" as would a comment that there is a 1:250000 chance of an asteroid impact in 2029. It is included purely for the scare value, as neither unphysical models nor actual data plausibly suggest that the Greenland icecap is likely to melt in the next 100 years, and even if they did the fact that it would raise sea levels by 23 meters is by no stretch of the imaginatoin related to any "Warning Signs Today." It is, like so much of the discussion related to AGW, simply thrown in as a scare tactic, like McCarthy talking about Communists.
Anti-AGW folks are afraid of economic risks, pro-AGW folks are afraid of climate risks. Both insist that the precautionary principle only be applied to the risks they care about, because who really gives a shit about what those liberal/fascist/pinko/greedy bastards on the other side want?
But it's estimated that this effect is only 25% of global warming.
The "new news" here apppears to be that it may be as much as half the effect, although those numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt: climate models are in general unphysical, and get more unphysical the larger the scale. So while smaller scale regional models may be more accurate, you're still comparing them to global models (to get the proportional contributions) that are only accurate by chance (and which have done rather poorly in recent comparisions to actual data on the ground.)
And in this particular case the regional models may not be so good either, precisely because they are dealing with a rich and complex geometry that is requires a lot more care that much of the globe (which is 70% water, after all, so the surface geometry is at least relatively straightforward, although the heat and mass transport at the interface is one of those places where unphysical assumptions creep in.)
Ergo, while these results are suggestive, as a basis for public policy they aren't a lot better than AGW itself.
People who believe that AGW is a scientific certainty are deluded. The W and Z bosons are scientific certainties. AGW is a plausible hypothesis. How one wants to respond to a plausible hypothesis with social and economic policy changes is far more dependent on one's political biases than on anything to do with the science.
Maybe we could call them buzzbombs or cruise missiles or intercontinental ballistic missiles or something.
Buzzbombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles don't make much use of computational intelligence.
Cruise missiles are similar to what I'm talking about, although the Wikipedia entry on them makes the useful point that they are distinct from UAVs because the warhead is integrated into the missile, they are always destroyed by successful completion of their mission, and they are never used for recon. That aside, my point--which I guess I didn't make sufficiently clear--is that I'm talking about seeing bomb-carrying (and drug-carrying) UAVs in the hands of non-governmental forces.
It is odd that we haven't, given how cheaply it could be done so long as one deviates from the integrated-systems design of cruise missiles, and avoids the dumb-trajectory aspects of buzz-bombs and ICBMs. In fact, so long as one builds autonomous general-purpose UAVs the cost is very low. Buying and modifying a typical light sport aircraft with a carrying capacity of a few hundred kg and a range of a thousand kilometers would run less than $100k, based on used aircraft prices.
That's a lot of cocaine, and a plane or two like that loaded with C4 and ball-bearings dropping into a random American city every couple of nights would create a huge amount of panic, which would probably result in the US invading Peru or someplace, just for the look of the thing. Admittedly the range would have to be increased to be able to reach the US from Saudia Arabia, which is where attacks like this would obviously originate, but that's a relatively minor technical problem given current materials and engine technologies.
These things are a terrorist's dream, and we've known since the '80's we were headed this way. Donald Kingsbury's novel "The Moon Goddess and the Son" describes the possibility, and it was published in '85 or so. Ergo, it should come as no surprise to anyone when the first use of UAVs by non-governmental criminal organizations comes to light.
the 7-foot-9-inch submersible robot from the stormy Atlantic off western Spain filled with cocaine .
I've been surprised we don't see autonomous drone aircraft being used for this purpose. It just isn't that hard.
And of course, it's also a good way to get nuclear weapons over cities before detonating them, which is really where you want them to be for maximum damage, which is caused by the firestorm they start, not blast or radiation damage (just ask the good people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima if you disagree.)
Despite the mystique of piloted vehicles, there is nothing very difficult, algorithmically, about running a sub or plane autonomously. The only reason we haven't done more of it yet is because we've only had sufficiently compact, powerful, computers for a decade or so. But I expect in the next decade we'll see a whole lot more of it, making nonsense of traditional notions of borders.
Stealth technologies are just too simple for vehicles that have no mission profile except to get from point A to point B. They can fly as low as they want and as slow as they want, unlike stealth fighters and bombers. So anyone who claims these things will be detectable is taking a whole lot on faith, whereas their existence is a matter of fact. How the technological fight between detection and penetration capabilities turns out will have a large effect on the future viability of nation-states.
Unlike idiotic movies (Terminator Salvation and later films in the Matrix trilogy come to mind) the real risk from autonomous machines is not that they will go rogue and take over the world, but that stupid human cowards will use them to randomly destroy stuff at a sufficiently high rate to endanger the large-scale structures that sustain what we are wont to call civilization.
The story of human exploration on Earth has also been one of spreading disease and wiping out indigenous populations
Now, now... sometimes we enslaved them rather than exterminating them. It wasn't all bad.
Where, exactly, does Microsoft think it's going to get this stuff from? The summary actually makes reference to health records.
What stuff, and for what purpose? The only thing you can tell by reading the summary is that MS has filed a patent application for something. That something has a marginally-different-from-zero chance of being something to do with games and health, but you have to understand how /. patent stories are generated:
1) Find out about a patent application from an organization we all love to hate
2) Read the patent title and abstract
3) Publish a summary that badly distorts the information in the title and abstract
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
I'm pretty sure the "???" in step 4 relates to getting lots of pageviews from /. readers who, despite having seen exactly the same process happen again and again and again, and having had explained to them repeatedly that the only thing that matters in a patent is the claims, not the title or abstract--much less the summary that has been spat out by the /. editors--still insist on reading the summary and responding as if it had something to do with the American patent system, which the /. editors love. We know they love it because they never attack it, and find it necessary to make stuff up about it for people to take offense at, because they think that if they told the truth about it everyone else would love it as much as they do (they'd be wrong about that, but that is clearly what they believe.)
The curious thing is: why do the /. editors love the American patent system so much?
Which is why we instinctually have men fight wars, hunt, crab fish, etc... the cost of a male life is (on a societal level) less than a females.
Evolution doesn't select for group survival, and you are making the very common mistake of invoking what amounts to a kin-selection argument without actually explaining how it works for the individuals involved. In this case, it must be that brothers (and fathers and uncles) who put themselves at risk had a higher chance of having more offspring than those in which males and females put themselves at risk equally. Given that one live male can impregnate a zillion females, and a dead male cannot impregnate any, this seems doubtful.
The very fact you invoke tells us that the loss (or gain) in reproductive potential for the male by the life or death of one close female relative is almost certainly going to be trivial compared to the gain (or loss) for the same male due to his own life or death. That is, males in groups where female kin died at the same rate as males would have a significant reproductive advantage over males in kin-groups where males died preferentially. After all, if males and females are dying at equal rates, there still won't be any shortage of potential mates for the surviving males, but there will be more surviving males who will therefore have more offspring than they would have otherwise. The group may suffer, but the individuals will benefit, which is all evolution knows about.
The role of "battle" and extreme risk in human life is a bizarre aberration that makes no evolutionary sense, except for the little fact that most women absolutely love violent, risk-taking men, so violent men get laid more. Male violence and recklessness is nothing but a product of female mate choice, and men's willingness to die has little or nothing to do with kin selection and everything to do with sexual selection.
So does our proclivity to rape, murder, commit genocide, etc. And no one shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, that's just the way evolution made us." We have the demonstrated capacity to subvert or suppress very significant evolutionary drives, so the claim that we just aren't able to value men's lives more is implausible at best.
Ultimately, that's instinct. There's nothing good or evil about it, it just is. Survival of the species, and so on.
You need to go back and read some anti-feminist comments from the first half of the 20th century. You sound just like those fusty old men claiming women "are just naturally" different from men in this or that respect so they shouldn't be allowed to vote, or drive cars, or be doctors or lawyers or politicians or whatever.
Claiming that status quo is the way it is because it has to be that way is never a good argument, and in this case it puts you in some really embarrassing company.
Don't mistake "scientific" journalists for scientists.
Yeah, this is typical distorted reporting. The paper is an entirely conventional one putting limits on mass and interaction strength. Some lying idiot in the press decided to hype up the "possibility dark matter has been dectected!" angle, demonstrating once again that no one hates science quite as much as "science journalists", who clearly don't trust that the subject matter is sufficiently interesting to warrant readers paying attention to it unless it is distorted beyond belief.
The details of this detection system and the quality of the analysis and results stand on their own, without needing any hype or misleading spin.
I can't remember personally using such activation process, but it wouldn't be shocking to me if one was able to download one of Eclipse's 3rd party proprietary plugins this way, or MS Visual Studio, some Adobe products.
That's an interesting question, but on my reading at least the patent would not cover plugins, as the clear implication is that the user can't do anything with the "shell" except enter license information etc. Ergo, a program that has functionality of its own would not constitute a "shell" in the relevant sense.
What a dishonest lawyer and idiot judge might agree is a fair reading of the patent, however, could be just about anything, so let's hope they aren't reading /.!
Who gives a damn if women don't work in IT?
Men who work in IT, who should be asking themselves what is so terrible about IT careers that women, who are filling the ranks of doctors and lawyers with wild abandon, won't go near them.
If a job really sucks--especially if it can get you killed--it is done predominantly by men.
We are society that holds the call of "Men last!" to be honourable and good. It is usually phrased as "Everyone who is not a man first!" Or more specifically "Women and children first!" But semantically they all mean, "Men last!" That sucks. If you're a man.
Gender dominance in a particular field is more due to interest than anything else.
Right, just because if a person gets killed on the job there's a 98% chance they're a man doesn't prove anything about societal pressure, parental/spousal/peer-group expectations, childhood indoctrination, or anything. Men just like getting killed more than women. That also explains why men are the victims of murder and all violent crimes except (probably) rape than women: they just have a greater interest in getting attacked, beaten and killed.
Thanks for clearing that up! It's great to know that we live in a society with no social justice or equity problems at all!
If Herschel can can find matter previously unseen with other telescopes, can this be used to avoid the dark matter theory?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: there are multiple dark matter problems on multiple scales. Galactic dark matter, which is the only kind Hershel might be able to see, may be baryonic (made up of the same sorts of elementary particles as everything else we know about.) Even that is doubtful, based on dynamical analysis of galactic collisions, which strongly favour a non-baryonic component even on galactic scales. And the thing about non-baryonic dark matter is that whatever it is, it doesn't interact electro-magnetically, at least not to a significant degree. If it did, it would be scattered off ordinary matter and be detectable and visible and have pretty much the same spacial distribution as ordinary matter, which it observably does not in the case of galactic collisions.
On larger scales, we know with as much certainty as we know anything that dark matter must be non-baryonic, and therefore almost certainly won't be visible. The reason we know it must be non-baryonic is because the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the early universe, which we can calculate quite precisely based on the universe we see today, puts a strict limit on the amount of baryonic matter, and the extra-galactic dark matter exceeds that limit by a factor of ten or more.
Finally, "avoiding the dark matter theory" is a funny way of putting things, as if somehow dark matter was bad and it would be a good thing to avoid it. Dark matter is a perfectly sensible explanation some peculiar phenomena, and although it is not the only one, it has proven consistent with the experimental and observational tests that have been used to investigate it, particularly the galactic collision analysis mentioned above.
(read the fucking patent)
I did. There are two independent claims (1 and 9) both dealing with the generation of an "overlay" (shades of RT-11) that contains the actual program code based on information the user provides through a "shell" program that they run initially.
On my reading, this is irrelevant to any activation system that deals solely with the data segment, so almost all conventional licence management systems are not covered. Some stuff MS does might be, but I've never used a license manger that does anything remotely similar to what's described in this patent: these days we deliver the full program, and unlock it based on data, whereas the patent covers delivering a partial program and generating a new program based on user-supplied data. That's unrelated to software-as-service implementations because there is no new "overlay"--whatever that might be construed to mean in this context--being generated by the delivery process: when I run something in my browser it isn't a custom copy newly compiled from source incorporating information I've provided. It's a bog-standard copy that may have restricted functionality based on data that is downloaded with it, a totally different thing.
So yeah, there's not that much prior art, but there's not that much "posterior art", either.
Some idiot on the bench in Marshal, Texas may of course disagree with this view, but that's based on how corrupt they are, not on how the patent reads.
Yea i noticed that too in the abstract
Well, it says in one of the Harry Potter books that the choices we make are more important than the talents we have, and that's as relevant to the patent as what's in the abstract, so why are you quoting what's in the abstract rather than J.K. Rowling?
Seriously: the claims are what matter, although in this case the claims do happen to be reflected in the abstract, which is true about half the time. The other half of the time the abstract appears to have been written by someone else, on another planet.
Thanks for the info! The article was unclear on that, as on much else. I particularly liked that "stars are really far away" was given as the second reason for this kind of imaging being difficult, as if the extreme distances didn't make this sort of thing completely impossible until a decade or so ago.
The video is wonderful, and accounting for the persistent asymmetry in the early expansion phase will no doubt result in a more detailed understanding of the oscillation mechanism of these stars. First rate science, badly mangled as usual by /. and the tabloid science press.
I'm eager to see how this trial's decisions will impact the trial against the LHC physicists team in a few months for causing rapid gravitational earth implosion
The what? Don't you mean the LHC physicists team turning everyone on on Earth into a penguin?
How is it that everyone who thinks the LHC might create black holes fails to notice the equally plausible grand unification of general relativity and evolution that could result in such mass cross-species conversion due to reprogramming of our DNA?
Yeah, I have to admit that's what I thought. when I read There is at present no way to contact the individual nor official word on why he was detained. Pretty much like a foreigner accused of "terrorism" in the US, then.
And for all the folks shouting up the way about the vacuity of moral equivalence arguments: the United States is holding innocent people today on such charges, and has been for years. The people responsible for that are evil, just as the people responsible for arresting this guy in Cuba are evil.