Waste shouldn't be "stored", it should be recycled.
And then made into bombs. Unfortunately the best plutonium is pure 239, even for reactors. The problem with longer fuel cycles is that the other isotopes, notably 240, are fairly radioactive, making them a huge pain to handle, to say nothing of moderately dangerous. And ultimately, as others have pointed out, reactor grade plutonium is still capable of sustaining an explosive chain reaction.
Plutonium breeding is not the answer. Extraction of uranium from sea water might well be--it has been done in macroscopic amounts, and represents a truly astonishing resource base.
so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
Unfortunately there is very little international support for invading and destroying a sovereign nation that is not at war with anyone, does not support Islamic terrorism, had no role in the September 11th attacks, and has in the past been considered a secular bulwark against rising Islamist powers.
So unlike Gulf War I, which was fought to defend the principle of national sovereignty, Gulf War II was fought in opposition to that principle. This explains why so few nations were willing to join in to Gulf War II, even if one assumes that most governments believed that Iraq had or might soon have WMDs.
That said, doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of the complaints here seem to be along the lines of "why lock my car door when someone can steal my stereo by breaking the window anyway?"
There are at least two legitimate concerns:
1) Various fairly obvious terrorist responses to these counter-measures will greatly increase the danger to bystanders without materially reducing the risk to the President.
2) There is some suspicion that this has more to do with making it harder for legitimate democratic protesters to co-ordinate their actions than it does with preventing terrorism.
Whether either of those things is sufficient to trump the needs of presidential security is a matter for debate, unlike the nearly-zero-cost behaviour of locking your car doors to protect your stereo. There is a point where people are going to say, "Enough! We've had it with all the intrusions into our daily lives in the name of counter-terrorist activity. I come from a society that has always valued liberty over security, and this is more than I am willing to give up."
They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate.
This is relatively trivial to work around. It goes like this (and it took me all of three minutes to think of it, so unless I'm some kind of super-genius I'm not giving anything away):
1) Plant multiple bombs spaced out along the route--say three or four bombs on a single block. This increases the chance of discovery and the cost of the operation. However, see below regarding what your goal is.
2) Wire the detonators as you so helpfully described--I was not aware of any of that information, although I'm guessing it's all probably a Google away. Now, change the wiring to a setup such that when the phone starts ringing the trigger is "set", and when the phone stops ringing a timer is started. When the timer runs out the bomb explodes. This involves some elementary electronics that you probably know how to do. Hopefully the morons who believe in an invisible old man in the sky do not, although being religious is unfortunately no bar to being technological capable.
3) Give each of your bombs a different time delay.
Result: as the presidential motorcade approaches the mined area you dial the numbers and set the triggers. When the blackout zone covers the area a minute or so later the phones stop ringing and the timers start running. Assume the motorcade is moving at 30 MPH, and the rest is simple arithmetic.
The odds of killing the president with this method are low, but in reality they aren't that great to begin with. You have to ask yourself what the losers who do this kind of thing are after: publicity and disruption and fear. This will generate all of those, and if the president happens to die in the process they will no-doubt consider it a bonus. But just getting a bomb to go off on the same block as the president would probably be considered some kind of victory.
So what the plan to block cell-phones does is reduce the risk to the president from almost zero to really very close to zero, while at the same time increasing the risk to bystanders enormously.
So the summary is: panic wildly? No, probably not. Be concerned and try to take action where possible? Certainly seems sensible.
I think this is a reasonable position. I was verging on wild panic sometime last year, before looking more deeply into the numbers. The figure you found for CO2 forcing was actually about half the figure I had found previously (which I knew to be unreliable, but wasn't sure which way it erred.)
The orbital terms in solar forcing vary extremely slowly. However, the change in effective insolation due to the difference in albedo between the northern and southern hemisphere is huge, something like 10%. But this is not directly comparable to changes in CO2 because it is the result of local differences rather than overall change.
The short timescale for CO2 changes is a bit of a concern, but in a sense it is moot: we know that slow changes can produce results like the Younger Dryas, which returned much of North America to glacial ice in a transition that lasted perhaps as little as a decade, despite the fact that the ultimate forcings were all long-term. They managed to stimulate catastrophic shifts in the continental climate, though, and while any similar event is undoubtedly improbable it is still a tad scary.
My own position is that the economic consequences of global climate change are likely to be quite significant, while the ecological consequences are likely to be quite small, although larger than in some previous climate fluctuations because of humans putting stress on habitats.
The question then becomes: how best to capture the externalities and prevent dumping in the atmospheric commons? History suggests that some kind of market will be the most effective means of doing this, and I find it fairly amusing that many people in favour of action on climate change are opposed to markets and most people against action claim to believe that markets are great things. This suggests that many people in favour of action on climate change are really using it as an excuse to push their own eco-puritan agenda, and many people opposed to action are exactly the sort of eco-criminals who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Thanks! I actually did look moderately hard for it some time ago, but rapidly got lost in a welter of conflicting claims. Not being familiar with the literature in this area is a problem.
So compared to mean insolation of about 250 W/m**2, we are looking at an effect around 0.5%.
So here's my problem: if you read about the Milankovitch cycle explanation of ice ages, you'll find people pointing out that the less than 1% variation in insolation due to changes in eccentricity are not sufficient to explain climate fluxuation in the past few million years. Milankovitch depends on the odd distribution of terrestrial landmasses to explain the large swings in mean global temperature: a variation in solar forcing of less than 1% is widely believed to be insufficient.
So while I am all for reducing our CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions for a variety of sound environmental and economic reasons, am I not sure how to reconcile these two facts: that there is widespread concern that a less than 1% change in radiative forcing due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases is putting us at risk of major climate catastrophe, and a widespread belief that changes in orbital eccentricity alone are insufficient to explain ice ages. The kind of climate events from global warming being talked about in some circles are comparable in scope to ice ages, and yet the forcing involved is actually quite a lot smaller.
The scientific community isn't bickering about the basic things: that warming is occuring, and that human activity is contributing to it.
Then perhaps you can tell me the figure, in W/m**2/ppm, that CO2 directly contributes to climate forcing.
If we had this figure it would be relatively easy to beat the deniers over the head with it, but I don't seem to be able to find a reliable source for it anywhere.
It seems to me that TFA is as much a myth as the 26 myths it points to.
Whether or not it is a myth, it is extremely curious. The first "myth" is that "human CO2 emissions are too small to matter", and the text goes on to talk about the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere, not its effect on the heat budget of the Earth. This is odd, because the effect on the heat budget of the Earth (independent of any feedbacks) must be well-known, and that is the only figure that is relevant.
It is always bad engineering and bad policy-making practice to drive action based on INPUTs rather than OUTPUTs. The idiots ultimately responsible for Three Mile Island were the engineers who decided that the current running to a valve actuator could be used to measure the state of the actuator, forgetting that sometimes valves jam and so the inputs have nothing to do with the outputs.
In the present case, I don't care how many tonnes of CO2 humans are putting into the atmosphere, and neither does anyone else. I care how many W/m**2 they are adding to the Earth's energy budget. Until we start discussing that figure, we are not talking about climate change at all.
Part of the problem with this issue is that neither side is very honest. Climate change deniers start by denying the brutally obvious fact that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased dramatically in the past century. This is an empirical measurement that only a lunatic would dispute. Having thus destroyed their credibility, they go on to make some interesting and valid points. On the other side of the issue, climate change proponents spend an awful lot of time focusing on INPUT measurements, which doesn't do their credibility any good either, while at the same time doing all kinds of excellent science.
If we could focus on the EFFECT of increased CO2 on the Earth's energy budget we might learn something important because CO2 forcing is global and well-mixed in the atmosphere, and so can be compared to other global forcings like insolation varation.
It's a curious thing that a simple figure like W/m**2/ppm is not universally available and serving as the basis for all these discussions, because if it was, at least both sides would be talking about the same thing, and it would be the thing that matters.
From the website: There is a large amount of relevant material in A New Kind of Science.
Does it have an explanation of the colour/state pictures he's so fond of showing?
The {state, colour} -> {state, colour, offset} description that makes sense relative to the image below it shown here http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/technica ldetails.html is counter-intuitive: W->0, Y->1, R->2. This means the rules shown in the image are the same, but in a totally different order than the rules as described in the text. What a clever way to confuse the interested but naive reader.
Call it a pet peeve, but this kind of third-rate presentation and lack of explanation does not bode well for the clarity of the rest of the thinking going in to the problem.
This does not counter the point I was originally making, which was that "property" is a very poor metaphor for patents, trademarks and copyrights. But it certainly does make clear that the law as it stands in the US very definitely treats such things as property, however poor a metaphor it might be.
Until they tell us specifically which patents are being violated by what software, we cannot take any remedial action.
There are two possible cases: 1) no free software violates any MS patents; and 2) some free software violates some MS patents, but we don't know what software violates what patents because MS refuses to tell us.
Ergo, it is reasonable to assume that since MS has made it impossible for potential infringers to take any action to avoid infringement, that they have an interest in any infringement that occurs. That is, MS is promoting infringement of their own patents.
Indeed, the article says, "But Augustin also acknowledged that it's not in Microsoft's interest to do so: Open-source programmers could rewrite their code to avoid infringing on specific patents, or the courts could find that Microsoft's patent isn't valid."
I am not a lawyer, but when a party promotes the infringement of their own patents it might be reasonable to assume that they may be estopped from ever enforcing those patents in the future.
MS needs to tell us specifically which free software is violating what patents. If they do not tell us that we are justified in assuming that either no free software violates any patents, or that MS is entirely ok with all the free software that violates any of their patents. If they were not ok with it, they would tell us exactly which free software violated exactly what patents.
In other news, the Attorney General announced that "suspicion of resisting arrest" will be added to America's criminal law under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution.
"We feel," he said, "that police should have the power to act to detain an individual based on their well-founded suspicions that the individual might resist the lawful actions of police in detaining them."
When asked about the use of the Interstate Commerce clause, he replied, "Obviously, if an individual is going to resist arrest they may do so by crossing state lines. The Constitution is very clear on this. In fact, the President has the power acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief to use the National Guard to detain such individuals. Furthermore, anyone who attempts to avoid arrest on suspicion is obviously guilty of resisting arrest, so we don't feel that it will be necessary, or indeed possible, for this to be tested in the courts. And if anyone attempts to do so, we will simply change the charges against them to something else, like filling out a form."
I continue to be amazed that anyone is taking this seriously. There are ZERO MS patents violated by free software. If MS says otherwise, SHOW US THE PATENTS. If you won't do that, shut up and go home.
The only answer to anyone making such outrageous claims is to ask them, "Which patents?"
Imagine the following conversation:
Company: "You have 112 unpaid invoices."
Human being: "What are the invoice numbers?"
Company: "We won't tell you."
Human being: "Then how am I supposed to pay them?"
Company: "You aren't. We're just going to threaten you with them until we do what we want."
Human being: "...?"
That is exactly what MS are saying: you owe us, but we won't tell you why or how much. Now pay up.
As a Linux user, I'm wondering if I should contact MS demanding to be notified of exactly what patents are violated by software in the Ubuntu 7.01 and Slackware 11.0 distros. As a concerned citizen I am most desirous that I not use any violating software, but unless I know a) what the software in question is and b) what the patent it violates it is, I have no way of independently verifying that it is infringing. Therefore, unless they can provide me with evidence NOW that the software I am using is infringing, I will consider them estopped from ever enforcing their patents.
I'm not a lawyer and not sure if the doctrine of estopel applies, but I'm pretty sure if we all send registered letters to MS asking for immediate notification as to a) what software is violating MS patents and b) what specific patents each specific piece of software is violating that we can all plausibly claim, in the absence of an answer, that MS has no further claim on us with regard to this.
Anyone know the address of the MS legal department?
There is no such thing as an Intellectual Property law. That's a big blanket that the megacorps want to pull over our eyes in order to gain more power.
And they are doing a fine job of it, with the uncritical repetition in this article of curious notion of "intellectual property thieves".
Intellectual "property" is a terrible metaphor. "Property" is a legal machine that is designed to enforce capture of negative externalities. That is, when you own property, you are responsible for its upkeep. Without property rights you could dump your wastes or graze your sheep on the commons, and not ever pay any costs for that. The notion of property, first and foremost, forces you to pay your own way on your own property.
Patents, trademarks and copyright are sufficiently unlike property that any attempt to reason about them using property metaphors is doomed to failure from the outset. It is a tad disturbing that this failed metaphor has become so much a part of the popular legal consciousness that even the Attorney General is able to remember it.
This is not to say that individuals cannot have rights in patents, trademarks and copyrights. But those rights are not ownership rights to property, and violating those rights is not theft.
Tell us what patents, exactly, are infringed and what software, exactly, is infringing.
No Free Software infringes on any Microsoft patents. We can say this with absolute confidence.
I mean really, "You infringe on 235 patents, but we're not going to tell you which ones!"
I'd LOVE to see them say that in court.
MS is engaging in what MS has always engaged in: intimidation and FUD. There is nothing that needs to be said in reply to this except, "Which ones?" So long as MS does not answer that, we know the answer: NONE.
but seriously. It orbits very close to its sun so is anyone surprised the damn thing is really hot?
The interesting science is how the temperature is distributed, not that it is really hot. The planet is almost certainly tidally locked, so one side faces the star all the time. However, the hottest part of the planet is not at the "high noon" position on the "surface" (which for some reason is what the article calls the cloud-tops).
The highest temperature region is about 30 degrees (angle, not temperature!) away from high noon. This, plus the relatively small temperature difference between the light hemisphere and dark hemisphere tell us that the planetary atmosphere is subject to extremely high winds, which are distributing the heat.
This is a fascinating way of probing the dynamics of planetary atmospheres under extreme conditions.
Sorry, but putting a steaming mug of coffee between your thighs in a moving car is just plain and simply dumb.
Indeed, but as she did nothing of the kind I am curious as to why you are bringing it up.
This incident has been documented and described to death. Wikipedia has a reasonably balanced description of the case, including the fact that the woman put the coffee between her knees, and the car was stationary. If you don't like Wikipedia the same facts can be found in many other places, and they are not disputed by anyone who has access to the court documents.
So the facts, as opposed to falsehoods like the claim quoted above, are widely and easily available. And yet people like you keep trying to make the facts into something other than what they are, even though the actual facts are almost instantaneously available to everyone.
Why is this? Do you really believe that saying something again and again in a loud angry voice will change reality to conform to your prejudices?
There is a debate to be had regarding tort reform, but like any debate it can only start when both sides stop lying and start trying to get at the truth. Otherwise what one has isn't a debate, but posturing and politics.
Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago?
Newton actually entertained the idea that the universe is the result of God's active attention, so it was being literally supported every instant by an act of God's will. If God ever stopped paying attention, the universe would simply blink out. Of course, it could blink back in at any future (or past!) state of evolution just as easily.
From a computational perspective, one might look at this as a serialization issue. It is perfectly possible to serialize a simulation and then restart it at a later date. It is not uncommon to serialize long-running simulations every hour or so just to be sure you can restart them if the power happens to go out or something equally bad happens in the middle of a run. On this basis, the notion of when the simulation "really" started is meaningless: from within the sim you can't tell if it has been running all along, or if it has been restarted from a serialized version of itself, or it has been newly started from a hand-rolled self-consistent set of data files.
Of course, to believe any of this about the universe is to abandon science for the sake of nonsense for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Only an idiot would waste more than a few idle moments on such speculation.
Like the last poster, you apparently have "criminal" confused with something you simply don't like.
No, in this case I am using "criminal" to mean: arrogating powers to oneself that are not granted by the Constitution. This is a principled disagreement, and introducing the straw person of my individual preference is a logical fallacy. Please note that I am not an American, and have serious doubts about the viability of a written constitution. But the fact remains that your constitution, as written, is being violated by the president under the guise of signing statements.
If you disagree, please point me to the clause(s) in the Constitution that gives the president the power to sign into law and then ignore parts of a bill that he believes to be unconstitutional. To be credible, your interpretation of said clause(s) must be backed by case law, particularly with respect to the Presentment Clause.
Note that I am not saying that President is wrong in his interpretation of these laws. That is an irrelevant issue. I am saying he is certainly and without question wrong in signing bills into law and then ignoring the provisions of them that he believes are unconstitutional. He has no power to do this under the Constitution, and therefore I am labelling that behaviour criminal, regardless of whether or not I like it.
It is not and cannot be "policy" to violate the law. Crime is not a policy. But the current president's signing statements routinely say that he will ignore and violate at will certain provisions when he is "acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief."
If the President believes some part of a law places unconstitutional restrictions on his powers as Commander in Chief he has one and only one option under the Constitution, and that is to veto it. Signing statements have no force in law, and if the president signs a law and then violates it he is subject to impeachment regardless of what any signing statement says.
As someone who has spent the last six years investigating controversial science, I have a good sense of the difficulties of new, poorly-understood science.
As someone who has actually done controversial science for a living, I have a good sense of how all science worth doing is new and poorly understood, and how little appreciation of that fact people on the fringe have.
In every experiment there are things that make you go, "Hmmm..." Almost all of the time they are irrelevant, and it is a matter of taste and good judgement as to when you spend the time and effort to follow up on them. People who have never done real experiments or who are very badly trained fail to appreciate this, and therefore ascribe to every anomaly a significance that it does not have.
There are several consequences of this: good scientists sometimes miss significant anomalies; bad scientists sometimes make important discoveries; good scientists spend almost all their time generating well-quantified reproducible results that accumulate to the betterment of humanity; bad scientists spend almost all their time pursuing irrelevant anomalies and telling everyone how smart they are.
Every experimental scientist knows that it is possible to prove a negative, and we do it all the time. They are called null results. The entire field of physics beyond the standard model has been generating reams of these for the past couple of decades. We know, for example, that neutrinoless double beta decay does NOT happen with a lifetime of less than some large number. The ABSENCE of a signal is the result. Likewise, we know that the 17 keV neutrino does NOT exist, and the experiments that proved it were designed in the manner of all such: they demonstrated that A=>B, and then showed !B, and therefore !A by modus tollens.
For example, if you have a working tachometer, and it reads zero, your engine is not running, because if your engine is running your working tachometer will read more than 100 RPM. Any such experiment involves a good deal of secondary experimental work to demonstrate that the tachometer really is working, and isolating it from any possible unexpected effects, but at the end of the day you are always detecting a phenomenon that is well-known, like a beta spectrum or the number of neutrons being produced, or in the case of a tachometer a spinning shaft.
Fringe scientists have a tendency to invoke "new physics" to explain why no one else measures the shaft spinning when they do. Good scientists understand that spinning is spinning, no matter what causes it, and that for the fringe scientist to be right everything we know about tachometers must be wrong, and that is simply not plausible.
One aspect the linked article emphasizes is that spoken language is ephemeral, whereas written language is permanent. This is a large difference, as anyone who can read a second language with relative fluency but understand the spoken form hardly at all knows.
For this and many other reasons (no one speaks like a textbook or scientific paper for a reason--writing is far more effective at conveying certain types of information) it is problematic to claim without proof that "making writing more like speech is a good thing." In some cases it is probably true. In lots of other cases it may well be false. It will depend on the nature of the information being conveyed.
He goes into fairly convincing arguments for why we are advancing faster and faster...
But we aren't. Consider:
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. By the time she was my age (early forties) she had seen heavier than air flight used in warfare and commerce, the end of the age of sail, the invention, commercialisation and massive popularisation of radio, massive urban electrification, and the coming of the mass-produced automobile, just to name a few of the bigger changes. Oh yeah, and votes for women amongst at least some of the English-speaking peoples.
I have seen human beings walk on the moon, the advent of ubiquitous computing and the Internet. Those are the only changes comparable to those on the incomplete list I've given above that occurred in the first forty-odd years of my grandmother's life, and the first one has nothing like the social relevance of any of those changes.
The pace of technological change is slowing down, and has been doing so my whole lifetime. I do not expect the trend to reverse itself any time soon.
Depending on how you measure it, the pace of scientific change is arguably slowing even more rapidly (especially if considered on a per-scientist basis!)
I'm not saying this to be all depressing: we continue to do remarkable things, and mapping extra-galactic dark matter (which is of course completely different from and unrelated to galactic dark matter) is remarkable. But I believe it is false to suggest that "the Singularity" is in the future: it is in the past. It happened sometime between 1903 and 1969, with good odds on July 16th, 1945 at a place called Alamogordo.
This regenerative braking technology is why hybrids get better gas mileage in stop-and-go city driving than on the highway.
Half true, or perhaps one third. Hybrids also get better gas mileage because when stopped in stop-and-go city driving they use no fuel. That's a huge gain. Also, energy capture during regenerative braking is imperfect both because it is easy to exceed the maximum charging rate of the batteries, and also because the charge/discharge cycle is not all that efficient (about 70% both ways, if memory serves.)
In any case, things that exist are better than things that do not. Hybrids actually exist. I can't tell from the article if the intelligent technology being talked about is anything other than a simulation. But I am sure I can't go down to my local car dealer and buy a car so equipped, whereas I can certainly buy a hybrid.
Finally, the only reason the story sets up a false and misleading opposition between hybrids and intelligent driving choices (whether human or automated) is that lies of this kind get more eyeballs on the page and sell more advertising, and who wouldn't want to get their knowledge about the future of technology from such a pristine and unsullied source?
Slashdot Mirror
Waste shouldn't be "stored", it should be recycled.
And then made into bombs. Unfortunately the best plutonium is pure 239, even for reactors. The problem with longer fuel cycles is that the other isotopes, notably 240, are fairly radioactive, making them a huge pain to handle, to say nothing of moderately dangerous. And ultimately, as others have pointed out, reactor grade plutonium is still capable of sustaining an explosive chain reaction.
Plutonium breeding is not the answer. Extraction of uranium from sea water might well be--it has been done in macroscopic amounts, and represents a truly astonishing resource base.
so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
Unfortunately there is very little international support for invading and destroying a sovereign nation that is not at war with anyone, does not support Islamic terrorism, had no role in the September 11th attacks, and has in the past been considered a secular bulwark against rising Islamist powers.
So unlike Gulf War I, which was fought to defend the principle of national sovereignty, Gulf War II was fought in opposition to that principle. This explains why so few nations were willing to join in to Gulf War II, even if one assumes that most governments believed that Iraq had or might soon have WMDs.
That said, doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of the complaints here seem to be along the lines of "why lock my car door when someone can steal my stereo by breaking the window anyway?"
There are at least two legitimate concerns:
1) Various fairly obvious terrorist responses to these counter-measures will greatly increase the danger to bystanders without materially reducing the risk to the President.
2) There is some suspicion that this has more to do with making it harder for legitimate democratic protesters to co-ordinate their actions than it does with preventing terrorism.
Whether either of those things is sufficient to trump the needs of presidential security is a matter for debate, unlike the nearly-zero-cost behaviour of locking your car doors to protect your stereo. There is a point where people are going to say, "Enough! We've had it with all the intrusions into our daily lives in the name of counter-terrorist activity. I come from a society that has always valued liberty over security, and this is more than I am willing to give up."
While the particular policy of jamming cell phones is relatively minor, it is symbolic of many other more significant intrusions.
They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate.
This is relatively trivial to work around. It goes like this (and it took me all of three minutes to think of it, so unless I'm some kind of super-genius I'm not giving anything away):
1) Plant multiple bombs spaced out along the route--say three or four bombs on a single block. This increases the chance of discovery and the cost of the operation. However, see below regarding what your goal is.
2) Wire the detonators as you so helpfully described--I was not aware of any of that information, although I'm guessing it's all probably a Google away. Now, change the wiring to a setup such that when the phone starts ringing the trigger is "set", and when the phone stops ringing a timer is started. When the timer runs out the bomb explodes. This involves some elementary electronics that you probably know how to do. Hopefully the morons who believe in an invisible old man in the sky do not, although being religious is unfortunately no bar to being technological capable.
3) Give each of your bombs a different time delay.
Result: as the presidential motorcade approaches the mined area you dial the numbers and set the triggers. When the blackout zone covers the area a minute or so later the phones stop ringing and the timers start running. Assume the motorcade is moving at 30 MPH, and the rest is simple arithmetic.
The odds of killing the president with this method are low, but in reality they aren't that great to begin with. You have to ask yourself what the losers who do this kind of thing are after: publicity and disruption and fear. This will generate all of those, and if the president happens to die in the process they will no-doubt consider it a bonus. But just getting a bomb to go off on the same block as the president would probably be considered some kind of victory.
So what the plan to block cell-phones does is reduce the risk to the president from almost zero to really very close to zero, while at the same time increasing the risk to bystanders enormously.
So the summary is: panic wildly? No, probably not. Be concerned and try to take action where possible? Certainly seems sensible.
I think this is a reasonable position. I was verging on wild panic sometime last year, before looking more deeply into the numbers. The figure you found for CO2 forcing was actually about half the figure I had found previously (which I knew to be unreliable, but wasn't sure which way it erred.)
The orbital terms in solar forcing vary extremely slowly. However, the change in effective insolation due to the difference in albedo between the northern and southern hemisphere is huge, something like 10%. But this is not directly comparable to changes in CO2 because it is the result of local differences rather than overall change.
The short timescale for CO2 changes is a bit of a concern, but in a sense it is moot: we know that slow changes can produce results like the Younger Dryas, which returned much of North America to glacial ice in a transition that lasted perhaps as little as a decade, despite the fact that the ultimate forcings were all long-term. They managed to stimulate catastrophic shifts in the continental climate, though, and while any similar event is undoubtedly improbable it is still a tad scary.
My own position is that the economic consequences of global climate change are likely to be quite significant, while the ecological consequences are likely to be quite small, although larger than in some previous climate fluctuations because of humans putting stress on habitats.
The question then becomes: how best to capture the externalities and prevent dumping in the atmospheric commons? History suggests that some kind of market will be the most effective means of doing this, and I find it fairly amusing that many people in favour of action on climate change are opposed to markets and most people against action claim to believe that markets are great things. This suggests that many people in favour of action on climate change are really using it as an excuse to push their own eco-puritan agenda, and many people opposed to action are exactly the sort of eco-criminals who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Thanks! I actually did look moderately hard for it some time ago, but rapidly got lost in a welter of conflicting claims. Not being familiar with the literature in this area is a problem.
So compared to mean insolation of about 250 W/m**2, we are looking at an effect around 0.5%.
So here's my problem: if you read about the Milankovitch cycle explanation of ice ages, you'll find people pointing out that the less than 1% variation in insolation due to changes in eccentricity are not sufficient to explain climate fluxuation in the past few million years. Milankovitch depends on the odd distribution of terrestrial landmasses to explain the large swings in mean global temperature: a variation in solar forcing of less than 1% is widely believed to be insufficient.
So while I am all for reducing our CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions for a variety of sound environmental and economic reasons, am I not sure how to reconcile these two facts: that there is widespread concern that a less than 1% change in radiative forcing due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases is putting us at risk of major climate catastrophe, and a widespread belief that changes in orbital eccentricity alone are insufficient to explain ice ages. The kind of climate events from global warming being talked about in some circles are comparable in scope to ice ages, and yet the forcing involved is actually quite a lot smaller.
Isn't it?
The scientific community isn't bickering about the basic things: that warming is occuring, and that human activity is contributing to it.
Then perhaps you can tell me the figure, in W/m**2/ppm, that CO2 directly contributes to climate forcing.
If we had this figure it would be relatively easy to beat the deniers over the head with it, but I don't seem to be able to find a reliable source for it anywhere.
It seems to me that TFA is as much a myth as the 26 myths it points to.
Whether or not it is a myth, it is extremely curious. The first "myth" is that "human CO2 emissions are too small to matter", and the text goes on to talk about the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere, not its effect on the heat budget of the Earth. This is odd, because the effect on the heat budget of the Earth (independent of any feedbacks) must be well-known, and that is the only figure that is relevant.
It is always bad engineering and bad policy-making practice to drive action based on INPUTs rather than OUTPUTs. The idiots ultimately responsible for Three Mile Island were the engineers who decided that the current running to a valve actuator could be used to measure the state of the actuator, forgetting that sometimes valves jam and so the inputs have nothing to do with the outputs.
In the present case, I don't care how many tonnes of CO2 humans are putting into the atmosphere, and neither does anyone else. I care how many W/m**2 they are adding to the Earth's energy budget. Until we start discussing that figure, we are not talking about climate change at all.
Part of the problem with this issue is that neither side is very honest. Climate change deniers start by denying the brutally obvious fact that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased dramatically in the past century. This is an empirical measurement that only a lunatic would dispute. Having thus destroyed their credibility, they go on to make some interesting and valid points. On the other side of the issue, climate change proponents spend an awful lot of time focusing on INPUT measurements, which doesn't do their credibility any good either, while at the same time doing all kinds of excellent science.
If we could focus on the EFFECT of increased CO2 on the Earth's energy budget we might learn something important because CO2 forcing is global and well-mixed in the atmosphere, and so can be compared to other global forcings like insolation varation.
It's a curious thing that a simple figure like W/m**2/ppm is not universally available and serving as the basis for all these discussions, because if it was, at least both sides would be talking about the same thing, and it would be the thing that matters.
From the website: There is a large amount of relevant material in A New Kind of Science.
a ldetails.html is counter-intuitive: W->0, Y->1, R->2. This means the rules shown in the image are the same, but in a totally different order than the rules as described in the text. What a clever way to confuse the interested but naive reader.
Does it have an explanation of the colour/state pictures he's so fond of showing?
The {state, colour} -> {state, colour, offset} description that makes sense relative to the image below it shown here http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/technic
Call it a pet peeve, but this kind of third-rate presentation and lack of explanation does not bode well for the clarity of the rest of the thinking going in to the problem.
All of the intellectual property laws (copyright, patents, trademarks) treat their respective rights as property.
/.) did a quick search first, and found this: "Subject to the provisions of this title, patents shall have the attributes of personal property." (US Code, Title 35, 265)
I was going to disagree with this, but not being a complete idiot (although for some reason I am still posting on
This does not counter the point I was originally making, which was that "property" is a very poor metaphor for patents, trademarks and copyrights. But it certainly does make clear that the law as it stands in the US very definitely treats such things as property, however poor a metaphor it might be.
Until they tell us specifically which patents are being violated by what software, we cannot take any remedial action.
There are two possible cases: 1) no free software violates any MS patents; and 2) some free software violates some MS patents, but we don't know what software violates what patents because MS refuses to tell us.
Ergo, it is reasonable to assume that since MS has made it impossible for potential infringers to take any action to avoid infringement, that they have an interest in any infringement that occurs. That is, MS is promoting infringement of their own patents.
Indeed, the article says, "But Augustin also acknowledged that it's not in Microsoft's interest to do so: Open-source programmers could rewrite their code to avoid infringing on specific patents, or the courts could find that Microsoft's patent isn't valid."
I am not a lawyer, but when a party promotes the infringement of their own patents it might be reasonable to assume that they may be estopped from ever enforcing those patents in the future.
MS needs to tell us specifically which free software is violating what patents. If they do not tell us that we are justified in assuming that either no free software violates any patents, or that MS is entirely ok with all the free software that violates any of their patents. If they were not ok with it, they would tell us exactly which free software violated exactly what patents.
The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were "intended to consist of" distribution.
(from http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html)
In other news, the Attorney General announced that "suspicion of resisting arrest" will be added to America's criminal law under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution.
"We feel," he said, "that police should have the power to act to detain an individual based on their well-founded suspicions that the individual might resist the lawful actions of police in detaining them."
When asked about the use of the Interstate Commerce clause, he replied, "Obviously, if an individual is going to resist arrest they may do so by crossing state lines. The Constitution is very clear on this. In fact, the President has the power acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief to use the National Guard to detain such individuals. Furthermore, anyone who attempts to avoid arrest on suspicion is obviously guilty of resisting arrest, so we don't feel that it will be necessary, or indeed possible, for this to be tested in the courts. And if anyone attempts to do so, we will simply change the charges against them to something else, like filling out a form."
I continue to be amazed that anyone is taking this seriously. There are ZERO MS patents violated by free software. If MS says otherwise, SHOW US THE PATENTS. If you won't do that, shut up and go home.
The only answer to anyone making such outrageous claims is to ask them, "Which patents?"
Imagine the following conversation:
Company: "You have 112 unpaid invoices."
Human being: "What are the invoice numbers?"
Company: "We won't tell you."
Human being: "Then how am I supposed to pay them?"
Company: "You aren't. We're just going to threaten you with them until we do what we want."
Human being: "...?"
That is exactly what MS are saying: you owe us, but we won't tell you why or how much. Now pay up.
As a Linux user, I'm wondering if I should contact MS demanding to be notified of exactly what patents are violated by software in the Ubuntu 7.01 and Slackware 11.0 distros. As a concerned citizen I am most desirous that I not use any violating software, but unless I know a) what the software in question is and b) what the patent it violates it is, I have no way of independently verifying that it is infringing. Therefore, unless they can provide me with evidence NOW that the software I am using is infringing, I will consider them estopped from ever enforcing their patents.
I'm not a lawyer and not sure if the doctrine of estopel applies, but I'm pretty sure if we all send registered letters to MS asking for immediate notification as to a) what software is violating MS patents and b) what specific patents each specific piece of software is violating that we can all plausibly claim, in the absence of an answer, that MS has no further claim on us with regard to this.
Anyone know the address of the MS legal department?
There is no such thing as an Intellectual Property law. That's a big blanket that the megacorps want to pull over our eyes in order to gain more power.
And they are doing a fine job of it, with the uncritical repetition in this article of curious notion of "intellectual property thieves".
Intellectual "property" is a terrible metaphor. "Property" is a legal machine that is designed to enforce capture of negative externalities. That is, when you own property, you are responsible for its upkeep. Without property rights you could dump your wastes or graze your sheep on the commons, and not ever pay any costs for that. The notion of property, first and foremost, forces you to pay your own way on your own property.
Intellectual "property" on the other hand is a legal machine that is intended to enforce capture of positive externalities: good things that happen to other people because of your work.
Patents, trademarks and copyright are sufficiently unlike property that any attempt to reason about them using property metaphors is doomed to failure from the outset. It is a tad disturbing that this failed metaphor has become so much a part of the popular legal consciousness that even the Attorney General is able to remember it.
This is not to say that individuals cannot have rights in patents, trademarks and copyrights. But those rights are not ownership rights to property, and violating those rights is not theft.
Tell us what patents, exactly, are infringed and what software, exactly, is infringing.
No Free Software infringes on any Microsoft patents. We can say this with absolute confidence.
I mean really, "You infringe on 235 patents, but we're not going to tell you which ones!"
I'd LOVE to see them say that in court.
MS is engaging in what MS has always engaged in: intimidation and FUD. There is nothing that needs to be said in reply to this except, "Which ones?" So long as MS does not answer that, we know the answer: NONE.
but seriously. It orbits very close to its sun so is anyone surprised the damn thing is really hot?
The interesting science is how the temperature is distributed, not that it is really hot. The planet is almost certainly tidally locked, so one side faces the star all the time. However, the hottest part of the planet is not at the "high noon" position on the "surface" (which for some reason is what the article calls the cloud-tops).
The highest temperature region is about 30 degrees (angle, not temperature!) away from high noon. This, plus the relatively small temperature difference between the light hemisphere and dark hemisphere tell us that the planetary atmosphere is subject to extremely high winds, which are distributing the heat.
This is a fascinating way of probing the dynamics of planetary atmospheres under extreme conditions.
Sorry, but putting a steaming mug of coffee between your thighs in a moving car is just plain and simply dumb.
Indeed, but as she did nothing of the kind I am curious as to why you are bringing it up.
This incident has been documented and described to death. Wikipedia has a reasonably balanced description of the case, including the fact that the woman put the coffee between her knees, and the car was stationary. If you don't like Wikipedia the same facts can be found in many other places, and they are not disputed by anyone who has access to the court documents.
So the facts, as opposed to falsehoods like the claim quoted above, are widely and easily available. And yet people like you keep trying to make the facts into something other than what they are, even though the actual facts are almost instantaneously available to everyone.
Why is this? Do you really believe that saying something again and again in a loud angry voice will change reality to conform to your prejudices?
There is a debate to be had regarding tort reform, but like any debate it can only start when both sides stop lying and start trying to get at the truth. Otherwise what one has isn't a debate, but posturing and politics.
Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago?
Newton actually entertained the idea that the universe is the result of God's active attention, so it was being literally supported every instant by an act of God's will. If God ever stopped paying attention, the universe would simply blink out. Of course, it could blink back in at any future (or past!) state of evolution just as easily.
From a computational perspective, one might look at this as a serialization issue. It is perfectly possible to serialize a simulation and then restart it at a later date. It is not uncommon to serialize long-running simulations every hour or so just to be sure you can restart them if the power happens to go out or something equally bad happens in the middle of a run. On this basis, the notion of when the simulation "really" started is meaningless: from within the sim you can't tell if it has been running all along, or if it has been restarted from a serialized version of itself, or it has been newly started from a hand-rolled self-consistent set of data files.
Of course, to believe any of this about the universe is to abandon science for the sake of nonsense for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Only an idiot would waste more than a few idle moments on such speculation.
Like the last poster, you apparently have "criminal" confused with something you simply don't like.
No, in this case I am using "criminal" to mean: arrogating powers to oneself that are not granted by the Constitution. This is a principled disagreement, and introducing the straw person of my individual preference is a logical fallacy. Please note that I am not an American, and have serious doubts about the viability of a written constitution. But the fact remains that your constitution, as written, is being violated by the president under the guise of signing statements.
If you disagree, please point me to the clause(s) in the Constitution that gives the president the power to sign into law and then ignore parts of a bill that he believes to be unconstitutional. To be credible, your interpretation of said clause(s) must be backed by case law, particularly with respect to the Presentment Clause.
Note that I am not saying that President is wrong in his interpretation of these laws. That is an irrelevant issue. I am saying he is certainly and without question wrong in signing bills into law and then ignoring the provisions of them that he believes are unconstitutional. He has no power to do this under the Constitution, and therefore I am labelling that behaviour criminal, regardless of whether or not I like it.
They are simply clarifications of policy.
It is not and cannot be "policy" to violate the law. Crime is not a policy. But the current president's signing statements routinely say that he will ignore and violate at will certain provisions when he is "acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief."
If the President believes some part of a law places unconstitutional restrictions on his powers as Commander in Chief he has one and only one option under the Constitution, and that is to veto it. Signing statements have no force in law, and if the president signs a law and then violates it he is subject to impeachment regardless of what any signing statement says.
This is not policy. It is criminal.
As someone who has spent the last six years investigating controversial science, I have a good sense of the difficulties of new, poorly-understood science.
As someone who has actually done controversial science for a living, I have a good sense of how all science worth doing is new and poorly understood, and how little appreciation of that fact people on the fringe have.
In every experiment there are things that make you go, "Hmmm..." Almost all of the time they are irrelevant, and it is a matter of taste and good judgement as to when you spend the time and effort to follow up on them. People who have never done real experiments or who are very badly trained fail to appreciate this, and therefore ascribe to every anomaly a significance that it does not have.
There are several consequences of this: good scientists sometimes miss significant anomalies; bad scientists sometimes make important discoveries; good scientists spend almost all their time generating well-quantified reproducible results that accumulate to the betterment of humanity; bad scientists spend almost all their time pursuing irrelevant anomalies and telling everyone how smart they are.
Every experimental scientist knows that it is possible to prove a negative, and we do it all the time. They are called null results. The entire field of physics beyond the standard model has been generating reams of these for the past couple of decades. We know, for example, that neutrinoless double beta decay does NOT happen with a lifetime of less than some large number. The ABSENCE of a signal is the result. Likewise, we know that the 17 keV neutrino does NOT exist, and the experiments that proved it were designed in the manner of all such: they demonstrated that A=>B, and then showed !B, and therefore !A by modus tollens.
For example, if you have a working tachometer, and it reads zero, your engine is not running, because if your engine is running your working tachometer will read more than 100 RPM. Any such experiment involves a good deal of secondary experimental work to demonstrate that the tachometer really is working, and isolating it from any possible unexpected effects, but at the end of the day you are always detecting a phenomenon that is well-known, like a beta spectrum or the number of neutrons being produced, or in the case of a tachometer a spinning shaft.
Fringe scientists have a tendency to invoke "new physics" to explain why no one else measures the shaft spinning when they do. Good scientists understand that spinning is spinning, no matter what causes it, and that for the fringe scientist to be right everything we know about tachometers must be wrong, and that is simply not plausible.
The algorithms used were inspired by spoken syntax:
Which may not be all that relevant to the comprehension of written language.
One aspect the linked article emphasizes is that spoken language is ephemeral, whereas written language is permanent. This is a large difference, as anyone who can read a second language with relative fluency but understand the spoken form hardly at all knows.
For this and many other reasons (no one speaks like a textbook or scientific paper for a reason--writing is far more effective at conveying certain types of information) it is problematic to claim without proof that "making writing more like speech is a good thing." In some cases it is probably true. In lots of other cases it may well be false. It will depend on the nature of the information being conveyed.
He goes into fairly convincing arguments for why we are advancing faster and faster...
But we aren't. Consider:
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. By the time she was my age (early forties) she had seen heavier than air flight used in warfare and commerce, the end of the age of sail, the invention, commercialisation and massive popularisation of radio, massive urban electrification, and the coming of the mass-produced automobile, just to name a few of the bigger changes. Oh yeah, and votes for women amongst at least some of the English-speaking peoples.
I have seen human beings walk on the moon, the advent of ubiquitous computing and the Internet. Those are the only changes comparable to those on the incomplete list I've given above that occurred in the first forty-odd years of my grandmother's life, and the first one has nothing like the social relevance of any of those changes.
The pace of technological change is slowing down, and has been doing so my whole lifetime. I do not expect the trend to reverse itself any time soon.
Depending on how you measure it, the pace of scientific change is arguably slowing even more rapidly (especially if considered on a per-scientist basis!)
I'm not saying this to be all depressing: we continue to do remarkable things, and mapping extra-galactic dark matter (which is of course completely different from and unrelated to galactic dark matter) is remarkable. But I believe it is false to suggest that "the Singularity" is in the future: it is in the past. It happened sometime between 1903 and 1969, with good odds on July 16th, 1945 at a place called Alamogordo.
In this sense, this gives the consumer the choice to either buy or rent.
How do I return the bits I've rented after I'm done with them?
This regenerative braking technology is why hybrids get better gas mileage in stop-and-go city driving than on the highway.
Half true, or perhaps one third. Hybrids also get better gas mileage because when stopped in stop-and-go city driving they use no fuel. That's a huge gain. Also, energy capture during regenerative braking is imperfect both because it is easy to exceed the maximum charging rate of the batteries, and also because the charge/discharge cycle is not all that efficient (about 70% both ways, if memory serves.)
In any case, things that exist are better than things that do not. Hybrids actually exist. I can't tell from the article if the intelligent technology being talked about is anything other than a simulation. But I am sure I can't go down to my local car dealer and buy a car so equipped, whereas I can certainly buy a hybrid.
Finally, the only reason the story sets up a false and misleading opposition between hybrids and intelligent driving choices (whether human or automated) is that lies of this kind get more eyeballs on the page and sell more advertising, and who wouldn't want to get their knowledge about the future of technology from such a pristine and unsullied source?