Atmospheric transmission windows in the near and mid-infrared are adequate for detecting fires. Fires cannot be seen under heavy cloud cover, and can be detected with reduced sensitivity under smoke and thin clouds, depending on the wavelength of the detectors, smoke particulate size, and moisture content of the atmospheric column.
Noticed the summary is now "Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop". That's no longer the exact opposite of the truth, at least, but it's still false for Chrome. The Google article only says
we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015.
That's it. In other words, like Mozilla, Google has no plans to end XP support, but unlike Mozilla, they are promising support for a specific time. The fact that they don't commit to more than a year's extra support doesn't prove they intend to stop after that - for example, they've only committed to keeping Google Voice free for a year at a time, and it's still free years later.
The linked article, posted 20 hours ago, actually says
Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."
We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.
For starters, make it illegal for the NSA to deliberately weaken cryptography standards. Large, powerful countries such as Russia and China (with nuclear arsenals that could wipe out most of our population) continue to be a much greater potential threat to the average American than terrorists, despite the end of the Cold War, and the fact that the latter make a lot of noise. The US is still the most technologically advanced country, and when communication isn't secure, by osmosis most technology flows from us to them, making us less secure. Most media-obsessed Americans don't realize that (since unlike Al Qaeda, Russia and China don't normally threaten to blow us up), but the NSA should, and weakening standards so they can hoover up more data increases their own power, so guess what their priorities are.
On the other hand, Snowden didn't know he'd be able to get asylum, and the death penalty was only taken off the table in an attempt to keep the Russians from giving it to him.
The article and the abstract didn't specify the probability of winning the $20 (the full paper is paywalled). In any case, the article said that old people were more likely to play it safe when gambling on earnings, so I'd guess that the probability was higher than 25% and they chose the $5 anyway, not the $20.
Wikipedia agrees that the distinction is usually made on source as opposed to energy, and points out that how it's done depends on the field of study (for example, in astronomy it's made based on energy since the source may be uncertain). Personally I think it should always be done based on energy alone and that these different fields should standardize on that.
Of course, this is dependent on the company's honesty. Large companies will probably just lie (by continuing to update their "not contacted" statement), and if necessary be given retroactive immunity for doing it.
I've virtually never had to do that. I did find that it's possible to access the site in Linux via https://aboutthedata.com/portal/home/ rather than the top page.
But perhaps what I found most amusing was that it indicated my OS of choice was Windows. I haven't owned a Windows computer in a long time.
Well, he couldn't be a Linux user, since the site doesn't work in Linux (at least not with Fedora 19 and Firefox 23). You see a dot animation in the center of the screen, but the full page never loads. It works fine running the same browser in Windows XP.
Then there's ignosticism, which is basically the belief that the question of whether God exists doesn't even make sense since no one has provided a coherent definition of God. From the link:
A simplified maxim on the subject states "An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '."
What we realized is that genome sequencing technology is plummeting in cost and increasing in speed independent of our competition. Today, companies can do this for less than $5,000 per genome, in a few days or less - and are moving quickly towards the goals we set for the prize.
If you look at the graphs at https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ what it actually shows is that after plummeting faster than Moore's Law for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, the cost has been basically flat for the past year and a half, probably due to lack of competition.
According to TFA most incidents were "self reported", meaning someone failed a polygraph. Since polygraphs are bullshit we know a lot of times the criminal abusing this power got away with it.
Not to mention that it's not in the NSA's self-interest to learn about these cases, since it makes them look bad. So they probably don't ask more than the most perfunctory questions in this area.
Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.
Which is exactly what you'd expect if the probability of getting caught is close to zero and the true number of cases is much larger.
Or maybe it's just a trap to flush out potential leakers, sort of like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, except with a stick instead of a carrot (make the sysadmins think they have nothing to lose). In which case they'll drop the idea after catching as many of them as possible.
It is a lot harder to get a hold of 500,000 classified documents and walk out of the office with them.
That's true, but it also makes it infeasible to do a search through those documents in a reasonable time, at least with the same generality as a computer search.
Schneier is assuming that it matters if a company's customers trust it. But with the relative lack of ISP competition in the US, where are customers of large ISPs supposed to go? What difference does it make whether their customers trust them?
The Internet Archive originally had all the issues except for February 1984, but some others have since been removed at the request of the content provider. Most if not all of the original Archive issues are available on a torrent created before they went missing. (No, it wasn't me.)
Unfortunately, at least some of the issues were scanned selectively, with some ads being left out, for example.
When the PAEA was passed in late 2006, it was at right about the peak in total mail volume (which of course they didn't know at the time) and the recession was still 2 years off. Everyone (Democrats, Republicans, and the postal service and unions) thought the prefunding was easily affordable, so it passed with bipartisan support. For example see this from the NALC (the main letter carrier's union) giving it high praise. (Although after things went sour, they started insinuating that it had been shoved down their throats, and pretty much everyone believes that by now.) Prior to 2006 there was no prefunding requirement at all, so it was just bad timing - it would have been fine if done 5 or 10 years earlier.
By the way, the correct prefunding figure is actually 50 years (see this and this which debunk the oft-repeated false value of 75 years).
The correct figure is 50 years (according to section 8909a of the PAEA), not 75. The PAEA does not specify 75 years anywhere at all. See here and here. Given that a postal worker can start working in their late teens and retire in their 40s, a 50-year requirement is perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, as the first link says, once you've gotten enough people, even "journalists", to repeat an unsubstantiated claim, there's no killing it (not even here at Slashdot, where people like to believe they check their facts). In this case, the false claim was apparently first made by the NALC and the NRLCA, two postal carrier unions. Neither of them has ever substantiated the claim. The NRLCA merely says it's "widely cited" (of course, that was the plan). The NALC simply refuses to respond to requests.
The rumor that the PAEA was a Republican plot is also false. This was before the 2008 recession, and total mail volume peaked around 2006 (although first class volume peaked in 2001 and was already dropping), so at the time everyone involved (Republicans, Democrats, postal management, and postal unions, with the possible exception of the APWU) thought the prefunding was affordable. It passed with bipartisan support. For the NALC's opinion of it at the time, see this. Note the almost total praise. The only criticism was a now completely forgotten provision that requires injured postal employees to wait three days before qualifying for Continuation of Pay. The NALC has never actually claimed that it was a Republican plot, though it now serves their purposes for people to believe that. They don't have to, there are enough left-leaning bloggers to do the job for them (along with spreading the false 75 year figure).
If there are advanced civilizations there, they've already intercepted our radio and TV signals. In fact, by monitoring the changes in our atmosphere, they could have detected our presence centuries ago, and been able to estimate when we would start transmitting, before we even knew what electromagnetic waves were. This is true even assuming they're not capable of interstellar travel.
Worse than 'a generalization': if this conjecture is true, FLT is a trivial consequence. That's a clue that Beal's conjecture is likely significantly harder than Fermat's.
If a claim makes unnecessary assumptions, then the simplest proof for it doesn't necessarily make use of those assumptions. They may simply cause people to waste time trying to find proofs that incorporate them.
Slashdot Mirror
The only mention of cloud cover I could find was in the full paper:
FUEGO — Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit — A Proposed Early-Warning Fire Detection System
One quote from the paper:
Atmospheric transmission windows in the near and mid-infrared are adequate for detecting fires. Fires
cannot be seen under heavy cloud cover, and can be detected with reduced sensitivity under smoke and
thin clouds, depending on the wavelength of the detectors, smoke particulate size, and moisture content
of the atmospheric column.
Noticed the summary is now "Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop". That's no longer the exact opposite of the truth, at least, but it's still false for Chrome. The Google article only says
we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015.
That's it. In other words, like Mozilla, Google has no plans to end XP support, but unlike Mozilla, they are promising support for a specific time. The fact that they don't commit to more than a year's extra support doesn't prove they intend to stop after that - for example, they've only committed to keeping Google Voice free for a year at a time, and it's still free years later.
The linked article, posted 20 hours ago, actually says
Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."
and basically the same for Chrome.
New Heart Device Allows Cheney To Experience Love
We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.
For starters, make it illegal for the NSA to deliberately weaken cryptography standards. Large, powerful countries such as Russia and China (with nuclear arsenals that could wipe out most of our population) continue to be a much greater potential threat to the average American than terrorists, despite the end of the Cold War, and the fact that the latter make a lot of noise. The US is still the most technologically advanced country, and when communication isn't secure, by osmosis most technology flows from us to them, making us less secure. Most media-obsessed Americans don't realize that (since unlike Al Qaeda, Russia and China don't normally threaten to blow us up), but the NSA should, and weakening standards so they can hoover up more data increases their own power, so guess what their priorities are.
On the other hand, Snowden didn't know he'd be able to get asylum, and the death penalty was only taken off the table in an attempt to keep the Russians from giving it to him.
The article and the abstract didn't specify the probability of winning the $20 (the full paper is paywalled). In any case, the article said that old people were more likely to play it safe when gambling on earnings, so I'd guess that the probability was higher than 25% and they chose the $5 anyway, not the $20.
Wikipedia agrees that the distinction is usually made on source as opposed to energy, and points out that how it's done depends on the field of study (for example, in astronomy it's made based on energy since the source may be uncertain). Personally I think it should always be done based on energy alone and that these different fields should standardize on that.
Snowden didn't commit treason either. In 1945 the Supreme Court ruled that treason requires adhering to a specific enemy, which neither of them did.
Of course, this is dependent on the company's honesty. Large companies will probably just lie (by continuing to update their "not contacted" statement), and if necessary be given retroactive immunity for doing it.
I've virtually never had to do that. I did find that it's possible to access the site in Linux via https://aboutthedata.com/portal/home/ rather than the top page.
But perhaps what I found most amusing was that it indicated my OS of choice was Windows. I haven't owned a Windows computer in a long time.
Well, he couldn't be a Linux user, since the site doesn't work in Linux (at least not with Fedora 19 and Firefox 23). You see a dot animation in the center of the screen, but the full page never loads. It works fine running the same browser in Windows XP.
Then there's ignosticism, which is basically the belief that the question of whether God exists doesn't even make sense since no one has provided a coherent definition of God. From the link:
A simplified maxim on the subject states "An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '."
What we realized is that genome sequencing technology is plummeting in cost and increasing in speed independent of our competition. Today, companies can do this for less than $5,000 per genome, in a few days or less - and are moving quickly towards the goals we set for the prize.
If you look at the graphs at https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ what it actually shows is that after plummeting faster than Moore's Law for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, the cost has been basically flat for the past year and a half, probably due to lack of competition.
According to TFA most incidents were "self reported", meaning someone failed a polygraph. Since polygraphs are bullshit we know a lot of times the criminal abusing this power got away with it.
Not to mention that it's not in the NSA's self-interest to learn about these cases, since it makes them look bad. So they probably don't ask more than the most perfunctory questions in this area.
Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.
Which is exactly what you'd expect if the probability of getting caught is close to zero and the true number of cases is much larger.
Or maybe it's just a trap to flush out potential leakers, sort of like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, except with a stick instead of a carrot (make the sysadmins think they have nothing to lose). In which case they'll drop the idea after catching as many of them as possible.
It is a lot harder to get a hold of 500,000 classified documents and walk out of the office with them.
That's true, but it also makes it infeasible to do a search through those documents in a reasonable time, at least with the same generality as a computer search.
Schneier is assuming that it matters if a company's customers trust it. But with the relative lack of ISP competition in the US, where are customers of large ISPs supposed to go? What difference does it make whether their customers trust them?
The Internet Archive originally had all the issues except for February 1984, but some others have since been removed at the request of the content provider. Most if not all of the original Archive issues are available on a torrent created before they went missing. (No, it wasn't me.)
Unfortunately, at least some of the issues were scanned selectively, with some ads being left out, for example.
When the PAEA was passed in late 2006, it was at right about the peak in total mail volume (which of course they didn't know at the time) and the recession was still 2 years off. Everyone (Democrats, Republicans, and the postal service and unions) thought the prefunding was easily affordable, so it passed with bipartisan support. For example see this from the NALC (the main letter carrier's union) giving it high praise. (Although after things went sour, they started insinuating that it had been shoved down their throats, and pretty much everyone believes that by now.) Prior to 2006 there was no prefunding requirement at all, so it was just bad timing - it would have been fine if done 5 or 10 years earlier.
By the way, the correct prefunding figure is actually 50 years (see this and this which debunk the oft-repeated false value of 75 years).
The correct figure is 50 years (according to section 8909a of the PAEA), not 75. The PAEA does not specify 75 years anywhere at all. See here and here. Given that a postal worker can start working in their late teens and retire in their 40s, a 50-year requirement is perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, as the first link says, once you've gotten enough people, even "journalists", to repeat an unsubstantiated claim, there's no killing it (not even here at Slashdot, where people like to believe they check their facts). In this case, the false claim was apparently first made by the NALC and the NRLCA, two postal carrier unions. Neither of them has ever substantiated the claim. The NRLCA merely says it's "widely cited" (of course, that was the plan). The NALC simply refuses to respond to requests.
The rumor that the PAEA was a Republican plot is also false. This was before the 2008 recession, and total mail volume peaked around 2006 (although first class volume peaked in 2001 and was already dropping), so at the time everyone involved (Republicans, Democrats, postal management, and postal unions, with the possible exception of the APWU) thought the prefunding was affordable. It passed with bipartisan support. For the NALC's opinion of it at the time, see this. Note the almost total praise. The only criticism was a now completely forgotten provision that requires injured postal employees to wait three days before qualifying for Continuation of Pay. The NALC has never actually claimed that it was a Republican plot, though it now serves their purposes for people to believe that. They don't have to, there are enough left-leaning bloggers to do the job for them (along with spreading the false 75 year figure).
If there are advanced civilizations there, they've already intercepted our radio and TV signals. In fact, by monitoring the changes in our atmosphere, they could have detected our presence centuries ago, and been able to estimate when we would start transmitting, before we even knew what electromagnetic waves were. This is true even assuming they're not capable of interstellar travel.
While it raises important issues, I'm struggling to find sympathy for him personally, as he has committed an extremely serious act of treason.
Although he did break the law, he did not commit treason.
Worse than 'a generalization': if this conjecture is true, FLT is a trivial consequence. That's a clue that Beal's conjecture is likely significantly harder than Fermat's.
If a claim makes unnecessary assumptions, then the simplest proof for it doesn't necessarily make use of those assumptions. They may simply cause people to waste time trying to find proofs that incorporate them.