The real question, always ignored, is how much are we altering things? Pro and anti global warming "sides" both seem to agree on the patently false assumption that the environment is static without human intervention.
I don't think any reasonable person thinks the climate is static. But as the human population grows and we alter many aspects of the planet, it becomes even more important to consider the impact we are making on the planet. We're well on the way down the road of doing things that cannot be undone. Maybe those have no impact, but if they do, it's a problem that will only get harder to address as time goes on. Considering we only currently have one habitable planet, it seems the prudent course of action is to try and minimize the alterations we do to the environment until we really understand what the consequences are.
Another big part of the climate science going on is not just determining the cause of change in the climate, but also trying to understand the effects of climate change. Man may not have an effect on changing the climate, the but the changing climate will certainly have an effect on man. Even if we decide nothing we do will have an effect on altering the course of the changing climate, it would be pretty stupid to not try to figure out the possible outcomes of the changing climate and figuring out how to respond to it.
Or, I can just say, f*ck it... I'll be dead soon enough and someone else can deal with it, whether I caused any of it or not. At that point it's not my problem... just my legacy.
Actually, the same site that PDF came from says the biggest source from LCDs is the video cable, especially if the signal is all digital. This would be an improvement over a CRT because the CRT will shares the video cable problem.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html My experience so far has been that with LCDs, the video cable is the most significant source of radiated information leakage. Where an analogue video cable (with 15-pin VGA connector) is used, low-pass filtered fonts have the same benefits as with CRTs. Where a purely digital video cable is used (DVI-D, laptop-internal displays with FPD/LVDS links, etc.) only the last step, namely randomizing the least-significant bits, should be implemented.
Where the video signal is entirely encoded in digital form, the low-pass filtered step will not have the desired effect. In fact, it can actually increase the differences between the signal generated by individual characters, and thereby make automatic radio character recognition more reliable.
I suspect there is already an encrypted standard for digital monitor signals so implementing that, even if you have a leaky connection, should probably thwart most attempts to intercept. Then considering that the video images during voting are fairly static, you could probably set up extra circuitry where you don't have to continually transmit the entire screen ever x times a second, just what changes, and only when it changes. Or you could even transmit parts of the screen out of order.
But just switching to LCD and focusing on securing the connection would be an improvement over CRT.
I think the idea of his proposed tax rebates are to cover low-income households. Every household would be entitled to a certain amount of energy without tax. Use more than that, then pay the extra tax.
People already have significantly lower taxes in addition to tax credits for each child they have. From a tax perspective, there's already plenty of tax incentives to procreate.
You don't have any kids, own a home, and pay a ton of school taxes - what about the jerk down the road who has 5 children and lives in an apartment?
I have no kids and pay property taxes because I own a house (with the bank). And sure, there are people who are poor with lots of kids and maybe they're renting. I have no problem funding the schools and here are some thoughts:
1) even if the guy is renting, the owner of the apartment is paying the same taxes and that will have to be covered by the rent 2) if those kids are poor, the very best thing we can do to ensure they don't stay poor the rest of their lives is to educate them well 3) even if I don't have kids, I benefit from others' kids being educated because they'll have better jobs, make more money, and buy the stuff my company sells 4) the taxes I pay that support schools are entirely local taxes. That means I have a much better chance of being able to influence how they are used
As a grown-up, I pay taxes for a lot of things and many of those don't directly benefit me. However I also realize that living in a country founded on democratic principles, these taxes are my responsibility and duty to pay.
As for teachers selling lesson plans, I am concerned that teachers should be using their "on the clock" prep periods to create lesson plans (that's what teachers I know do, or claim to do). Or, if it's part of the contractual obligation of their jobs to produce these plans (even if they end up doing it "at home"), and that's part of what they're already getting paid for, it doesn't seem right that they should be then able to sell them to other teachers/school-districts. And are they starting with resources that their districts already bought? And are they using paid-for class time to test and refine these plans?
And who is actually paying for them? Is the money paid the personal money of the teachers or are they charging their school districts the cost of the materials? It wouldn't be right if my school district is buying lesson plans and then the teachers are tweaking them and then turning around and selling them.
I think it boils down to the idea that if the teachers are already being paid to make lesson plans, then those plan are "work for hire" and they should not be able to sell them and profit yet again.
This really just shows how weak the prosecution's case was. I suspect they locked him up in Rikers for 12 days to hopefully get him to just give up and plead guilty to a lesser charge. That way they get a conviction, the city is "tough on crime", and they didn't actually have to make the effort of putting together an actual case in front of a judge and jury.
When they can make your life miserable until you confess, there's no need for a presumption of innocence. This guy got lucky that he had eye witnesses and technological records that supported his innocence.
I'm the same way... I've never had a cable subscription since I left my parents' house a couple decades ago. By virtue of higher mathematics and assuming $50/month, that's $12k.
Or even large optical telescopes. Imagine if the lens could be manufactured on the moon, you could build a telescope much larger than any orbiting platform could support.
Plus, there's just the engineering solutions that would have to be invented and developed to even support any kind of settlement on the moon.
There are huge potentials for exciting new technologies and knowledge available when you start working out how to live and work on the moon.
I just hope I live long enough to spend some time there.
Your point about the composition of the moon makes sense, but your citing mines going deep doesn't.
The deepest mine is about 4km, and compared to the Earth's diameter of 12.7k km, that's not very deep. To scrape enough mass off the surface of the Earth to make the moon, you'd probably be going deeper than most mines.
However, I suspect that while there are rich veins of metal in the surface of the Earth, most of the metal is below the surface, in the mantle and the core. But none of our mines go anywhere near that deep.
Just because no model can effectively predict what the stock market will do tomorrow does not mean that economic modeling is useless.
That reminds me of a favorite quote of mine: All models are wrong. Some are useful.
I'm neither an economist nor a computer scientist, but it seems to me that if you look at sets of economic data, such as wealth distributions, it really seems that there must be some "fundamental law" driving the patterns - since they seem to come up over and over again. Determining that law is probably pretty hard, if not impossible. However as you appear to say, there is still value in attempting to describe what's going on mathematically.
As an analogy, the Traveling Salesman problem apparently can never be "solved", however very useful information can be found from approximations and analytical methods. It would be stupid for UPS or the postal service to say "it can't be solved, oh well" and never at least try to come up with something better than having their drivers randomly drive around.
Others here point out that individual human beings are economically irrational and erratic. That makes them very difficult to model in many cases, and that once they are aware of analysis, they are likely to change their behavior. Looking for a "fundamental law", this sounds a lot like "collapsing the wave function" in quantum mechanics or even the "uncertainty principle".
I don't know exactly how hard it is to predict the behavior of a single electron, but we benefit greatly from being able to model and predict behavior of lots of them (PSPICE works pretty well at modeling circuits, but would be impossible if it had to model every individual electron in the circuit). Likewise, there are probably ways to fairly accurately model and describe human behavior in aggregate, even if you can't accurately deal with a single individual.
I may be biased, however, since I do like working with modeling & simulation. I'm probably wrong, but sometimes I'm useful.
I think the idea is that the plastic is supposed to have a property that helps cause a reflected glare from the flash. While taking a picture, I've looked at things and been able to see them but when I take the shot, the glare from the reflected flash makes part of the photo "invisible".
I suspect the ones that are illegal have the potential to work.
I've used Knoppix in the past (the CD image) and it had an hd-install option that would put itself on the harddrive. You would be able to tell if X works using just the live CD then decide if you want to install.
The millimeter wave machines in US airports are passive, not active. So this is all interesting but academic.
You're only partially correct. The article you linked above clearly contrasted the hand-held millimeter devices by pointing out they are passive. However, the large walk-through devices already in use in several airports actively emit millimeter radiation. So it's not merely an academic point.
"... killing a violent criminal should be unlawful, but killing an unborn child should be lawful."
It seems to me the right, while claiming to be the "culture of life" is equally inconsistent when it chalks up killing innocent civilians as mere "collateral damage".
Calling a sociologist a scientist analogous to calling a chiropractor a doctor.
Are you saying that there is no scientific merit to studying systems of people people and societies? Or are you saying that sociologists don't know how to apply the scientific method in their studies?
If it's the former, that seems to me an ignorant position to take. Social systems may be messier and less predictable than other physical systems, but that just means the job of trying to derive laws of social science is harder than in the "hard" sciences. If it's the latter, why don't you apply some scientific method and publish some ground-breaking paper that will show those sociologists how it's done and win yourself the Nobel prize?
You'd also have to factor in how much money he could have made during that year pre-degree compared to having that year post-degree. Hopefully he got a much better job after the degree, so that if he was able to pay the private loan off in under 3 years, it was really just an irritating nuisance.
You can always walk away and not want the loan. Universities do not posess some secret knowledge, it's all in the books and if you can read you can learn. Smart employers will ignore your lack of degree if instead you present a lot of experience.
That's not the case if you want to be a professional engineer (a requirement in most places to be the engineer that signs off and takes liability for a project). Note the first requirement:
Step 1: Graduation - The first step is graduating from an ABET-accredited engineering program at a college or university.
Sure, you can learn all this on your own, and to be a good engineer, you indeed have to keep learning on your own. But you NEED that piece of paper if you want to be anything more than an engineer technician.
And what if you want to be a lawyer? There are only 4 states that allow you to sit the Bar exam without a law degree, but that's only if you work under a judge for an extended period of time.
While I would agree with you and go so far as to say that all learning must be done by the individual, there are indeed situations (and benefits) where you have to have that piece of paper from a school that says they've vetted you for a minimum amount of knowledge.
Maybe "smart" employers will ignore your knowledge without a degree, but they'll also pay you less. Someone doing the same job and with equivalent skills, who also has a degree, will almost always make more. The trick for them was to make sure they'll make enough more so that they can pay off the loans and still be ahead.
However, most employers aren't smart, they're safe. And hiring the graduate is the safe thing to do.
It is most certainly a root-cause. You're confusing desire with economic demand. The demand can only be realized because of the abundance of student loans. Decrease the availability of student loans and the demand that the be realized by the schools will go down, even while the desire for students to attend may stay the same.
Demand is only a useful term in that it is a desire for a product that can actually be acted upon.
I think they are only talking about the location of the Voyager spacecraft as a reference, I don't think there's any suggestion that they would have been expected to detect a large scale effect like this
Plus, I suspect the Voyager craft were not equipped to detect this particular phenomena. However, if they were colliding with a lot more particles than expected, or got caught in a flow of particles, over a long period of time, that might impact their trajectories.
I've read that the courses Pioneer craft have changed in slow and unexplainable ways. I can't find if the Voyager craft have experienced the same thing. But maybe this phenomena could be part of the explanation.
I just love how we keep finding new things that challenge what we knew before.
If you had the flu, you wouldn't confuse it with a standard cold.
That's spot on. A lot of people call whatever they have "the flu" when they just have a common rhinovirus. I probably get a cold once or twice a year and it sucks... can't breathe well, sleeping's a pain, and you just wish it would go away.
I've had the flu once. And with the body aches, shivers, inability to eat or drink (and keep it down), I just wished _I_ would away. I was out for more than 2 weeks and was a bit shaky and week for a couple more. That night when the fever finally broke was like a ray of sunshine.
You're right, once you've had the flu, you'll never mistake it for a cold again.
That was a fantastic post, and spelled out the problem succinctly.
Another reply mentions that the approach from this article paints a lot of innocent people as guilty. But a big part of the problem is that even if the sexist behaviors are committed by a minority, the "innocent" majority that stands by and does nothing are still contributing to the problem.
I wish I could give you mod points instead of this reply.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question, always ignored, is how much are we altering things? Pro and anti global warming "sides" both seem to agree on the patently false assumption that the environment is static without human intervention.
I don't think any reasonable person thinks the climate is static. But as the human population grows and we alter many aspects of the planet, it becomes even more important to consider the impact we are making on the planet. We're well on the way down the road of doing things that cannot be undone. Maybe those have no impact, but if they do, it's a problem that will only get harder to address as time goes on. Considering we only currently have one habitable planet, it seems the prudent course of action is to try and minimize the alterations we do to the environment until we really understand what the consequences are.
Another big part of the climate science going on is not just determining the cause of change in the climate, but also trying to understand the effects of climate change. Man may not have an effect on changing the climate, the but the changing climate will certainly have an effect on man. Even if we decide nothing we do will have an effect on altering the course of the changing climate, it would be pretty stupid to not try to figure out the possible outcomes of the changing climate and figuring out how to respond to it.
Or, I can just say, f*ck it... I'll be dead soon enough and someone else can deal with it, whether I caused any of it or not. At that point it's not my problem... just my legacy.
Actually, the same site that PDF came from says the biggest source from LCDs is the video cable, especially if the signal is all digital. This would be an improvement over a CRT because the CRT will shares the video cable problem.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html
My experience so far has been that with LCDs, the video cable is the most significant source of radiated information leakage. Where an analogue video cable (with 15-pin VGA connector) is used, low-pass filtered fonts have the same benefits as with CRTs. Where a purely digital video cable is used (DVI-D, laptop-internal displays with FPD/LVDS links, etc.) only the last step, namely randomizing the least-significant bits, should be implemented.
Where the video signal is entirely encoded in digital form, the low-pass filtered step will not have the desired effect. In fact, it can actually increase the differences between the signal generated by individual characters, and thereby make automatic radio character recognition more reliable.
I suspect there is already an encrypted standard for digital monitor signals so implementing that, even if you have a leaky connection, should probably thwart most attempts to intercept. Then considering that the video images during voting are fairly static, you could probably set up extra circuitry where you don't have to continually transmit the entire screen ever x times a second, just what changes, and only when it changes. Or you could even transmit parts of the screen out of order.
But just switching to LCD and focusing on securing the connection would be an improvement over CRT.
What? I don't know.
I think the idea of his proposed tax rebates are to cover low-income households. Every household would be entitled to a certain amount of energy without tax. Use more than that, then pay the extra tax.
People already have significantly lower taxes in addition to tax credits for each child they have. From a tax perspective, there's already plenty of tax incentives to procreate.
If you like life-stealers like that, you might want to check out Project Euler: http://projecteuler.net/
But don't say I didn't warn you!
No, they will find something they can name like the whole USA PATRIOT crap
I doubt it. The Democrats can't seem of figure this kind of thing out and come up with lame names for otherwise good ideas, like SCHIP.
I'm sure the new health care law will end up something like Basic Open Health Issue Care for America - BOHICA.
You don't have any kids, own a home, and pay a ton of school taxes - what about the jerk down the road who has 5 children and lives in an apartment?
I have no kids and pay property taxes because I own a house (with the bank). And sure, there are people who are poor with lots of kids and maybe they're renting. I have no problem funding the schools and here are some thoughts:
1) even if the guy is renting, the owner of the apartment is paying the same taxes and that will have to be covered by the rent
2) if those kids are poor, the very best thing we can do to ensure they don't stay poor the rest of their lives is to educate them well
3) even if I don't have kids, I benefit from others' kids being educated because they'll have better jobs, make more money, and buy the stuff my company sells
4) the taxes I pay that support schools are entirely local taxes. That means I have a much better chance of being able to influence how they are used
As a grown-up, I pay taxes for a lot of things and many of those don't directly benefit me. However I also realize that living in a country founded on democratic principles, these taxes are my responsibility and duty to pay.
As for teachers selling lesson plans, I am concerned that teachers should be using their "on the clock" prep periods to create lesson plans (that's what teachers I know do, or claim to do). Or, if it's part of the contractual obligation of their jobs to produce these plans (even if they end up doing it "at home"), and that's part of what they're already getting paid for, it doesn't seem right that they should be then able to sell them to other teachers/school-districts. And are they starting with resources that their districts already bought? And are they using paid-for class time to test and refine these plans?
And who is actually paying for them? Is the money paid the personal money of the teachers or are they charging their school districts the cost of the materials? It wouldn't be right if my school district is buying lesson plans and then the teachers are tweaking them and then turning around and selling them.
I think it boils down to the idea that if the teachers are already being paid to make lesson plans, then those plan are "work for hire" and they should not be able to sell them and profit yet again.
This really just shows how weak the prosecution's case was. I suspect they locked him up in Rikers for 12 days to hopefully get him to just give up and plead guilty to a lesser charge. That way they get a conviction, the city is "tough on crime", and they didn't actually have to make the effort of putting together an actual case in front of a judge and jury.
When they can make your life miserable until you confess, there's no need for a presumption of innocence. This guy got lucky that he had eye witnesses and technological records that supported his innocence.
I'm the same way... I've never had a cable subscription since I left my parents' house a couple decades ago. By virtue of higher mathematics and assuming $50/month, that's $12k.
If you like TED, you might like FORA http://fora.tv/.
I also find video.google.com is a great way to find content across a variety of video sources. And of course, there is the local library.
Or even large optical telescopes. Imagine if the lens could be manufactured on the moon, you could build a telescope much larger than any orbiting platform could support.
Plus, there's just the engineering solutions that would have to be invented and developed to even support any kind of settlement on the moon.
There are huge potentials for exciting new technologies and knowledge available when you start working out how to live and work on the moon.
I just hope I live long enough to spend some time there.
Your point about the composition of the moon makes sense, but your citing mines going deep doesn't.
The deepest mine is about 4km, and compared to the Earth's diameter of 12.7k km, that's not very deep. To scrape enough mass off the surface of the Earth to make the moon, you'd probably be going deeper than most mines.
However, I suspect that while there are rich veins of metal in the surface of the Earth, most of the metal is below the surface, in the mantle and the core. But none of our mines go anywhere near that deep.
Just because no model can effectively predict what the stock market will do tomorrow does not mean that economic modeling is useless.
That reminds me of a favorite quote of mine: All models are wrong. Some are useful.
I'm neither an economist nor a computer scientist, but it seems to me that if you look at sets of economic data, such as wealth distributions, it really seems that there must be some "fundamental law" driving the patterns - since they seem to come up over and over again. Determining that law is probably pretty hard, if not impossible. However as you appear to say, there is still value in attempting to describe what's going on mathematically.
As an analogy, the Traveling Salesman problem apparently can never be "solved", however very useful information can be found from approximations and analytical methods. It would be stupid for UPS or the postal service to say "it can't be solved, oh well" and never at least try to come up with something better than having their drivers randomly drive around.
Others here point out that individual human beings are economically irrational and erratic. That makes them very difficult to model in many cases, and that once they are aware of analysis, they are likely to change their behavior. Looking for a "fundamental law", this sounds a lot like "collapsing the wave function" in quantum mechanics or even the "uncertainty principle".
I don't know exactly how hard it is to predict the behavior of a single electron, but we benefit greatly from being able to model and predict behavior of lots of them (PSPICE works pretty well at modeling circuits, but would be impossible if it had to model every individual electron in the circuit). Likewise, there are probably ways to fairly accurately model and describe human behavior in aggregate, even if you can't accurately deal with a single individual.
I may be biased, however, since I do like working with modeling & simulation. I'm probably wrong, but sometimes I'm useful.
I think the idea is that the plastic is supposed to have a property that helps cause a reflected glare from the flash. While taking a picture, I've looked at things and been able to see them but when I take the shot, the glare from the reflected flash makes part of the photo "invisible".
I suspect the ones that are illegal have the potential to work.
I've used Knoppix in the past (the CD image) and it had an hd-install option that would put itself on the harddrive. You would be able to tell if X works using just the live CD then decide if you want to install.
[url:http://www.knoppix.org/]
[url:http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Install_HowTo]
The millimeter wave machines in US airports are passive, not active. So this is all interesting but academic.
You're only partially correct. The article you linked above clearly contrasted the hand-held millimeter devices by pointing out they are passive. However, the large walk-through devices already in use in several airports actively emit millimeter radiation. So it's not merely an academic point.
It was effectively a stall tactic. I'm sure even TDS knew they would fail in court.
As punishment for abusing the court system, the city should use imminent domain to take the infrastructure and then lease it back to TDS.
Of course, maybe the whole idea behind the "threat" of a public system was to compel TDS to get off its butt and actually provide the service.
"... killing a violent criminal should be unlawful, but killing an unborn child should be lawful."
It seems to me the right, while claiming to be the "culture of life" is equally inconsistent when it chalks up killing innocent civilians as mere "collateral damage".
Calling a sociologist a scientist analogous to calling a chiropractor a doctor.
Are you saying that there is no scientific merit to studying systems of people people and societies? Or are you saying that sociologists don't know how to apply the scientific method in their studies?
If it's the former, that seems to me an ignorant position to take. Social systems may be messier and less predictable than other physical systems, but that just means the job of trying to derive laws of social science is harder than in the "hard" sciences. If it's the latter, why don't you apply some scientific method and publish some ground-breaking paper that will show those sociologists how it's done and win yourself the Nobel prize?
Maybe you are thinking of this short story, "Right To Read" by Richard Stallman?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You'd also have to factor in how much money he could have made during that year pre-degree compared to having that year post-degree. Hopefully he got a much better job after the degree, so that if he was able to pay the private loan off in under 3 years, it was really just an irritating nuisance.
You can always walk away and not want the loan. Universities do not posess some secret knowledge, it's all in the books and if you can read you can learn. Smart employers will ignore your lack of degree if instead you present a lot of experience.
That's not the case if you want to be a professional engineer (a requirement in most places to be the engineer that signs off and takes liability for a project). Note the first requirement:
http://www.ncees.org/licensure/licensure_for_engineers/
Step 1: Graduation - The first step is graduating from an ABET-accredited engineering program at a college or university.
Sure, you can learn all this on your own, and to be a good engineer, you indeed have to keep learning on your own. But you NEED that piece of paper if you want to be anything more than an engineer technician.
And what if you want to be a lawyer? There are only 4 states that allow you to sit the Bar exam without a law degree, but that's only if you work under a judge for an extended period of time.
While I would agree with you and go so far as to say that all learning must be done by the individual, there are indeed situations (and benefits) where you have to have that piece of paper from a school that says they've vetted you for a minimum amount of knowledge.
Maybe "smart" employers will ignore your knowledge without a degree, but they'll also pay you less. Someone doing the same job and with equivalent skills, who also has a degree, will almost always make more. The trick for them was to make sure they'll make enough more so that they can pay off the loans and still be ahead.
However, most employers aren't smart, they're safe. And hiring the graduate is the safe thing to do.
It is most certainly a root-cause. You're confusing desire with economic demand. The demand can only be realized because of the abundance of student loans. Decrease the availability of student loans and the demand that the be realized by the schools will go down, even while the desire for students to attend may stay the same.
Demand is only a useful term in that it is a desire for a product that can actually be acted upon.
I think they are only talking about the location of the Voyager spacecraft as a reference, I don't think there's any suggestion that they would have been expected to detect a large scale effect like this
Plus, I suspect the Voyager craft were not equipped to detect this particular phenomena. However, if they were colliding with a lot more particles than expected, or got caught in a flow of particles, over a long period of time, that might impact their trajectories.
I've read that the courses Pioneer craft have changed in slow and unexplainable ways. I can't find if the Voyager craft have experienced the same thing. But maybe this phenomena could be part of the explanation.
I just love how we keep finding new things that challenge what we knew before.
If you had the flu, you wouldn't confuse it with a standard cold.
That's spot on. A lot of people call whatever they have "the flu" when they just have a common rhinovirus. I probably get a cold once or twice a year and it sucks... can't breathe well, sleeping's a pain, and you just wish it would go away.
I've had the flu once. And with the body aches, shivers, inability to eat or drink (and keep it down), I just wished _I_ would away. I was out for more than 2 weeks and was a bit shaky and week for a couple more. That night when the fever finally broke was like a ray of sunshine.
You're right, once you've had the flu, you'll never mistake it for a cold again.
That was a fantastic post, and spelled out the problem succinctly.
Another reply mentions that the approach from this article paints a lot of innocent people as guilty. But a big part of the problem is that even if the sexist behaviors are committed by a minority, the "innocent" majority that stands by and does nothing are still contributing to the problem.
I wish I could give you mod points instead of this reply.