Give them what they need (mostly food, shelter, and work), and let them choose what they want from us. We absolutely can't be seen as imposing our culture on them, because this is exactly what the Taliban and Osama bin Laden have been accusing of ou doing all over the Middle East.
If we enforce our lifestyle on them, it will only stir religious fervor amongst them. We must let them decide what they want and need. You'll still have people saying how their brothers have been corrupted by us, but those in the "secure" territory who know we aren't pushy will be less likely to hate us.
Also remember that Taliban is not just a government, it is a theocracy and local clerics will support it. Do you remove someone's priest because he represents the government you oppose? How do you deal with the preachers who say our lifestyle is wrong? Religion is a powerful thing if handled badly.
I absolutely agree that the best strategy is to get the people behind us, but we have to give them the lifestyle they want, not the lifestyle we would want. Start with basic neccesities and work with them to build infrastructure. Asserting basic human rights is also tricky. We can't stop people from believing that women are inferior. The best we could hope for is to make it illegal for people to act in ways that violate accepted human rights. For instance we can say women can travel without the burqua, but we should not try to make them do it.
Treating people right, is all about helping people have oppurtunities to help themselves.
Anyone who thinks we are going to try and conquer Afghanistan is an idiot.
Bush has been saying a lot about punishing the Taliban for harboring terrorism. If this goes on to become displacing/destroying the Taliban, then you really are talking about conquering the country at least in some sense. IMHO overthrowing the Taliban would require either sustained popular support from the Afghanis or massive ground troops. In neither case is success assurred nor could such an operation produce only a few casualties.
If we intend to substantially reduce terrorism coming from Afghanistan then we need to have either a government in place that will actively root out terrorists, or the ability to freely send police forces to do it ourselves. Neither option seems likely without using military force to replace or utterly subjugate the Taliban government.
Afghanistan is a horrible place to wage war for a lot of reasons, but US officials seem to have already gotten it into their heads, that this can't and shouldn't be your father's war. I hope that we can find a way to accomplish sensible objectives in a reasonable way, but only time will tell how well we actually do.
Also, we should be a little careful when listening to people who didn't win in Afghanistan conclude that it is impossible to win in Afghanistan, perhaps there is something they never thought of. We need to be clever and controlled in how we act and learn from the mistakes of all those that have tried before. Perhaps the biggest mistake was trying to wage a war of conquest without being able to gather the support of the people. I hope we can find a way to get the populace to oppose the Taliban, cause hard as it might be, it also seems the surest way to really improve things in Afghanistan.
So let me get this right, he wants to create legislation that won't stop bad guys because A) it only effects the US and B) the bad guys wouldn't bother using backdoored software AND he want's to mire it in quasi-judicial controls so that the bureaucracy will make use of the backdoor a rare and slow event (at least for legal government purposes).
If it wasn't for the fact that any such restrictions impose an extra burden on software/hardware manufacturers and limit the security of encryption, I'd start to think this was nothing but feel good legislation that would never accomplish anything. Sure doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything good.
If you look at these pages, we are talking about $3000-$5500 worth of relay equipment sitting out in the middle of nowhere. What happens if someone comes along and decide they'd want some of that for themselves?
Of course no one would ever want to steal from the Indians... Oh, wait, nevermind.
I have to agree, Google toolbar is phenomenal. Saves me from typing in www.google.com, or clicking a favorites link etc, AND it gives more power than simply being at the frontpage of google. Being able to highlight and jump to search terms in any website more than justifies it's use.
For those who want one, here's the link. Sadly it's still only available for Windows and IE. Back when it first came out this was one of the prime reasons I cut way back in my use of Netscape.
I have a friend who previously worked for a company (I forget the name) that does a sort of chip reverse engineering in the US. Essentially, they are paid to take chips apart and understand how they work in order to check for patent violations. Along the way they can also generate complete design schematics.
Pretty cool technology to be dealing with, but it does show that corporations as well as governments are perfectly capable of taking chips apart.
First you write a 5, Informative article with a little information and then reply to your own article with more information and getting another 5, Informative.
I'd call you a karma whore, but judging solely from your ID number you probably don't need the karma. This will probably get modded down but then I don't need the karma either.
I am glad you posted this though, while others might disagree there does seem to be a substantial difference between "don't use our tools to bash us" and "don't use our tools to make stuff that bashes us".
I would guess that the people using old software are rarely concerned with the liscensing and other MS tricks. Like most of my family, they probably simply don't need anything better right now. Win 95, Office 97 already have more features than your typical user needs and remain suitable for most of people's needs. As you might remember Win 3.1 was something of a pain, whereas 95 is managable for most people especially with a little practice.
One of MS's problems is that they want to sell products and retain market share, but you can't do that by asking hundreds of dollars for incremental upgrades (especially when the software the consumer has already does everything they think they want). It's "killer apps" and stuff that you just got to have that gets average people to go out and buy software.
I don't think XP is going to do it for MS, there are some interesting new features, but nothing that strikes me as something Joe Average will rush out to get. To my mind, the next big thing will require better broadband apps and broadband saturation. For instance, I'd be willing to pay for video conference hardware and software, if I knew more than 2 people who had that functionality in their home.
One of the problems I have with congress is that they are motivated by too many factors. For instance I remember hearing quotes from a couple people who said they strongly considered joining Lee, but were afraid to look soft on terrorism and other pandering bullshit.
Politicians are too busy being political to give honest answers on the record, especially if they think they might change that answer later. While I don't imagine that ever changing, I would still like to have better insight into what congress is thinking.
I know it would never be accepted, but I can imagine having anonymous opinion polls that congressmen fill out each morning. Oh look, 85% of them favor curbing encryption, better get writing. Or, 15% don't know how to read email, who elected these guys?
Sure there would still be bullshit, but maybe we'd get a little less bullshit. I'm all for any way of knowing more about what the people we put in charge have in mind for the rest of us. Writing and calling can be good too, but then at best you still only get a few opinions rather than a helpful forecast of what's ahead.
A this particular moment, I am struck by the thought: Could we have trained him, used him, kept in contact with him, and built some form of relationship that wouldn't have led to this?
Probably not, but I'm still left to wonder if we could have kept a minimal level of understanding had we not lost all interest in him, his organizations, and for the most part his country, after the USSR pulled out.
With the anti-encryption hype in congress, soon we may not have good security at any level. It's bad enough today when things aren't kept upto date, but how much worse will it be when you aren't allowed to be secure?
I find it so fitting that this story came directly after the story on public distrust of secure encryption.
Also, don't forget the ability of Congress to repeal its own laws.
5 or 10 years down the line when script kiddies have figured out how to use "secure" government backdoors and we have a few major incidents of important information getting stolen or misused, then Congress will be wondering how they ever passed the thing in the first place.
Same way that far more congressmen have taken a mind to be concerned about DMCA today than there were when it got passed. I tend to find that if you wait long enough most things will sort themselves out.
Think about this for a second. We don't know how many people knew what was going to happen on Sept. 11, but it's quite reasonably to think it's between 30 and say 150.
Even if there were 150 people who knew what was going to happen and wanted to kill Americans, that still means they killed ~35 each. Drunk drivers, smokers, etc aren't nearly so efficient. If you add in the $10-15 billion in damages resulting directly from the crashes and building collapses (without counting all the losses and costs due to government action), then they each did at least $65 million in damages.
If this kind of event only happened every couple decades then it wouldn't be that big a deal, but the fear is that it could become a regular thing.
Sure smoking, alcohol deaths and such are bad things, but how much worse would it be if there were 50 or so terrorist incidents a year? I'm all for doing something about drinking and smoking, but I do believe that this has to be our priority.
IMHO, people who commit crimes out of hatred for groups (not just individuals) are more likely to commit more crimes against them, and to commit more violent crimes.
If we agree that part of the purpose of jail is to protect society from criminals then imposing stiffer penalties for crimes motivated by bigotry makes some sense.
The important part here is that the penalties are still attached to real crimes. Thoughts alone are not a crime. The KKK and other groups still can protest in appropriate ways, without being rounded up for the views they hold.
What someone is thinking goes toward motivation and intent, which I think is an important part of a criminal proceeding. It's not the thoughts alone that are outlawed its how people act on them.
There is a crucial step in the 1984 world that you are forgetting. Sure there was intrusive monitoring, access to personal info, strangely variable war stances.
What you have forgotten is the thought police. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but for a large part, free speech, free press and free thought have been preserved in the US. To my mind, the freedom to dissent is the most important basic right. We don't have much privacy as it is and giving up a little more to the government isn't a horrible concern so long as what is a crime makes sense, and it can only be used against legitimate crime.
Of course our ability to have sensible criminal law reliably enforced is another ball of wax entirely.
Oh, one other thing, 1984 encouraged people to hate the enemy who was paraded around and made to clearly appear different from you. The US leaders have done exactly the opposite lately, encouraging restraint and not attacking cultures and racial groups. Of course those cultures and racial groups are already here, so it would be difficult (albeit not impossible) to engender that level of socially pervasive sense of otherness about your enemy.
I hope that's not because it just came out of the genetic engineering lab. What would one cross with to get purple? Sea Anemones perhaps?
Really, though I like potatos and GM stuff if it's useful and safe. Besides more than likely it really is nature doing freaky stuff, cause she's good at that.
In essence the goal is a police action. We want to round up and punish (by legal means if possible) those terrorists responsible for the attacks.
However it will probably become a war because force may be the only means of getting access to some of the countries involved so that we can shut down the terrorist operations. Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, if they are involved, are more than likely both incapable and unwilling to apprehend the people that have attacked the US.
Since they can not do enough to ensure US safety, the US and other western countries will have to do it for them. Regardless of how well focused and implemented, stomping out terrorism on foriegn turf may well require a conventional war before national governments let international police forces do their work.
Some people did try this once upon a time. As it turns out the electrical signal in a heartbeat is so weak that it gets drowned out in the natural background almost immediately. In fact, IIRC, you'd be better off with a directional mic trying to listen for heartbeats (which isn't very good either).
One of the companies trying to do this stuff did actually develop a device for something like $50,000 but independant testing showed they were essentially a fraud. Whether the device said there was a heartbeat in a particular direction was purely a function of how the operator was holding and using it, and had no relation to actual heartbeats.
After that fiasco the whole idea pretty much got thrown out.
I agree, it's not really a slap on the wrist. Seems to me like it strikes a pretty good balance between the need to recognize that this is a serious crime and deter him and others from doing it again, and the need to recognize that he's still young and should be allowed to show that he can mature and become a productive member of society.
In many prison systems there is an emphasis on simply locking people away and doing little or nothing beyond that to rehabilitate them. This kid, like a lot of other people commiting sophisticated crime, probably has a good intelligence and real potential to contribute to society.
I truly believe we need a system of criminal justice that effectively deals with the mental illness and lack of education that contributes to crime. We should foster productive life skills and punishments that are appropriate to rehabilitation. Non-violent white collar crime certainly isn't deserving of long sentences on first offense. When people have shown that they won't or can't change and continue to offend then it's reasonable for society to consider locking them up for long times merely to keep them out of society.
Compassion and forgiveness have a place in justice, whenever promoting society's respect for life and liberty can be balanced against our need for security. Overly strict law will promote hate, mistrust, and fear among the innocent as well as the guilty.
Those 8 months will be a life altering experience for this kid, as most certainly the arrest and trial already have been. This is a pretty reasonable solution.
Yes, it is special. Not because it's a magic number, though. It's just like having curled dimensions which are just smaller than we can detect. In this case, it's just smaller than we've than we've ever been able to "probe" before.
A typical 1 TeV particle has a de Broglie wavelength of 2.0*10^-19 m == 2.0*10^-17 cm, which means that LHC will just about reach this threshold while no other machine ever has.
In all fairness they may have other reasons to believe in 10^-17 cm, but my experience with high energy particle physicists has typically been that if they don't know when something will happen then they'll tell you that the next big machine certainly has a good chance of seeing it.
The curled dimensions would actually have to be much larger than this. If a black hole is to form then the modification of the gravity from 2 to (n-1) will have to grow so important that it overcomes the typically much larger repulsion of nuclear and electromagnetic forces, which would tend to prevent gravitational collapse. Also they need to gain enough kinetic energy from falling through the modified gravitational well that their mass (E=mc^2) is large enough to create a black hole, given the other properties of the particles.
While you've got a good number of the important ideas right, you might want to work on the presentation. It took me several reads to get what you meant, and I know what you are talking about.
FYI, you get the strean of particles coming out because the intensity of Hawking radiation gets dramatically large as the hole evaporates. All that's needed to create particle X is for the hole to be putting out enough energy equivalent to the mass of particle X. It has a large reserve of energy (and this part is key), because of the theorized change in the gravitational attraction law that makes the whole process possible.
Ordinarily gravitational potential energy goes as G*m1*m2/r but if the rate law changes energy may go as G*m1*m2/r^(n-2), where n is the number of actual dimensions. Or even some other strange law. Since the effective minimal approach is at least the wavelength of the 1 TeV particles (10^-19 m) and probably considerably less, the fact that the powers of r increase can give a dramatic increase in the kinetic energy of the particles as they approach and thus allow for enough energy to create the black hole and lots of energy for it to then radiate away.
The original theory expected curled dimensions on the order of a Planck Length (10^-33 m), but some people later showed that is was possible to modify the theory for dimensions of arbitrary size. The question then falls to experimentalist to say how large they might be. As it turns out, it's easy to show that they aren't as large as a meter (unless you modify string theory in some really weird ways that few people consider plausible). Thus we can easily confirm everyone's ordinary perceptions that life at our scale is 3D. However the types of experiments to test this don't scale well, so the best that experiments can say so far is that there are no hidden dimensions on the order of a millimeter.
Scientists that think that hidden dimensions are really only just beyond the horizon of where we know they aren't are a pretty scant minority right now. Most people expect that they probably are down near the Planck Length and well out of reach. However, the neat experiments and effects (such as black holes) that could be done with access to large extra dimensions make them worth looking for, just in case.
We get to cheat. In order for a black hole to "eat" something the potential munchie needs to have a De Broglie wavelength no larger than the diameter of the black hole (according to prevailing wisdom in how black holes and quantum mechanics will interact). 1 TeV particles have a de Broglie wavelength of about 1.9 * 10^-19 m, and presumably the threshold for creating a blackhole will make ones of roughly this size or slightly smaller (this is the one point I don't know for sure).
Typical atomic matter at rest has a de Broglie wavelength on the order of 10^-15 m and larger. So if the first blackholes have a 10^-19 m threshold size then they can't eat anything when removed from the beam.
Secondly the beams are highly charged by nature. We fully expect that black holes can carry electrical charge if there is a charge imbalance in what they eat. So we will presumably have a charged black hole which is a very good thing because charged objects can be trapped in magnetic bubbles and moved according to electrical forces.
In any case I fully expect that the things will boil off due to Hawking radiation far faster than they can grow from eating matter. Hawking effects are small for large holes but IIRC go as something like 1/R^4 which gets big very fast when R is near 0.
The simple fact is that nature still does better at creating high energy particles than anything we can do in the lab. The reason a 100 blackholes might be created in the atomsphere is because cosmic rays are still more powerful than accelerators. In fact rare extremely powerful cosmic rays, believed to be extra-galatic in origin, are still several orders of magnitude beyond what we can make.
Since these high energy cosmic rays will have the same types of collisions as they want to produce in the lab, you would expect them to produce black holes if that is possible. Any such black holes that might be produced obviously haven't destroyed the Earth thus far, so these energies are probably safe to use in a lab. Of course this may just mean that they never actually create black holes.
Regarding your other issue, nuetrinos. The reason they didn't come out right is because Super Kamiokande and the other 1st generation experiments could only detect electron and muon nuetrinos. The next generation results, which came out in the last two years, show that when you account for the number of tao nuetrinos, the total flux from the sun turns out to be right where it should be according to the theories for what goes on in stellar fusion.
The surprise here is that nuetrinos of one type can apparently turn into another type. We knew from theory how many electron nuetrinos to expect but they were hidden by changing into the other two varieties. Thus the appearance of low nuetrino counts. Flavor mixing, as it's called, is exactly what is predicted and required if nuetrinos have a non-zero mass. So we simple have to accept that nuetrinos have small but non-zero mass and figure out how this revises the "Standard Model" of particle physics.
Let me be very clear, everything that follows is speculation. It will probably be days if not weeks before we have a good idea what has happened today. We may never really know all that has led up to this tragedy, but what is the likely scenario?
We know that 4 planes were hijacked and 3 slammed into buildings.
Almost certainly all the hijackers on the planes are now dead as well as many many victims. By targeting the WTC and Pentagon they have attacked buildings with both actual and symbolic value to the American way of life. These are places presumably intended to produce as many casualties as possible and demonstrate the vulnerabilities of even our greatest organizations.
Clearly these people hate America and Americans and are perfectly happy to give their lives to hurt us and create terror. Multiple people prepared to give their lives in the assault suggest a religious group with beliefs that their souls will be honored after their death. Essentially all major religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) share a fundamental respect for life, but at many times and places their teachings have been corrupted to justify killing in God's name. In the current case Islam seems the most likely, not because they are especially vulnerable, but because people in Islamic regions seem the most likely to hate Americans at this point in history.
We must bear partial responsibility for the hate they feel towards us. At some point there was a failure to connect with these people and address their concerns in a reasonable way. Now the world has stepped down a path that will almost certainly lead to even greater destruction. Of course, our unseen attackers bear the greatest responsibility and will hopefully be called to account, but we must wonder if there was anything society could do to redress their grievances before they grew to the point that they perceived violence as their only option.
What does it take to do this? Most likely you need pilots trained on these planes or one's like them. This ensures that the pilot will in fact fly directly into the target, and minimized the chance of the original pilot conveying that something is wrong. Probably it would be easier to find suicide bombers and send them to flight school than to recruit pilots to be bombers.
Terrorists would also need weapons. This means either being able to conceal them through security or being able to go around security. If you have money it is probably easier to get weapons that can be walked through a metal detector than to research ways to breach security. This is especially true if you plan to go through more than one airport. Hard plastics and ceramics can be made into some nasty things if cost is not a concern. Alternatively, a sharp obsidian or glass knife with wooden handle could probably be made for a bargain.
Once on the plane you want to be able to take control and get into the locked cockpit. Threatening passengers might get one to open the cockpit but it's not totally reliable and they would certainly send distress signals first. More preferably one would want to practice breaking into cockpits and have a tool or ram that could do it quickly. A slightly modified piece of luggage might serve as a ram. (I don't know what the locking mechanisms are like but someone taking the time to train as a pilot certainly would have access to them and perhaps figure out how to quickly defeat them.)
A single terrorist is somewhat likely to be overpowered in the tight quarters of an airliner, and is at greater risk if he has to pilot the plane himself while in a cockpit that can no longer be secured properly. This suggests that you need multiple suicidal terrorists per plane. Two might be enough, but three would be safer because that still gives them a backup even after your pilot takes the controls.
To continue speculating, we are talking about 8-12 hijackers, at least 4 of which pilots. They would probably want some financial backers and other organizers. It would make sense to have associates to recruit the next generation of terrorists. If they're foreign nationals you need an identity and papers, or some other way to get into the country. Of course securing entrance into the country wouldn't require telling the person you get the false papers from what you intend to do. While they do want some people in support positions, they wouldn't want too many as it increases the opportunities of leaks that would kill the whole project. I'm guessing that somewhere between 10 and 30 people knew about this attack in advance.
The main cost is in preparation time and finding the right people to go through with it. The point is that you don't actually need an army, expensive weaponry, or lots of financial backing to accomplish this. Of course, having financial backing and encouragement is perhaps rather likely and would make things easier, especially if they come from third world nations where the relative income is quite low.
Obviously we will have to wait until the facts are known to see how accurate my speculations are, and truth is often stranger than imagination.
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Give them what they need (mostly food, shelter, and work), and let them choose what they want from us. We absolutely can't be seen as imposing our culture on them, because this is exactly what the Taliban and Osama bin Laden have been accusing of ou doing all over the Middle East.
If we enforce our lifestyle on them, it will only stir religious fervor amongst them. We must let them decide what they want and need. You'll still have people saying how their brothers have been corrupted by us, but those in the "secure" territory who know we aren't pushy will be less likely to hate us.
Also remember that Taliban is not just a government, it is a theocracy and local clerics will support it. Do you remove someone's priest because he represents the government you oppose? How do you deal with the preachers who say our lifestyle is wrong? Religion is a powerful thing if handled badly.
I absolutely agree that the best strategy is to get the people behind us, but we have to give them the lifestyle they want, not the lifestyle we would want. Start with basic neccesities and work with them to build infrastructure. Asserting basic human rights is also tricky. We can't stop people from believing that women are inferior. The best we could hope for is to make it illegal for people to act in ways that violate accepted human rights. For instance we can say women can travel without the burqua, but we should not try to make them do it.
Treating people right, is all about helping people have oppurtunities to help themselves.
Anyone who thinks we are going to try and conquer Afghanistan is an idiot.
Bush has been saying a lot about punishing the Taliban for harboring terrorism. If this goes on to become displacing/destroying the Taliban, then you really are talking about conquering the country at least in some sense. IMHO overthrowing the Taliban would require either sustained popular support from the Afghanis or massive ground troops. In neither case is success assurred nor could such an operation produce only a few casualties.
If we intend to substantially reduce terrorism coming from Afghanistan then we need to have either a government in place that will actively root out terrorists, or the ability to freely send police forces to do it ourselves. Neither option seems likely without using military force to replace or utterly subjugate the Taliban government.
Afghanistan is a horrible place to wage war for a lot of reasons, but US officials seem to have already gotten it into their heads, that this can't and shouldn't be your father's war. I hope that we can find a way to accomplish sensible objectives in a reasonable way, but only time will tell how well we actually do.
Also, we should be a little careful when listening to people who didn't win in Afghanistan conclude that it is impossible to win in Afghanistan, perhaps there is something they never thought of. We need to be clever and controlled in how we act and learn from the mistakes of all those that have tried before. Perhaps the biggest mistake was trying to wage a war of conquest without being able to gather the support of the people. I hope we can find a way to get the populace to oppose the Taliban, cause hard as it might be, it also seems the surest way to really improve things in Afghanistan.
So let me get this right, he wants to create legislation that won't stop bad guys because A) it only effects the US and B) the bad guys wouldn't bother using backdoored software AND he want's to mire it in quasi-judicial controls so that the bureaucracy will make use of the backdoor a rare and slow event (at least for legal government purposes).
If it wasn't for the fact that any such restrictions impose an extra burden on software/hardware manufacturers and limit the security of encryption, I'd start to think this was nothing but feel good legislation that would never accomplish anything. Sure doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything good.
If you look at these pages, we are talking about $3000-$5500 worth of relay equipment sitting out in the middle of nowhere. What happens if someone comes along and decide they'd want some of that for themselves?
Of course no one would ever want to steal from the Indians... Oh, wait, nevermind.
I have to agree, Google toolbar is phenomenal. Saves me from typing in www.google.com, or clicking a favorites link etc, AND it gives more power than simply being at the frontpage of google. Being able to highlight and jump to search terms in any website more than justifies it's use.
For those who want one, here's the link. Sadly it's still only available for Windows and IE. Back when it first came out this was one of the prime reasons I cut way back in my use of Netscape.
I have a friend who previously worked for a company (I forget the name) that does a sort of chip reverse engineering in the US. Essentially, they are paid to take chips apart and understand how they work in order to check for patent violations. Along the way they can also generate complete design schematics.
Pretty cool technology to be dealing with, but it does show that corporations as well as governments are perfectly capable of taking chips apart.
Neat trick rOD.
First you write a 5, Informative article with a little information and then reply to your own article with more information and getting another 5, Informative.
I'd call you a karma whore, but judging solely from your ID number you probably don't need the karma. This will probably get modded down but then I don't need the karma either.
I am glad you posted this though, while others might disagree there does seem to be a substantial difference between "don't use our tools to bash us" and "don't use our tools to make stuff that bashes us".
I would guess that the people using old software are rarely concerned with the liscensing and other MS tricks. Like most of my family, they probably simply don't need anything better right now. Win 95, Office 97 already have more features than your typical user needs and remain suitable for most of people's needs. As you might remember Win 3.1 was something of a pain, whereas 95 is managable for most people especially with a little practice.
One of MS's problems is that they want to sell products and retain market share, but you can't do that by asking hundreds of dollars for incremental upgrades (especially when the software the consumer has already does everything they think they want). It's "killer apps" and stuff that you just got to have that gets average people to go out and buy software.
I don't think XP is going to do it for MS, there are some interesting new features, but nothing that strikes me as something Joe Average will rush out to get. To my mind, the next big thing will require better broadband apps and broadband saturation. For instance, I'd be willing to pay for video conference hardware and software, if I knew more than 2 people who had that functionality in their home.
One of the problems I have with congress is that they are motivated by too many factors. For instance I remember hearing quotes from a couple people who said they strongly considered joining Lee, but were afraid to look soft on terrorism and other pandering bullshit.
Politicians are too busy being political to give honest answers on the record, especially if they think they might change that answer later. While I don't imagine that ever changing, I would still like to have better insight into what congress is thinking.
I know it would never be accepted, but I can imagine having anonymous opinion polls that congressmen fill out each morning. Oh look, 85% of them favor curbing encryption, better get writing. Or, 15% don't know how to read email, who elected these guys?
Sure there would still be bullshit, but maybe we'd get a little less bullshit. I'm all for any way of knowing more about what the people we put in charge have in mind for the rest of us. Writing and calling can be good too, but then at best you still only get a few opinions rather than a helpful forecast of what's ahead.
A this particular moment, I am struck by the thought: Could we have trained him, used him, kept in contact with him, and built some form of relationship that wouldn't have led to this?
Probably not, but I'm still left to wonder if we could have kept a minimal level of understanding had we not lost all interest in him, his organizations, and for the most part his country, after the USSR pulled out.
Just wait.
With the anti-encryption hype in congress, soon we may not have good security at any level. It's bad enough today when things aren't kept upto date, but how much worse will it be when you aren't allowed to be secure?
I find it so fitting that this story came directly after the story on public distrust of secure encryption.
Also, don't forget the ability of Congress to repeal its own laws.
5 or 10 years down the line when script kiddies have figured out how to use "secure" government backdoors and we have a few major incidents of important information getting stolen or misused, then Congress will be wondering how they ever passed the thing in the first place.
Same way that far more congressmen have taken a mind to be concerned about DMCA today than there were when it got passed. I tend to find that if you wait long enough most things will sort themselves out.
Unfortunately that waiting period can be a bitch.
Think about this for a second. We don't know how many people knew what was going to happen on Sept. 11, but it's quite reasonably to think it's between 30 and say 150.
Even if there were 150 people who knew what was going to happen and wanted to kill Americans, that still means they killed ~35 each. Drunk drivers, smokers, etc aren't nearly so efficient. If you add in the $10-15 billion in damages resulting directly from the crashes and building collapses (without counting all the losses and costs due to government action), then they each did at least $65 million in damages.
If this kind of event only happened every couple decades then it wouldn't be that big a deal, but the fear is that it could become a regular thing.
Sure smoking, alcohol deaths and such are bad things, but how much worse would it be if there were 50 or so terrorist incidents a year? I'm all for doing something about drinking and smoking, but I do believe that this has to be our priority.
IMHO, people who commit crimes out of hatred for groups (not just individuals) are more likely to commit more crimes against them, and to commit more violent crimes.
If we agree that part of the purpose of jail is to protect society from criminals then imposing stiffer penalties for crimes motivated by bigotry makes some sense.
The important part here is that the penalties are still attached to real crimes. Thoughts alone are not a crime. The KKK and other groups still can protest in appropriate ways, without being rounded up for the views they hold.
What someone is thinking goes toward motivation and intent, which I think is an important part of a criminal proceeding. It's not the thoughts alone that are outlawed its how people act on them.
There is a crucial step in the 1984 world that you are forgetting. Sure there was intrusive monitoring, access to personal info, strangely variable war stances.
What you have forgotten is the thought police. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but for a large part, free speech, free press and free thought have been preserved in the US. To my mind, the freedom to dissent is the most important basic right. We don't have much privacy as it is and giving up a little more to the government isn't a horrible concern so long as what is a crime makes sense, and it can only be used against legitimate crime.
Of course our ability to have sensible criminal law reliably enforced is another ball of wax entirely.
Oh, one other thing, 1984 encouraged people to hate the enemy who was paraded around and made to clearly appear different from you. The US leaders have done exactly the opposite lately, encouraging restraint and not attacking cultures and racial groups. Of course those cultures and racial groups are already here, so it would be difficult (albeit not impossible) to engender that level of socially pervasive sense of otherness about your enemy.
"so obscure it has no name"?
I hope that's not because it just came out of the genetic engineering lab. What would one cross with to get purple? Sea Anemones perhaps?
Really, though I like potatos and GM stuff if it's useful and safe. Besides more than likely it really is nature doing freaky stuff, cause she's good at that.
In essence the goal is a police action. We want to round up and punish (by legal means if possible) those terrorists responsible for the attacks.
However it will probably become a war because force may be the only means of getting access to some of the countries involved so that we can shut down the terrorist operations. Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, if they are involved, are more than likely both incapable and unwilling to apprehend the people that have attacked the US.
Since they can not do enough to ensure US safety, the US and other western countries will have to do it for them. Regardless of how well focused and implemented, stomping out terrorism on foriegn turf may well require a conventional war before national governments let international police forces do their work.
Some people did try this once upon a time. As it turns out the electrical signal in a heartbeat is so weak that it gets drowned out in the natural background almost immediately. In fact, IIRC, you'd be better off with a directional mic trying to listen for heartbeats (which isn't very good either).
One of the companies trying to do this stuff did actually develop a device for something like $50,000 but independant testing showed they were essentially a fraud. Whether the device said there was a heartbeat in a particular direction was purely a function of how the operator was holding and using it, and had no relation to actual heartbeats.
After that fiasco the whole idea pretty much got thrown out.
I agree, it's not really a slap on the wrist. Seems to me like it strikes a pretty good balance between the need to recognize that this is a serious crime and deter him and others from doing it again, and the need to recognize that he's still young and should be allowed to show that he can mature and become a productive member of society.
In many prison systems there is an emphasis on simply locking people away and doing little or nothing beyond that to rehabilitate them. This kid, like a lot of other people commiting sophisticated crime, probably has a good intelligence and real potential to contribute to society.
I truly believe we need a system of criminal justice that effectively deals with the mental illness and lack of education that contributes to crime. We should foster productive life skills and punishments that are appropriate to rehabilitation. Non-violent white collar crime certainly isn't deserving of long sentences on first offense. When people have shown that they won't or can't change and continue to offend then it's reasonable for society to consider locking them up for long times merely to keep them out of society.
Compassion and forgiveness have a place in justice, whenever promoting society's respect for life and liberty can be balanced against our need for security. Overly strict law will promote hate, mistrust, and fear among the innocent as well as the guilty.
Those 8 months will be a life altering experience for this kid, as most certainly the arrest and trial already have been. This is a pretty reasonable solution.
Yes, it is special. Not because it's a magic number, though. It's just like having curled dimensions which are just smaller than we can detect. In this case, it's just smaller than we've than we've ever been able to "probe" before.
A typical 1 TeV particle has a de Broglie wavelength of 2.0*10^-19 m == 2.0*10^-17 cm, which means that LHC will just about reach this threshold while no other machine ever has.
In all fairness they may have other reasons to believe in 10^-17 cm, but my experience with high energy particle physicists has typically been that if they don't know when something will happen then they'll tell you that the next big machine certainly has a good chance of seeing it.
The curled dimensions would actually have to be much larger than this. If a black hole is to form then the modification of the gravity from 2 to (n-1) will have to grow so important that it overcomes the typically much larger repulsion of nuclear and electromagnetic forces, which would tend to prevent gravitational collapse. Also they need to gain enough kinetic energy from falling through the modified gravitational well that their mass (E=mc^2) is large enough to create a black hole, given the other properties of the particles.
I like the Elegant Universe, a good read.
While you've got a good number of the important ideas right, you might want to work on the presentation. It took me several reads to get what you meant, and I know what you are talking about.
FYI, you get the strean of particles coming out because the intensity of Hawking radiation gets dramatically large as the hole evaporates. All that's needed to create particle X is for the hole to be putting out enough energy equivalent to the mass of particle X. It has a large reserve of energy (and this part is key), because of the theorized change in the gravitational attraction law that makes the whole process possible.
Ordinarily gravitational potential energy goes as G*m1*m2/r but if the rate law changes energy may go as G*m1*m2/r^(n-2), where n is the number of actual dimensions. Or even some other strange law. Since the effective minimal approach is at least the wavelength of the 1 TeV particles (10^-19 m) and probably considerably less, the fact that the powers of r increase can give a dramatic increase in the kinetic energy of the particles as they approach and thus allow for enough energy to create the black hole and lots of energy for it to then radiate away.
You're essentially right.
The original theory expected curled dimensions on the order of a Planck Length (10^-33 m), but some people later showed that is was possible to modify the theory for dimensions of arbitrary size. The question then falls to experimentalist to say how large they might be. As it turns out, it's easy to show that they aren't as large as a meter (unless you modify string theory in some really weird ways that few people consider plausible). Thus we can easily confirm everyone's ordinary perceptions that life at our scale is 3D. However the types of experiments to test this don't scale well, so the best that experiments can say so far is that there are no hidden dimensions on the order of a millimeter.
Scientists that think that hidden dimensions are really only just beyond the horizon of where we know they aren't are a pretty scant minority right now. Most people expect that they probably are down near the Planck Length and well out of reach. However, the neat experiments and effects (such as black holes) that could be done with access to large extra dimensions make them worth looking for, just in case.
We get to cheat. In order for a black hole to "eat" something the potential munchie needs to have a De Broglie wavelength no larger than the diameter of the black hole (according to prevailing wisdom in how black holes and quantum mechanics will interact). 1 TeV particles have a de Broglie wavelength of about 1.9 * 10^-19 m, and presumably the threshold for creating a blackhole will make ones of roughly this size or slightly smaller (this is the one point I don't know for sure).
Typical atomic matter at rest has a de Broglie wavelength on the order of 10^-15 m and larger. So if the first blackholes have a 10^-19 m threshold size then they can't eat anything when removed from the beam.
Secondly the beams are highly charged by nature. We fully expect that black holes can carry electrical charge if there is a charge imbalance in what they eat. So we will presumably have a charged black hole which is a very good thing because charged objects can be trapped in magnetic bubbles and moved according to electrical forces.
In any case I fully expect that the things will boil off due to Hawking radiation far faster than they can grow from eating matter. Hawking effects are small for large holes but IIRC go as something like 1/R^4 which gets big very fast when R is near 0.
The simple fact is that nature still does better at creating high energy particles than anything we can do in the lab. The reason a 100 blackholes might be created in the atomsphere is because cosmic rays are still more powerful than accelerators. In fact rare extremely powerful cosmic rays, believed to be extra-galatic in origin, are still several orders of magnitude beyond what we can make.
Since these high energy cosmic rays will have the same types of collisions as they want to produce in the lab, you would expect them to produce black holes if that is possible. Any such black holes that might be produced obviously haven't destroyed the Earth thus far, so these energies are probably safe to use in a lab. Of course this may just mean that they never actually create black holes.
Regarding your other issue, nuetrinos. The reason they didn't come out right is because Super Kamiokande and the other 1st generation experiments could only detect electron and muon nuetrinos. The next generation results, which came out in the last two years, show that when you account for the number of tao nuetrinos, the total flux from the sun turns out to be right where it should be according to the theories for what goes on in stellar fusion.
The surprise here is that nuetrinos of one type can apparently turn into another type. We knew from theory how many electron nuetrinos to expect but they were hidden by changing into the other two varieties. Thus the appearance of low nuetrino counts. Flavor mixing, as it's called, is exactly what is predicted and required if nuetrinos have a non-zero mass. So we simple have to accept that nuetrinos have small but non-zero mass and figure out how this revises the "Standard Model" of particle physics.
Let me be very clear, everything that follows is speculation. It will probably be days if not weeks before we have a good idea what has happened today. We may never really know all that has led up to this tragedy, but what is the likely scenario?
We know that 4 planes were hijacked and 3 slammed into buildings.
Almost certainly all the hijackers on the planes are now dead as well as many many victims. By targeting the WTC and Pentagon they have attacked buildings with both actual and symbolic value to the American way of life. These are places presumably intended to produce as many casualties as possible and demonstrate the vulnerabilities of even our greatest organizations.
Clearly these people hate America and Americans and are perfectly happy to give their lives to hurt us and create terror. Multiple people prepared to give their lives in the assault suggest a religious group with beliefs that their souls will be honored after their death. Essentially all major religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) share a fundamental respect for life, but at many times and places their teachings have been corrupted to justify killing in God's name. In the current case Islam seems the most likely, not because they are especially vulnerable, but because people in Islamic regions seem the most likely to hate Americans at this point in history.
We must bear partial responsibility for the hate they feel towards us. At some point there was a failure to connect with these people and address their concerns in a reasonable way. Now the world has stepped down a path that will almost certainly lead to even greater destruction. Of course, our unseen attackers bear the greatest responsibility and will hopefully be called to account, but we must wonder if there was anything society could do to redress their grievances before they grew to the point that they perceived violence as their only option.
What does it take to do this? Most likely you need pilots trained on these planes or one's like them. This ensures that the pilot will in fact fly directly into the target, and minimized the chance of the original pilot conveying that something is wrong. Probably it would be easier to find suicide bombers and send them to flight school than to recruit pilots to be bombers.
Terrorists would also need weapons. This means either being able to conceal them through security or being able to go around security. If you have money it is probably easier to get weapons that can be walked through a metal detector than to research ways to breach security. This is especially true if you plan to go through more than one airport. Hard plastics and ceramics can be made into some nasty things if cost is not a concern. Alternatively, a sharp obsidian or glass knife with wooden handle could probably be made for a bargain.
Once on the plane you want to be able to take control and get into the locked cockpit. Threatening passengers might get one to open the cockpit but it's not totally reliable and they would certainly send distress signals first. More preferably one would want to practice breaking into cockpits and have a tool or ram that could do it quickly. A slightly modified piece of luggage might serve as a ram. (I don't know what the locking mechanisms are like but someone taking the time to train as a pilot certainly would have access to them and perhaps figure out how to quickly defeat them.)
A single terrorist is somewhat likely to be overpowered in the tight quarters of an airliner, and is at greater risk if he has to pilot the plane himself while in a cockpit that can no longer be secured properly. This suggests that you need multiple suicidal terrorists per plane. Two might be enough, but three would be safer because that still gives them a backup even after your pilot takes the controls.
To continue speculating, we are talking about 8-12 hijackers, at least 4 of which pilots. They would probably want some financial backers and other organizers. It would make sense to have associates to recruit the next generation of terrorists. If they're foreign nationals you need an identity and papers, or some other way to get into the country. Of course securing entrance into the country wouldn't require telling the person you get the false papers from what you intend to do. While they do want some people in support positions, they wouldn't want too many as it increases the opportunities of leaks that would kill the whole project. I'm guessing that somewhere between 10 and 30 people knew about this attack in advance.
The main cost is in preparation time and finding the right people to go through with it. The point is that you don't actually need an army, expensive weaponry, or lots of financial backing to accomplish this. Of course, having financial backing and encouragement is perhaps rather likely and would make things easier, especially if they come from third world nations where the relative income is quite low.
Obviously we will have to wait until the facts are known to see how accurate my speculations are, and truth is often stranger than imagination.