The "data" that is being sent is not classical information, but quantum information in the form of "qubits". Ergo, you cannot intercept and then "read" it in the sense that your post is describing.
Specifically, what is being sent is one half of two perfectly entangled qubits. The fact that they are "entangled" means that if the two people involved each measure their qubit using the same basis, they will always get the same answer.
When you intercept one of the two qubits, you can measure it but in the process you destroy it, and you cannot create a new qubit that is entangled with the one kept by the sender. Thus, the final recipient of the qubit will no longer get qubits entangled with the original sender's, and so even when the two of them measure with the same basis they are no longer guaranteed to get the same result. In fact, on average 50% of the time they will disagree -- equivalent to what would happen if they both just generated independent random strings of bits.
Now you might say: why not have the repeater just generate a qubit such that the recipient will get the same measurement result as you did? The answer is that you cannot do this because you cannot know in advance what basis he will use to measure the qubit. In the case of photons, he could measure it in a horizontal/vertical basis, or he could measure it in a diagonal basis. (For each measurement he will pick one or the other on a random basis.) If you polarize your photon horizontally (which might correspond to a classical value of "0"), then the other guy will get a random result when he measures it in the diagonal basis. You can only hope to guess right 50% of the time.
Part of the QC protocol is to share selected strings of bits to make sure that they are in fact in ownership of a common secret. If these strings differ 50% of the time, then they know that someone was reading them in the middle.
Thus, the whole point of QC is that it is impossible to put repeaters in the middle to intercept the data without this resulting in a detectable error rate in the shared secret.
You post sounds like it is based on a misconception that QC is allowing Alice to transmit to Bob a secret. This is not what is going on at all; rather, a shared secret is being generated that Alice does not even know until the end of the process. In classical crypto, a man could sit in the middle and figure out the secret that is shared between Alice and Bob. In properly implemented quantum crypto, however, this is not possible. The best he could do -- using the very man in the middle attack that you described -- is to have one secret that is shared with Alice, and a separate secret that is shared with Bob, when Alice and Bob both think that they have a secret that is shared with each other. It is unlikely that Alice and Bob would take very long to notice that they are using different keys, given that this would produce garbage in every single message that they exchanged.
It's true that he could then hijack ALL communication channels between Alice and Bob, decrypt messages using one key and then re-encrypt them using the other, but... it would probably be easier just to bribe the people doing the transmitting and receiving to tell him what the messages were. I don't think that most people who are serious about security are claiming that QC is a miricule cure, just that it makes one part of the system much, much more secure.
It might be the case that the benefit is not worth the cost, given that the weakest link tends to be the human element, but this is much different than it being "just as good as classical crypto", or a form of "snake oil".
> If you disagree with fighting fire with fire, I suggest you also criticize any and all law enforcement activities. They're simply state- > sponsored vigilantes.
Actually, in any reasonable democracy law enforcement is more like "state-sponsered vigilantes, with an independent court system designed to prevent them from accidently screwing over the innocent in their zealous quest for justice."
Actually, if it could be done it wouldn't violate the Uncertainty Principle at all. A particle cannot have both a definite momentum and position, it can only have (roughly speaking) a probability distribution of each. So if you could clone a particle a zillion times, then each time you wouldn't get the same position, but rather if you looked at all of the clones together you'd get a distribution which would be identical to that of the original particle.
Having said that, cloning a particle perfectly is nonetheless forbidden by the No Cloning Theorem. Basically (as I understand it) what this says is that there is an underlying principle of Quantum Mechanics that you can never know what position distribution a particle originally had, since the moment you measure it you focus it at that point and kill the original distribution. Cloning the particle would be a way of "cheating" that would let you get the distribution of the particle without destroying it, so it ends up being forbidden.
Now, even though you cannot perfectly clone a particle, you can imperfectly clone it, which is what these guys have claimed to have done. If you look at the abstract, you will note that they are only claiming a fidelity of 58% +/- 1%. (The theoretical limit is five-sixths (83%) according to this article in New Scientist.)
A non-perfect fidelity, however, isn't so bad. Alice and Bob probably can't get their own optimal fidelity when using Quantum Cryptography anyways; in theory they should expect to see 50% of the bits get through, and then worry if they see it goes down below that -- even, say, to 49%. In practice, their equipment might only be able to get 40% of the bits through, and sometimes even less than that, so they'll tolerate lower rates than 50% since they are figuring that eavesdropping would lower this rate all the way down to 25%, and that is something that they'd surely notice. However, by using the techniques like those discussed in the article you can apparently eavesdrop less than perfectly in a way that, while still lowering the bit transmission, does not make it as bad as 25%. Thus, if Alice and Bob were naive they'd just assume that their equipment was faulty and not that there was an eavesdropper.
So the moral of this story is that from now on Alice and Bob will have to make their apparatus work much more reliably so that they can expect a success rate of say, 45-50% rather than 35-50%, and thus be more likely to notice a slight degradation in the signal due to an eavesdropper.
Boy scouts are about honor and doing what is right and about self reliance and about all other good things like that...
Yes, because excluding gays and atheists from their organization is both honorable and good, right?
Suppose the situation were turned around, and the local Atheism Club turned down a Boy Scout for membership because he was religious. Should the Boy Scout feel "excluded"? Of course not! It's perfectly acceptable for an organization of people to form around a shared value and to only allow in people who share that value. There's nothing dishonorable or mean about this.
Also, homosexuals are not "excluded" out of bigotry, as your post seems to imply. It's partly a value thing, as with Atheism, and its partly to assure parents that their children are going to be in a situation where no one will have sexual feelings for them and vice versa. The Boy Scouts don't think that homosexuals are bad people at all -- they just disagree with the behavior. Don't confuse these two things.
Besides, this is generally a nonissue. There's an unofficial policy of "Don't ask, don't tell." Even if you are an atheist or a homosexual, if you don't make a big deal out of it nobody's going to care. If you say, "Hey everyone, I'm an atheist and I insist on being a Boy Scout anyways!" then of course they have no choice but to not allow you in, but I don't think that most troops work particularly hard to enforce that rule unless someone forces the issue.
There are much, much bigger problems with this pseudo-military youth group than RIAA merit badges. They deserve neither our respect nor our money.
Boy Scouts is not really pseudo-military -- at least, my troop wasn't at all, but every troop is different. It's much more like an outdoors club that strives to teach leadership skills and the value of accomplishment (e.g. merit badges, etc.), both of which are very respectable things to have.
I think you are wrong in saying that people with a higher IQ don't deal with as much stress as "Normal" people. Smart people often take on more difficult projects (such as higher level courses) that are commenserate with their increased abilities, so that they stress out as much (or maybe more than) "Normal" people.
It's true that there are a lot of smart people who don't challenge themselves and so just take life easy, but I'd imagine that's not a characteristic unique to people with a high IQ.
Just because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth. Suppose that the asteroid were going to come close to Earth without hitting it. At first, the impact probability would appear low since the "window" of orbits allowed from the data would be wide. As we got better observations, however, this window would shrink, but the Earth would stay inside it since it's near the center. Thus, for a time the probability of impact would go up, since the Earth would take up a greater percentage of the window. Eventually, though, the window would shrink past the Earth and the probability would go down again.
I suspect that this is what will happen. Could easily be wrong, though.
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'
Your quote completely mischaracterizes the report, which you can read in its entirety from here. Let me offer an alternative quote from the report (p. 7-8):
Rather than predicting how climate change will happen, our intent is to dramatize
the impact climate change could have on society if we are unprepared for it. Where
we describe concrete weather conditions and implications, our aim is to further the
strategic conversation rather than to accurately forecast what is likely to happen with
a high degree of certainty. Even the most sophisticated models cannot predict the
details of how the climate change will unfold, which regions will be impacted in
which ways, and how governments and society might respond. However, there
appears to be general agreement in the scientific community that an extreme case like
the one depicted below is not implausible. Many scientists would regard this
scenario as extreme both in how soon it develops, how large, rapid and ubiquitous
the climate changes are. But history tells us that sometimes the extreme cases do
occur, there is evidence that it might be and it is DOD's job to consider such
scenarios.
In other words, the the report does not claim that the extreme doomsday scenerio you describe above is likely to happen. Rather, the purpose of the report was to pick a unlikely but plausable extreme outcome since it's the DOD's job to prepare for the worst-case scenerios.
In fact, let me know share with you the emphasized section in a big box on the front of the report,
IMAGINING THE UNTHINKABLE
The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable - to push the boundaries of current
research on climate change so we may better understand the potential implications on United
States national security.
We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and
reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this
project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First,
they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather
than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.
We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and
would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered
immediately.
The article you quote from The Observer reports that "'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'" The sentance quoted from the Pentagon report was summarizing what the world would be like in the imagined, extreme scenerio. Your wouldn't have been able to tell this at all from The Observer article, however, since the article made it seem like the Pentagon thinks that thi
Well, when the shereholders make more profit, what do you think that they will do with it? I mean, personally when I become rich I am going to turn all of my insane profits into gold coins and put all of those coins into a vault so I can swim at them ala Uncle Scrooge in Duck Tails. But I'd imagine that most shereholders will either A) spend it, creating jobs to produce the goods or services they are buying, or B) reinvest the profits in the private sector, creating new companies or expanding old ones, wihch also leads to new jobs. (Now, there's also C), which is investing the money in government bonds, but I'm not sure whether that would suck up jobs by draining money from the public sector or create jobs by expanding the stuff bought by the government.)
Now, you may argue that the new stuff being will STILL be bought from abroad, so that there is still no net gain in American jobs. The point I'm guessing this article makes (admittedly not having read it:-) ) is that you are nonetheless enriching poor countries and making it possible for them to afford the more expensive goods we produce here --- such as premium quality software like Windows XP. (;-) )
People who make the argument that it is faith alone and NOT good works that saves rarely make clear exactly what they think is going on. Thus, here is my explanation:
TRUE SAVING FAITH ==IMPLIES==>>> GOOD WORKS
but
GOOD WORKS =XXX=DO NOT IMPLY=XXX=>> TRUE SAVING FAITH
i.e. Good Works are a NECESSARY but NOT a SUFFICIENT condition for the True Saving Faith that will get you into Heaven.
Put another way, if you really have the kind of true, saving faith that will get you into heaven, then you must necessarily be trying to perform good works. If you are not performing good works, then you do not really have true saving faith, no matter what you claim to profess.
This is why people who say, "I believe in the Lord, and surrender myself to him!" and yet who actually make livings from selling used lollipops stolen from babies are probably not actually saved. If they had true faith, they would be repelled from making such a living. Thus, they must not have true faith.
On the other hand, a woman or a man could be an upstanding moral being, and yet not have saving faith, and thus not be saved. I think that the reasoning behind this belief is that since God is perfect and we are not, even the smallest little evil is the most terrible thing that God has ever seen, and this pushes us away from him. Only true saving faith can overcome this and bring us back to him.
Thus, if someone truly believes in God but temporarily succombs to temptation and kills his neighbor, but then apologizes to God and tries harder, he is saved. (After all, none of us are perfect and even people who have true saving faith will commit evil on occaison due to their imperfection.) On the other hand, if you have never killed another human being but once told a silly lie about being busy a night you weren't in order to avoid being with someone, then if you do not have saving faith this evil act of dishonesty is still enough to push you away from God because ALL evil is ABHORRANT to him. The difference between murder and a small lie may be a factor of one million, but in practice to God's mind murder = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bad and small lie = 1,000,000,000,000 bad, so both are astronomically evil to him. This is why no matter how good you thing you are, you are still a terrible person in God's eyes due to your imperfections.
Two words: network effect. One of the main reasons that most people use Windows is because most people use Windows, since as a result most (Desktop) hardware and software is made for Windows machines, with Linux etc. maybe, maybe supported as an after-thought.
It would be really nice if I could just get rid of the copy of Windows I have on my hard drive, but the fact is that I cannot because there are many programs and some pieces of hardware I have that will only work in Windows. The only way to escape this is for software and hardware makers to have motivation to make sure that Linux is supported, and the only way this will happen is if they will lose significant sales if they do not support Linux.
Thus, the reason we want big companies to support Linux is because it encourages others to make sure that their hardware/software supports Linux, which in turn makes Linux attractive to more people, which in turn gets us better hardware/software support, etc. In other words, maybe we could finally get the network effect working in our favor.
There is actually a little warp field around the main computer that allows computations to perform at faster than the speed of light. Due to relativistic effects, this means that the computations must be traveling backwards in time, so the computer already knew what Data was going to say. Furthermore, it knew what he was going to say several seconds ago. By the time Data had finished asking the computer to connect him with Worf, not only had Worf's communicator already paged him, but it had done so several seconds ago. This is how Star Trek charecters get the time to sigh or stretch for several seconds before responding, and yet always sound to the other person as if they'd responded right away!
"Calling palestinians freedom fighters is no more or less accurate than calling our american forefathers heroes."
Well, I would think that one small difference between the Americans and the Palestinian "freedom fighters" is that the Americans did not sneak into Britain and blow up random civilians, though when you think about it this had been an option available to them at the time. In fact, it would have been stupid for them to have done so because it would have just made Britian much angrier and more inclined to smash the colonies into the ground, just as the acts of many of the Palestinian "freedom fighters" has caused Israel to get really angry and bitter and respond with military action.
Personally I agree with you though about the North attacking civilian targets in the South -- this is a part of American history which I am not particularly proud of.
This has been said before, but I think an example might make it clearer.
Suppose that we have 100 mega-man-hours available to us in the U.S., and we can use each of these mega-man-hours to produce EITHER three software programs OR ten spaceships. So we can have at most 300 programs or 1000 spaceships.
India also has 100 mega-man-hours available to it, but there each mega-man-hour can produce EITHER two software programs OR one spaceship. Thus, at most India can make 200 programs or 100 spaceships.
The question is, even though we hold the absolute advantage over India in all goods, should we still outsource programming jobs to them? The answer is a resounding yes, and here's why.
In economics, "cost" is defined to be what you give up to get something. So in a manner of speaking, the cost of a software program in the U.S. is 3 1/3 spaceships, since each mega-man-hour spent coding cannot be spent building spaceships. In India, however, the cost of writing a program is only half a spaceship. Thus, we say that India has a comparative advantage in producing software programs, since it costs them less to produce then it costs us (in terms of spaceships), even though they can't produce as many.
So what these two countries should do is something along these lines: the U.S. should put all of its mega-man-hours into building spaceships, and India into building software programs, and then the two countries should agree to an even one-to-one trade of spaceships and programs. Now the U.S., by trading with India, can obtain software programs at the cost of only ONE spaceship each, rather than 3 1/3, and India can obtain spaceships at a cost of only one program each, rather than two. (This isn't necessarily the optimum outcome, but it's still better than it was when there was no trading at all.)
This is how taking advantage of comparative advantage, rather than absolute advantage, theoretically allows everyone to have more than they would otherwise.
Now, I can already forsee the millions of replies saying "Yeah, but this isn't a perfect world, and people can't just change jobs instantly from writing code to making spaceships, so you're full of BS." There is a lot of truth to this, but I believe the original point is still valid: even if you are ten times the coder of a programming team in India, it may STILL be an inefficient use of your time to be producing code -- not because the Indians are cheaper, but because you are even better at other things than the Indians. For example, I've often heard it said that Indians are very good at following processes exactly, but that Americans excel at thinking creatively, so perhaps this is an advantage that you may have been underutilizing that makes you even more valuable than you realized.
Remember, the point of free trade is that everyone has more. And don't give me that crap about "but it will just go to the evil corporations!" Remember that these evil corporations have to compete with each other for your money, so it is in their best interest to pass some of the savings on to you so that you'll buy from them rather than their competitors. (And, on an unrelated note, if you don't mind the corporations competing for your dollar, then you are being a hypocrit if you don't think that you should have to compete for their job -- the beauty and terror of capitalism is that it works both ways.)
The last time I checked, the highest bid was $360. Thus, clearly, the song's real value is $360, and every time you buy a song for $1 from Apple's web site, the RIAA has just lost $359!
So that's how they manage to lose billions of dollars each year!
How did you get the software in the first place? If it wasn't legally distributed to you, then how can it be legal for you to use it?
Quoth the GPL,
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
So, Linux developers can sue, and win, because by paying the fee to SCO they acknowledge that they have kowingly received Linux in violation of the GPL, and have no license to do anything with said software.
You are wrong. The GPL does not cover use of the program, it covers modification and distribution of the program. In section 0 it is specifically stated that,
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
No one can ever be liable for a GPL violation merely by using the software.
Microsoft Windows has a defragger? That's so cool! Now when I get blown up while playing Quake I can just alt-tab out, punch the defragger, and watch the shocked expression on my enemies' faces as my pieces fly back together! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
If you work harder and produce more, people are going to be willing to pay you more. Since you have more money, you can get more stuff. Thus, if you produce more, you get more, which is exactly the way it should be.
Also, since *I* can decide where I spend my money, *I* get to make the choice that I'm willing to spend a little less on, say, Media/Information in order to get better Health Care. I have the freedom to choose to have less of one thing in order to have more of something that I want more.
I can't claim to be an expert on Qt's design philosophy, but I would imagine that part of the reason that it acts he way that it does is because it is meant to be a cross-platform toolkit. The Qt developers presumably figured it would be easier to write a single widget rendering engine that could be ported with minimum effort to multiple platforms, rather than to rewrite it for each platform to take advantage of it's unique features.
It does raise an interesting philosophical question, though: is it better to write a program that can easily be ported, or is it better to take advantage of the unique features of each platform? After all, if all programs were made portable by acting in a least-common-denominator fashon, then no individual platform would have a reason to come up with new features since the cross-platform toolkits wouldn't taken advantage of them in the interest of portability. On the other hand, the more that one's codebase changes from platform to platform, the more of a code development/maintenance nightmare you have on your hands.
Don't you think mozilla is bloated enough already? If they added that, then they might as well just go ahead and include a kitchen si... wait... err... nevermind.
Not to criticize, but what you have said does raise an interesting question: why are we calling the ISS a symbol of the "unity of the human race" if it requires NASA to survive? If the rest of the human race can't or won't take care of it without us then it isn't a very good symbol.
Slashdot Mirror
The "data" that is being sent is not classical information, but quantum information in the form of "qubits". Ergo, you cannot intercept and then "read" it in the sense that your post is describing.
Specifically, what is being sent is one half of two perfectly entangled qubits. The fact that they are "entangled" means that if the two people involved each measure their qubit using the same basis, they will always get the same answer.
When you intercept one of the two qubits, you can measure it but in the process you destroy it, and you cannot create a new qubit that is entangled with the one kept by the sender. Thus, the final recipient of the qubit will no longer get qubits entangled with the original sender's, and so even when the two of them measure with the same basis they are no longer guaranteed to get the same result. In fact, on average 50% of the time they will disagree -- equivalent to what would happen if they both just generated independent random strings of bits.
Now you might say: why not have the repeater just generate a qubit such that the recipient will get the same measurement result as you did? The answer is that you cannot do this because you cannot know in advance what basis he will use to measure the qubit. In the case of photons, he could measure it in a horizontal/vertical basis, or he could measure it in a diagonal basis. (For each measurement he will pick one or the other on a random basis.) If you polarize your photon horizontally (which might correspond to a classical value of "0"), then the other guy will get a random result when he measures it in the diagonal basis. You can only hope to guess right 50% of the time.
Part of the QC protocol is to share selected strings of bits to make sure that they are in fact in ownership of a common secret. If these strings differ 50% of the time, then they know that someone was reading them in the middle.
Thus, the whole point of QC is that it is impossible to put repeaters in the middle to intercept the data without this resulting in a detectable error rate in the shared secret.
You post sounds like it is based on a misconception that QC is allowing Alice to transmit to Bob a secret. This is not what is going on at all; rather, a shared secret is being generated that Alice does not even know until the end of the process. In classical crypto, a man could sit in the middle and figure out the secret that is shared between Alice and Bob. In properly implemented quantum crypto, however, this is not possible. The best he could do -- using the very man in the middle attack that you described -- is to have one secret that is shared with Alice, and a separate secret that is shared with Bob, when Alice and Bob both think that they have a secret that is shared with each other. It is unlikely that Alice and Bob would take very long to notice that they are using different keys, given that this would produce garbage in every single message that they exchanged.
It's true that he could then hijack ALL communication channels between Alice and Bob, decrypt messages using one key and then re-encrypt them using the other, but... it would probably be easier just to bribe the people doing the transmitting and receiving to tell him what the messages were. I don't think that most people who are serious about security are claiming that QC is a miricule cure, just that it makes one part of the system much, much more secure.
It might be the case that the benefit is not worth the cost, given that the weakest link tends to be the human element, but this is much different than it being "just as good as classical crypto", or a form of "snake oil".
> If you disagree with fighting fire with fire, I suggest you also criticize any and all law enforcement activities. They're simply state-
> sponsored vigilantes.
Actually, in any reasonable democracy law enforcement is more like "state-sponsered vigilantes, with an independent court system designed to prevent them from accidently screwing over the innocent in their zealous quest for justice."
Having said that, cloning a particle perfectly is nonetheless forbidden by the No Cloning Theorem. Basically (as I understand it) what this says is that there is an underlying principle of Quantum Mechanics that you can never know what position distribution a particle originally had, since the moment you measure it you focus it at that point and kill the original distribution. Cloning the particle would be a way of "cheating" that would let you get the distribution of the particle without destroying it, so it ends up being forbidden.
Now, even though you cannot perfectly clone a particle, you can imperfectly clone it, which is what these guys have claimed to have done. If you look at the abstract, you will note that they are only claiming a fidelity of 58% +/- 1%. (The theoretical limit is five-sixths (83%) according to this article in New Scientist.)
A non-perfect fidelity, however, isn't so bad. Alice and Bob probably can't get their own optimal fidelity when using Quantum Cryptography anyways; in theory they should expect to see 50% of the bits get through, and then worry if they see it goes down below that -- even, say, to 49%. In practice, their equipment might only be able to get 40% of the bits through, and sometimes even less than that, so they'll tolerate lower rates than 50% since they are figuring that eavesdropping would lower this rate all the way down to 25%, and that is something that they'd surely notice. However, by using the techniques like those discussed in the article you can apparently eavesdrop less than perfectly in a way that, while still lowering the bit transmission, does not make it as bad as 25%. Thus, if Alice and Bob were naive they'd just assume that their equipment was faulty and not that there was an eavesdropper.
So the moral of this story is that from now on Alice and Bob will have to make their apparatus work much more reliably so that they can expect a success rate of say, 45-50% rather than 35-50%, and thus be more likely to notice a slight degradation in the signal due to an eavesdropper.
Yes, because excluding gays and atheists from their organization is both honorable and good, right?
Suppose the situation were turned around, and the local Atheism Club turned down a Boy Scout for membership because he was religious. Should the Boy Scout feel "excluded"? Of course not! It's perfectly acceptable for an organization of people to form around a shared value and to only allow in people who share that value. There's nothing dishonorable or mean about this.
Also, homosexuals are not "excluded" out of bigotry, as your post seems to imply. It's partly a value thing, as with Atheism, and its partly to assure parents that their children are going to be in a situation where no one will have sexual feelings for them and vice versa. The Boy Scouts don't think that homosexuals are bad people at all -- they just disagree with the behavior. Don't confuse these two things.
Besides, this is generally a nonissue. There's an unofficial policy of "Don't ask, don't tell." Even if you are an atheist or a homosexual, if you don't make a big deal out of it nobody's going to care. If you say, "Hey everyone, I'm an atheist and I insist on being a Boy Scout anyways!" then of course they have no choice but to not allow you in, but I don't think that most troops work particularly hard to enforce that rule unless someone forces the issue.
There are much, much bigger problems with this pseudo-military youth group than RIAA merit badges. They deserve neither our respect nor our money.
Boy Scouts is not really pseudo-military -- at least, my troop wasn't at all, but every troop is different. It's much more like an outdoors club that strives to teach leadership skills and the value of accomplishment (e.g. merit badges, etc.), both of which are very respectable things to have.
I think you are wrong in saying that people with a higher IQ don't deal with as much stress as "Normal" people. Smart people often take on more difficult projects (such as higher level courses) that are commenserate with their increased abilities, so that they stress out as much (or maybe more than) "Normal" people.
It's true that there are a lot of smart people who don't challenge themselves and so just take life easy, but I'd imagine that's not a characteristic unique to people with a high IQ.
Just because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth. Suppose that the asteroid were going to come close to Earth without hitting it. At first, the impact probability would appear low since the "window" of orbits allowed from the data would be wide. As we got better observations, however, this window would shrink, but the Earth would stay inside it since it's near the center. Thus, for a time the probability of impact would go up, since the Earth would take up a greater percentage of the window. Eventually, though, the window would shrink past the Earth and the probability would go down again.
I suspect that this is what will happen. Could easily be wrong, though.
Your quote completely mischaracterizes the report, which you can read in its entirety from here. Let me offer an alternative quote from the report (p. 7-8):
In other words, the the report does not claim that the extreme doomsday scenerio you describe above is likely to happen. Rather, the purpose of the report was to pick a unlikely but plausable extreme outcome since it's the DOD's job to prepare for the worst-case scenerios.
In fact, let me know share with you the emphasized section in a big box on the front of the report,
The article you quote from The Observer reports that "'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'" The sentance quoted from the Pentagon report was summarizing what the world would be like in the imagined, extreme scenerio. Your wouldn't have been able to tell this at all from The Observer article, however, since the article made it seem like the Pentagon thinks that thi
Well, when the shereholders make more profit, what do you think that they will do with it? I mean, personally when I become rich I am going to turn all of my insane profits into gold coins and put all of those coins into a vault so I can swim at them ala Uncle Scrooge in Duck Tails. But I'd imagine that most shereholders will either A) spend it, creating jobs to produce the goods or services they are buying, or B) reinvest the profits in the private sector, creating new companies or expanding old ones, wihch also leads to new jobs. (Now, there's also C), which is investing the money in government bonds, but I'm not sure whether that would suck up jobs by draining money from the public sector or create jobs by expanding the stuff bought by the government.) Now, you may argue that the new stuff being will STILL be bought from abroad, so that there is still no net gain in American jobs. The point I'm guessing this article makes (admittedly not having read it :-) ) is that you are nonetheless enriching poor countries and making it possible for them to afford the more expensive goods we produce here --- such as premium quality software like Windows XP. ( ;-) )
People who make the argument that it is faith alone and NOT good works that saves rarely make clear exactly what they think is going on. Thus, here is my explanation:
TRUE SAVING FAITH ==IMPLIES==>>> GOOD WORKS
but
GOOD WORKS =XXX=DO NOT IMPLY=XXX=>> TRUE SAVING FAITH
i.e. Good Works are a NECESSARY but NOT a SUFFICIENT condition for the True Saving Faith that will get you into Heaven.
Put another way, if you really have the kind of true, saving faith that will get you into heaven, then you must necessarily be trying to perform good works. If you are not performing good works, then you do not really have true saving faith, no matter what you claim to profess.
This is why people who say, "I believe in the Lord, and surrender myself to him!" and yet who actually make livings from selling used lollipops stolen from babies are probably not actually saved. If they had true faith, they would be repelled from making such a living. Thus, they must not have true faith.
On the other hand, a woman or a man could be an upstanding moral being, and yet not have saving faith, and thus not be saved. I think that the reasoning behind this belief is that since God is perfect and we are not, even the smallest little evil is the most terrible thing that God has ever seen, and this pushes us away from him. Only true saving faith can overcome this and bring us back to him.
Thus, if someone truly believes in God but temporarily succombs to temptation and kills his neighbor, but then apologizes to God and tries harder, he is saved. (After all, none of us are perfect and even people who have true saving faith will commit evil on occaison due to their imperfection.) On the other hand, if you have never killed another human being but once told a silly lie about being busy a night you weren't in order to avoid being with someone, then if you do not have saving faith this evil act of dishonesty is still enough to push you away from God because ALL evil is ABHORRANT to him. The difference between murder and a small lie may be a factor of one million, but in practice to God's mind murder = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bad and small lie = 1,000,000,000,000 bad, so both are astronomically evil to him. This is why no matter how good you thing you are, you are still a terrible person in God's eyes due to your imperfections.
Two words: network effect. One of the main reasons that most people use Windows is because most people use Windows, since as a result most (Desktop) hardware and software is made for Windows machines, with Linux etc. maybe, maybe supported as an after-thought.
It would be really nice if I could just get rid of the copy of Windows I have on my hard drive, but the fact is that I cannot because there are many programs and some pieces of hardware I have that will only work in Windows. The only way to escape this is for software and hardware makers to have motivation to make sure that Linux is supported, and the only way this will happen is if they will lose significant sales if they do not support Linux.
Thus, the reason we want big companies to support Linux is because it encourages others to make sure that their hardware/software supports Linux, which in turn makes Linux attractive to more people, which in turn gets us better hardware/software support, etc. In other words, maybe we could finally get the network effect working in our favor.
It is an urben legend that digging straight down will take you to China.
If you really were to do such a thing, you would actually arrive in the Indian Ocean a little west of Australia.
There is actually a little warp field around the main computer that allows computations to perform at faster than the speed of light. Due to relativistic effects, this means that the computations must be traveling backwards in time, so the computer already knew what Data was going to say. Furthermore, it knew what he was going to say several seconds ago. By the time Data had finished asking the computer to connect him with Worf, not only had Worf's communicator already paged him, but it had done so several seconds ago. This is how Star Trek charecters get the time to sigh or stretch for several seconds before responding, and yet always sound to the other person as if they'd responded right away!
"Calling palestinians freedom fighters is no more or less accurate than calling our american forefathers heroes."
Well, I would think that one small difference between the Americans and the Palestinian "freedom fighters" is that the Americans did not sneak into Britain and blow up random civilians, though when you think about it this had been an option available to them at the time. In fact, it would have been stupid for them to have done so because it would have just made Britian much angrier and more inclined to smash the colonies into the ground, just as the acts of many of the Palestinian "freedom fighters" has caused Israel to get really angry and bitter and respond with military action.
Personally I agree with you though about the North attacking civilian targets in the South -- this is a part of American history which I am not particularly proud of.
This has been said before, but I think an example might make it clearer.
Suppose that we have 100 mega-man-hours available to us in the U.S., and we can use each of these mega-man-hours to produce EITHER three software programs OR ten spaceships. So we can have at most 300 programs or 1000 spaceships.
India also has 100 mega-man-hours available to it, but there each mega-man-hour can produce EITHER two software programs OR one spaceship. Thus, at most India can make 200 programs or 100 spaceships.
The question is, even though we hold the absolute advantage over India in all goods, should we still outsource programming jobs to them? The answer is a resounding yes, and here's why.
In economics, "cost" is defined to be what you give up to get something. So in a manner of speaking, the cost of a software program in the U.S. is 3 1/3 spaceships, since each mega-man-hour spent coding cannot be spent building spaceships. In India, however, the cost of writing a program is only half a spaceship. Thus, we say that India has a comparative advantage in producing software programs, since it costs them less to produce then it costs us (in terms of spaceships), even though they can't produce as many.
So what these two countries should do is something along these lines: the U.S. should put all of its mega-man-hours into building spaceships, and India into building software programs, and then the two countries should agree to an even one-to-one trade of spaceships and programs. Now the U.S., by trading with India, can obtain software programs at the cost of only ONE spaceship each, rather than 3 1/3, and India can obtain spaceships at a cost of only one program each, rather than two. (This isn't necessarily the optimum outcome, but it's still better than it was when there was no trading at all.)
This is how taking advantage of comparative advantage, rather than absolute advantage, theoretically allows everyone to have more than they would otherwise.
Now, I can already forsee the millions of replies saying "Yeah, but this isn't a perfect world, and people can't just change jobs instantly from writing code to making spaceships, so you're full of BS." There is a lot of truth to this, but I believe the original point is still valid: even if you are ten times the coder of a programming team in India, it may STILL be an inefficient use of your time to be producing code -- not because the Indians are cheaper, but because you are even better at other things than the Indians. For example, I've often heard it said that Indians are very good at following processes exactly, but that Americans excel at thinking creatively, so perhaps this is an advantage that you may have been underutilizing that makes you even more valuable than you realized.
Remember, the point of free trade is that everyone has more. And don't give me that crap about "but it will just go to the evil corporations!" Remember that these evil corporations have to compete with each other for your money, so it is in their best interest to pass some of the savings on to you so that you'll buy from them rather than their competitors. (And, on an unrelated note, if you don't mind the corporations competing for your dollar, then you are being a hypocrit if you don't think that you should have to compete for their job -- the beauty and terror of capitalism is that it works both ways.)
It kould be worse. At they kan type a "see" without it koming out as a "kay" like it does on KDE keyboards. :-(
The last time I checked, the highest bid was $360. Thus, clearly, the song's real value is $360, and every time you buy a song for $1 from Apple's web site, the RIAA has just lost $359!
So that's how they manage to lose billions of dollars each year!
Quoth the GPL,
You are wrong. The GPL does not cover use of the program, it covers modification and distribution of the program. In section 0 it is specifically stated that,
No one can ever be liable for a GPL violation merely by using the software.
...that this experiment sucks?
Microsoft Windows has a defragger? That's so cool! Now when I get blown up while playing Quake I can just alt-tab out, punch the defragger, and watch the shocked expression on my enemies' faces as my pieces fly back together! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
How is that sad?
If you work harder and produce more, people are going to be willing to pay you more. Since you have more money, you can get more stuff. Thus, if you produce more, you get more, which is exactly the way it should be.
Also, since *I* can decide where I spend my money, *I* get to make the choice that I'm willing to spend a little less on, say, Media/Information in order to get better Health Care. I have the freedom to choose to have less of one thing in order to have more of something that I want more.
This is what we call a Good Thing (tm).
I can't claim to be an expert on Qt's design philosophy, but I would imagine that part of the reason that it acts he way that it does is because it is meant to be a cross-platform toolkit. The Qt developers presumably figured it would be easier to write a single widget rendering engine that could be ported with minimum effort to multiple platforms, rather than to rewrite it for each platform to take advantage of it's unique features.
It does raise an interesting philosophical question, though: is it better to write a program that can easily be ported, or is it better to take advantage of the unique features of each platform? After all, if all programs were made portable by acting in a least-common-denominator fashon, then no individual platform would have a reason to come up with new features since the cross-platform toolkits wouldn't taken advantage of them in the interest of portability. On the other hand, the more that one's codebase changes from platform to platform, the more of a code development/maintenance nightmare you have on your hands.
Don't you think mozilla is bloated enough already? If they added that, then they might as well just go ahead and include a kitchen si... wait... err... nevermind.
Not to criticize, but what you have said does raise an interesting question: why are we calling the ISS a symbol of the "unity of the human race" if it requires NASA to survive? If the rest of the human race can't or won't take care of it without us then it isn't a very good symbol.