I thought that would be extremely obvious. Are you really saying that because we already have one organization that does not secure its nuclear devices properly there is no problem with increasing the number of organizations that do likewise?
Yes. And used responsibly that can be a good thing.
The point I am trying to make is what happens when they are NOT used responsibly? Nuclear weapons are simply too dangerous to have around in common use - not primarily because of the radioactivity they cause but simply because of the power of the devices. Conventional explosives in the wrong hands can maximally kill a few hundred people on a plane or building, a nuclear device could kill millions in a city. So is a 10,000 fold increase in the risk worth it over conventional methods? This is not fearmongering but simply asking a reasonable question about risk vs. reward. I see a huge increase in risk and minimal (and that not yet proven) reward. Show me some proven benefit that outweighs this and I'll reconsider.
Things like radon that are radioactive, and created by uranium have a shelf life of 2 days. So basically if you separate out leftover uranium, in 2 days I would expect your extracted oil would be radiation free.
Sorry but this is completely wrong. First uranium itself is not very radioactive (although it is toxic). The half-life for U235/238 (what you find in a Uranium bomb) is 0.7/4.5 billion years respectively. This means that even in large non-critical lumps the radiation is low. Secondly radioactivity after a nuclear explosion comes from the fission products of Uranium (or what they very rapidly decay into) like Strontium, Xenon, Caesium etc. which have varying but generally medium half lives (of order decades). Radon is a decay product of Uranium (after several steps), not a fission product.
Finally radioactive nuclei, particularly heavy ones, usually decay into other radioactive nuclei. Hence the fact that one isotope of radon has a short half-life does not mean that "all the radioactivity" will be gone because there is a decay chain. For example Radon-222 which has a half-live of 3.8 days (there is no Radon isotope with a 2d half-life that I could find) will eventually decay into Lead-210 which has a half life of 22.3 years.
Even if this was deep enough to contain the radioactivity do we really want lots of civilian uses for nuclear explosions? This will mean demand to make more and, rather than being stored on high security military bases, they will be looked after by companies hiring security guards. If we want to get rid of them the safest option is to disassemble them and either burn the fissionable material in a reactor or render it non-weapons grade. Developing commercial uses will only encourage us to build more.
Which game company would stop creating *French* localizations of their games and lose the market in *France*
It won't prevent them all but if you shrink the market size it will mean that less will. Plus what if they decide to make a French, but not Quebecois-French version - the differences are greater than between American and English. Will that satisfy the language laws? Even if it does suppose they decide not to make it available in North America would that mean the retailers were off the hook?
Quebec has been a fantastic influence on Canada - it has continuously reminded the government that we are not a mono-culture. The sad irony of laws like this is that the cultural diversity that the rest of Canada enjoys and celebrates partly because of Quebec seems to be actively suppressed in Quebec itself.
If we dominate each other through trickery and exploitative contracts, how is that better than dominating each other through violence and force of arms?
Contracts are considerably better. For one very few contracts lead to loss of life. For another there is nothing that you can do to avoid violence and force of arms whereas at least with trickery you have a chance to spot it and not sign up.
Yes, trickery and exploitive contracts are bad but nowhere near as bad as violence. Besides for the case in question their is a known solution called a quorum. This concept has been around since at least the 1500's i.e. far longer than the current French system. So is this trickery or simply how the French want their system to work?
Google isn't going to allow apps that annoy the carriers....they probably won't be banning apps simply because they don't fit into Google's view of what you 'should' be doing
Sorry but you contradict yourself here. Clearly Google's world view is that you should not be annoying the carriers and so ban apps that do. So its a slightly different set of criteria from Apple but neither of them are yours or my criteria which is really what matters. At least Apple don't have the gall to push the iPhone/iTouch as an open platform.
I can guarantee you that life exists elsewhere in the universe. The universe is incomprehensibly vast, and it's likely that most of it does not lie within our light cone.
In that case it is impossible for you to know about it and so you guarentee is completely worthless. I would agree with you that life elsewhere seems incredibly likely given what we know. The question is how likely is is given what we don't know? The only way to answer that is to go out there and either find it or not as the case may be.
The existence of dark matter does not invalidate one single fact of what was known before.
Actually it does. You see before this the options of the end of the Universe were always continuous, slowing, expansion, expansion to s fixed size or recollapse. Now we know that all of these are wrong and we will actually have a continuously accelerating expansion.
Newtonian phisics is still valid
It is actually very ironic that you chose this because, in fact, one explanation of Dark Matter is to use modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) on large distance scales. This is becoming increasingly unlikely (the Bullet cluster was almost a shot to its head) but it is still not ruled out.
Asimov was right, we are getting closer to the truth.
Yes we are, but that was not entirely what Asimov was saying - he was also claiming that the steps we took towards the truth were getting smaller because we were closer to the destination. My point is that we still have no idea yet how far we have to go. We might be heading in the roughly right direction but sometimes we take baby steps and sometimes we take huge strides. Asimov's point that we are asymptotically approaching the truth is demonstrably wrong.
Mankind != important in the grand scheme of things, thus nothing we produce is all that important either.
How do you know that? As far as we know we might be the only intelligent life in the entire universe (the probabilistic arguments suggesting this is unlikely have huge unknowns) i.e. the only way for the Universe to understand itself. Until we know otherwise perhaps we should not write ourselves off. Besides, even if there is other intelligent life out there, who knows how far we'll have spread a few billion years time.
I think the perfect answer to that kind of thinking was given by Isaac Asimov in an essay named "The Relativity of Wrong" [google.com].
While I support your point that article is actually not a good example. Since that article was written we have learnt that we don't know what 96% of the Universe is made of. While it is true that normally we asymptotically approach the truth of the matter sometimes we make completely unexpected discoveries that completely change the picture in ways we cannot imagine beforehand. These are the really exciting and educational moments.
The best example I know of is the localization of FF8 to Europe removed the word Nunchaku because they are outlawed in most jurisdictions
That has got to be the daftest thing I've heard in a long while. Automatic rifles, rocket launchers etc. are also illegal but I did not see them removing them from Halo. As far as I am aware there is no laws about virtual weapons in a game only in real life.
Go watch B5 again and things that happen in the 5th season are clearly spelled out in the 1st.
True, but the 5th season was a pale imitation of the former seasons. It was still good, and the second time I watched them I appreciated it more. However they clearly rushed season 4 to get to the end of the Earth gov arc due to funding worries and this meant a lot of big drama was missing from season 5. Also they never resolved the psi corps arc which was clearly a casualty of the hurriedly changed plans.
However, upon reflection, I think what I really liked about BSG's end was the unexpectedness of some of it and that will probably significantly diminish its appeal with time. Whereas B5, even years afterwards, I still think of as an amazing epic. So perhaps you are right...I just need a few months to get there:-)
Maybe we should wait 'till we completely understand the basics of physics...before we turn on something that in the worst case (black hole) will wipe out our solar system.
Ok, first some physics that we do know: converting the Earth into a black hole will not destroy the solar system, in fact even the Moon would likely be unaffected. The Earth's mass would still be there just considerably more compressed.
Next our understanding physics is not improved by sitting around with our heads in the clouds waiting for a bright idea, nor is it improved by debating it. No matter how smart an idea it must be tested by experiment. So you cannot 'wait' for our understanding to improve you have to do experiments exactly like the LHC to figure out which of the miriad of possibilities is correct.
Finally we know it is safe because we are not sitting inside an Earth-sized BH already. Cosmic rays strike the Earth, sun, planets and every start in the galaxy with energies many times greater than the LHC and yet we have yet to see any of these collapse into a Black Hole.
Actually that is pretty typical for most good grad students - just because it is the LHC does not make it special. In fact I really fail to see how this is news is of any interest outside CMS. A lot of what grad students do to get them started is to check what has already been done - I have a grad student doing this right now and it looks like he's found a problem too with some online code so should I submit that as newsworthy to Slashdot too? If so there are going to be a huge number of "look I found a bug" stories...
Even when not just checking they are usually concentrated on particular parts of the detector and it is quite common for them to spot subtle problems that others have missed. I did it several times when I was a grad student and now, as a prof, I'm finally where I can make the errors for future grad students to find!
The value of a well thought out, planned and executed story arc where all the pieces fit together because they've been planned that way is AWESOME.
I agree. However the B5 (as well as Farscape's) endings were damaged by uncertain (or lacking) funding for the final seasons. As such I'd put them on a roughly even footing. While BSG did not come up with sensible solutions to everything (like dumping all the tech) what blew me away was the revelation of god being the real deal. I had always thought that there would be some scientific type explanation (isolated high tech society etc.). It was an incredibly brave and unique twist (for a scifi show) to add right at the end and, for me at least, it really worked partly because of the religious subtext of the entire show but partly because that's what I loved about BSG. It was so incredibly unique and you never really knew exactly what was going to happen next but whatever it was it usually fit.
The unilateral decision to get rid of all technology for everybody was both absurd, short-sighted, and just plain stupid.
I agree. A better way to have solved it would have been to have the final jump point end up inside Earth's atmosphere with only minutes for the fleet to abandon ship and scatter over the surface of the planet with a few limited supplies...either that or some other emergency to force rapid abandonment and destruction of the major bits of tech.
This has nothing to do with the Higgs. All they have potentially discovered is a new quark bound state. The fact that it is not expected is also not surprising since it is fantastically hard to be able to calculate what bound states there should be.
This is because quarks bind via the strong force and while we understand the principles behind this force what they imply is that at low energy the basic mathematical method typically used (perturbation theory) does not work because the force becomes so strong. Unfortunately nobody has found a real way around this so approximations are used and, not being fundamentally correct, these sometimes get things wrong.
As a particle experimentalist it looks like there are two promissing approaches to really solve this properly. The first is using huge, massively parallel computers and a technique called lattice QCD where you divide space and time into points and solve numerically. The computing power has just recently begun to be enough to start producing useful, believable results. the other technique is a result of string theory that has shown that a really strong force like QCD is mathematically equivalent to a weak force (which can be calculated) but in more than 3+1 dimensions....so there might actually be something useful coming out of string theory sooner than anticipated!
If the US government owns 80% of the company don't they have some control? Can't they tell the CEO to drop the lawsuit and if he refuses just replace him with someone who will?
Given their greater than usual powers, they need to be subject to greater than usual standards.
Exactly. The way you hold someone to a higher standard is that you discipline them if they fall short. Releasing criminals punishes society and frustrates the police from doing their job. It would be like a teacher being told that because she smacked little Johnny when she should not have the entire class will be made to forget everything they learned from her when of course the correct response is to discipline the teacher for inappropriate behaviour.
If the risk is suspension and I'm going to put a murder away, I might do it....Instead of increasing the punishment, you simply do away with the reward entirely.
Exactly - if the officer is convinced he is going to get a murderer then don't you want him to take that risk? The reward is not just his but all of society's. What it will stop though is police deciding to search your car just because they don't look the look of you. Indeed they are far, far less likely to do this if they risk getting suspended. If they are pretty sure they will find nothing and just want to intimidate you then there is now a penalty of suspension whereas without the threat of suspension the inadmisibility of evidence that they don't expect to find in the first place is hardly a deterrent.
If the rules of court allow it, they get pencil and paper. Otherwise, they sit and listen.
As countless years of educational research has shown: if you want people to pay attention and take information in you need to make things interactive. Instead of having the jury sit there let them ask questions. If they don't understand an argument they can ask for clarification. Of course you'll need the judge to ensure that the questions are fair and relevant but I bet you'd get them paying a lot more attention if they were active participants.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is worse than the Russian military how?
I thought that would be extremely obvious. Are you really saying that because we already have one organization that does not secure its nuclear devices properly there is no problem with increasing the number of organizations that do likewise?
Yes. And used responsibly that can be a good thing.
The point I am trying to make is what happens when they are NOT used responsibly? Nuclear weapons are simply too dangerous to have around in common use - not primarily because of the radioactivity they cause but simply because of the power of the devices. Conventional explosives in the wrong hands can maximally kill a few hundred people on a plane or building, a nuclear device could kill millions in a city. So is a 10,000 fold increase in the risk worth it over conventional methods? This is not fearmongering but simply asking a reasonable question about risk vs. reward. I see a huge increase in risk and minimal (and that not yet proven) reward. Show me some proven benefit that outweighs this and I'll reconsider.
Things like radon that are radioactive, and created by uranium have a shelf life of 2 days. So basically if you separate out leftover uranium, in 2 days I would expect your extracted oil would be radiation free.
Sorry but this is completely wrong. First uranium itself is not very radioactive (although it is toxic). The half-life for U235/238 (what you find in a Uranium bomb) is 0.7/4.5 billion years respectively. This means that even in large non-critical lumps the radiation is low. Secondly radioactivity after a nuclear explosion comes from the fission products of Uranium (or what they very rapidly decay into) like Strontium, Xenon, Caesium etc. which have varying but generally medium half lives (of order decades). Radon is a decay product of Uranium (after several steps), not a fission product.
Finally radioactive nuclei, particularly heavy ones, usually decay into other radioactive nuclei. Hence the fact that one isotope of radon has a short half-life does not mean that "all the radioactivity" will be gone because there is a decay chain. For example Radon-222 which has a half-live of 3.8 days (there is no Radon isotope with a 2d half-life that I could find) will eventually decay into Lead-210 which has a half life of 22.3 years.
Even if this was deep enough to contain the radioactivity do we really want lots of civilian uses for nuclear explosions? This will mean demand to make more and, rather than being stored on high security military bases, they will be looked after by companies hiring security guards. If we want to get rid of them the safest option is to disassemble them and either burn the fissionable material in a reactor or render it non-weapons grade. Developing commercial uses will only encourage us to build more.
Why? We've been trying to change the climate on Earth for the past 100 years or so to be more like Venus.
Really? From what I heard it was far from civil.
I thought you Americans did win that one?
Which game company would stop creating *French* localizations of their games and lose the market in *France*
It won't prevent them all but if you shrink the market size it will mean that less will. Plus what if they decide to make a French, but not Quebecois-French version - the differences are greater than between American and English. Will that satisfy the language laws? Even if it does suppose they decide not to make it available in North America would that mean the retailers were off the hook?
Quebec has been a fantastic influence on Canada - it has continuously reminded the government that we are not a mono-culture. The sad irony of laws like this is that the cultural diversity that the rest of Canada enjoys and celebrates partly because of Quebec seems to be actively suppressed in Quebec itself.
If we dominate each other through trickery and exploitative contracts, how is that better than dominating each other through violence and force of arms?
Contracts are considerably better. For one very few contracts lead to loss of life. For another there is nothing that you can do to avoid violence and force of arms whereas at least with trickery you have a chance to spot it and not sign up.
Yes, trickery and exploitive contracts are bad but nowhere near as bad as violence. Besides for the case in question their is a known solution called a quorum. This concept has been around since at least the 1500's i.e. far longer than the current French system. So is this trickery or simply how the French want their system to work?
Google isn't going to allow apps that annoy the carriers....they probably won't be banning apps simply because they don't fit into Google's view of what you 'should' be doing
Sorry but you contradict yourself here. Clearly Google's world view is that you should not be annoying the carriers and so ban apps that do. So its a slightly different set of criteria from Apple but neither of them are yours or my criteria which is really what matters. At least Apple don't have the gall to push the iPhone/iTouch as an open platform.
I can guarantee you that life exists elsewhere in the universe. The universe is incomprehensibly vast, and it's likely that most of it does not lie within our light cone.
In that case it is impossible for you to know about it and so you guarentee is completely worthless. I would agree with you that life elsewhere seems incredibly likely given what we know. The question is how likely is is given what we don't know? The only way to answer that is to go out there and either find it or not as the case may be.
The existence of dark matter does not invalidate one single fact of what was known before.
Actually it does. You see before this the options of the end of the Universe were always continuous, slowing, expansion, expansion to s fixed size or recollapse. Now we know that all of these are wrong and we will actually have a continuously accelerating expansion.
Newtonian phisics is still valid
It is actually very ironic that you chose this because, in fact, one explanation of Dark Matter is to use modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) on large distance scales. This is becoming increasingly unlikely (the Bullet cluster was almost a shot to its head) but it is still not ruled out.
Asimov was right, we are getting closer to the truth.
Yes we are, but that was not entirely what Asimov was saying - he was also claiming that the steps we took towards the truth were getting smaller because we were closer to the destination. My point is that we still have no idea yet how far we have to go. We might be heading in the roughly right direction but sometimes we take baby steps and sometimes we take huge strides. Asimov's point that we are asymptotically approaching the truth is demonstrably wrong.
Mankind != important in the grand scheme of things, thus nothing we produce is all that important either.
How do you know that? As far as we know we might be the only intelligent life in the entire universe (the probabilistic arguments suggesting this is unlikely have huge unknowns) i.e. the only way for the Universe to understand itself. Until we know otherwise perhaps we should not write ourselves off. Besides, even if there is other intelligent life out there, who knows how far we'll have spread a few billion years time.
I think the perfect answer to that kind of thinking was given by Isaac Asimov in an essay named "The Relativity of Wrong" [google.com].
While I support your point that article is actually not a good example. Since that article was written we have learnt that we don't know what 96% of the Universe is made of. While it is true that normally we asymptotically approach the truth of the matter sometimes we make completely unexpected discoveries that completely change the picture in ways we cannot imagine beforehand. These are the really exciting and educational moments.
The best example I know of is the localization of FF8 to Europe removed the word Nunchaku because they are outlawed in most jurisdictions
That has got to be the daftest thing I've heard in a long while. Automatic rifles, rocket launchers etc. are also illegal but I did not see them removing them from Halo. As far as I am aware there is no laws about virtual weapons in a game only in real life.
Go watch B5 again and things that happen in the 5th season are clearly spelled out in the 1st.
True, but the 5th season was a pale imitation of the former seasons. It was still good, and the second time I watched them I appreciated it more. However they clearly rushed season 4 to get to the end of the Earth gov arc due to funding worries and this meant a lot of big drama was missing from season 5. Also they never resolved the psi corps arc which was clearly a casualty of the hurriedly changed plans.
:-)
However, upon reflection, I think what I really liked about BSG's end was the unexpectedness of some of it and that will probably significantly diminish its appeal with time. Whereas B5, even years afterwards, I still think of as an amazing epic. So perhaps you are right...I just need a few months to get there
Maybe we should wait 'till we completely understand the basics of physics...before we turn on something that in the worst case (black hole) will wipe out our solar system.
Ok, first some physics that we do know: converting the Earth into a black hole will not destroy the solar system, in fact even the Moon would likely be unaffected. The Earth's mass would still be there just considerably more compressed.
Next our understanding physics is not improved by sitting around with our heads in the clouds waiting for a bright idea, nor is it improved by debating it. No matter how smart an idea it must be tested by experiment. So you cannot 'wait' for our understanding to improve you have to do experiments exactly like the LHC to figure out which of the miriad of possibilities is correct.
Finally we know it is safe because we are not sitting inside an Earth-sized BH already. Cosmic rays strike the Earth, sun, planets and every start in the galaxy with energies many times greater than the LHC and yet we have yet to see any of these collapse into a Black Hole.
I'm a firm believer that theory is like being a lawyer. If you can convince enough people (or the right people) of it, it must be true.
This is why theoretical physics is considered so difficult. People are irrelevant: you have to convince the Universe that it is true.
Actually that is pretty typical for most good grad students - just because it is the LHC does not make it special. In fact I really fail to see how this is news is of any interest outside CMS. A lot of what grad students do to get them started is to check what has already been done - I have a grad student doing this right now and it looks like he's found a problem too with some online code so should I submit that as newsworthy to Slashdot too? If so there are going to be a huge number of "look I found a bug" stories...
Even when not just checking they are usually concentrated on particular parts of the detector and it is quite common for them to spot subtle problems that others have missed. I did it several times when I was a grad student and now, as a prof, I'm finally where I can make the errors for future grad students to find!
The value of a well thought out, planned and executed story arc where all the pieces fit together because they've been planned that way is AWESOME.
I agree. However the B5 (as well as Farscape's) endings were damaged by uncertain (or lacking) funding for the final seasons. As such I'd put them on a roughly even footing. While BSG did not come up with sensible solutions to everything (like dumping all the tech) what blew me away was the revelation of god being the real deal. I had always thought that there would be some scientific type explanation (isolated high tech society etc.). It was an incredibly brave and unique twist (for a scifi show) to add right at the end and, for me at least, it really worked partly because of the religious subtext of the entire show but partly because that's what I loved about BSG. It was so incredibly unique and you never really knew exactly what was going to happen next but whatever it was it usually fit.
The unilateral decision to get rid of all technology for everybody was both absurd, short-sighted, and just plain stupid.
I agree. A better way to have solved it would have been to have the final jump point end up inside Earth's atmosphere with only minutes for the fleet to abandon ship and scatter over the surface of the planet with a few limited supplies...either that or some other emergency to force rapid abandonment and destruction of the major bits of tech.
This has nothing to do with the Higgs. All they have potentially discovered is a new quark bound state. The fact that it is not expected is also not surprising since it is fantastically hard to be able to calculate what bound states there should be.
This is because quarks bind via the strong force and while we understand the principles behind this force what they imply is that at low energy the basic mathematical method typically used (perturbation theory) does not work because the force becomes so strong. Unfortunately nobody has found a real way around this so approximations are used and, not being fundamentally correct, these sometimes get things wrong.
As a particle experimentalist it looks like there are two promissing approaches to really solve this properly. The first is using huge, massively parallel computers and a technique called lattice QCD where you divide space and time into points and solve numerically. The computing power has just recently begun to be enough to start producing useful, believable results. the other technique is a result of string theory that has shown that a really strong force like QCD is mathematically equivalent to a weak force (which can be calculated) but in more than 3+1 dimensions....so there might actually be something useful coming out of string theory sooner than anticipated!
If the US government owns 80% of the company don't they have some control? Can't they tell the CEO to drop the lawsuit and if he refuses just replace him with someone who will?
Given their greater than usual powers, they need to be subject to greater than usual standards.
Exactly. The way you hold someone to a higher standard is that you discipline them if they fall short. Releasing criminals punishes society and frustrates the police from doing their job. It would be like a teacher being told that because she smacked little Johnny when she should not have the entire class will be made to forget everything they learned from her when of course the correct response is to discipline the teacher for inappropriate behaviour.
If the risk is suspension and I'm going to put a murder away, I might do it....Instead of increasing the punishment, you simply do away with the reward entirely.
Exactly - if the officer is convinced he is going to get a murderer then don't you want him to take that risk? The reward is not just his but all of society's. What it will stop though is police deciding to search your car just because they don't look the look of you. Indeed they are far, far less likely to do this if they risk getting suspended. If they are pretty sure they will find nothing and just want to intimidate you then there is now a penalty of suspension whereas without the threat of suspension the inadmisibility of evidence that they don't expect to find in the first place is hardly a deterrent.
If the rules of court allow it, they get pencil and paper. Otherwise, they sit and listen.
As countless years of educational research has shown: if you want people to pay attention and take information in you need to make things interactive. Instead of having the jury sit there let them ask questions. If they don't understand an argument they can ask for clarification. Of course you'll need the judge to ensure that the questions are fair and relevant but I bet you'd get them paying a lot more attention if they were active participants.