Programaticaly created/discovered love is meaningless.
Spoken like a true romantic. I do have to wonder though why is "programatically created/discovered" love is any less meaningfull than say finding someone at a bar? You sound like you've bought into the whole hollywood garbage, and I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with the idea of finding out why people are attracted to one another and exploiting that. If you could really take some kind of test measuring brain chemicals, etc and increase your chances of finding someone you like what's wrong with that? Love doesn't have to be mysterious for it to work and be real.
This particular analysis does sound like garbage however. How you find "chemistry" through asking people questions I don't know. It sounds like the same old crap people have been doing for years dressed up by then saying it's brain chemistry.
Why doesn't NASA cooperate with other countries in exploration, technology etc?
To some degree they do. The ISS is funded and developed by multiple countries. The Cassini-Huygens probe was a co-operation between NASA and the ESA. Why not get Russia, China and even India involved in design a new space orbiter? When they share costs and brain power wouldn't it be cheaper and faster?
It likely would be cheaper, but the problem is how politicians view federal dollars being spent. If money isn't spent in someones district, it might as well not matter. Who's going to build the orbiter? Who gets the money? The US wouldn't be too happy about pumping a big chunk of money for manned space exploration into another country. Manned space exploration is mostly about pork and not about science.
The mathematics of Superstring theory apparently explain all currently known phenomena, while signficantly reducing the complexity of the basic assumptions, and unifying the disjointed pieces of the standard model, in particular the heretofore unresolvable rift between relativity theory and sub-atomic theory.
Actually the mathematics is far more complicated than even general relativity. The big problem though is lack of testable predictions. If a theory isn't falsibiable it's philosophy, not science.
I do still have a question though, how does one falsify a claim that 90% of the universe's matter can't be detected?
Well, if it truly couldn't be detected then its existence isn't falsibiable. I'd call that philosophy and not science. I'm no expert on dark matter, but I believe most dark matter candidates do interact, though weakly with normal matter. They have various ways of trying to detect these particles but I have no clue as to how they actually go about it.
You _might_ be able to detect dark matter through the gravitational force that it does produce. Maybe you could somehow detect it through the same way people want to detect coliding black holes, by observing gravitational waves. Right now there's an experiment called LIGO that several Universities around the world have set up to detect such large astronomical objects colliding. It works by detecting the warping of space-time by measuring difference in distance between two points. If that kind of instrument could also detect large chunks of dark matter I have no idea, but I would think it's at least possible.
The other way to falsify (or at least eliminate) dark matter is just to come up with a theory that explains the observations without resorting to coming up with new predictions we have no evidence for. In science if you have two theories that have the same predictions, but one is simpler, the simple one wins. That's why dark matter is in danger here because general relativity doesn't predict new forms of matter we don't have evidence for.
Sounds more like religion than science if you ask me. So it's nice to see some substantial cracking in the edifice, and I'll be quite pleased if the whole dubious enterprise comes crashing down and we revert to science that's either grounded on more substantial claims or is man enough to admit it doesn't know.
Well, I think you have to understand that science is a process, not a set of facts. Sometimes the theory comes first and the evidence has to follow later. It took many years for general and special relativity to be accepted as correct. I do think that dark matter has gotten too much press and public exposure for something that doesn't really have any good evidence supporting it. Maybe your objection is merely that it's being presented as something that's accepted as true and not just an interesting but unaccepted theory. If so I wouldn't disagree with you at all.
I think the comparison between Luminiferous Aether and Dark Matter is one of the most prudent ones I've heard in a long while. Making something up to force your data to fit is a pretty bad idea. We can't be wrong.
Except this has happened many times in physics with successfull results. The neutrino was a predicted particle that interacts weakly with normal matter. It was predicted in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli to explain the result of experiments measuring beta decay. The particle wasn't actually detected until 1956. Does this mean Dark Matter must exist? Obviously no, and if this new calculation pans out it most likely doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean that proposing something new to fit your data is bad science. It obviously is good science, just make sure your prediction can be falsified.
It was revised and improved with relativity theory, which is itself being revised and improved today with multidimensional, superstring theory.
I know this is a minor point in your post, and I agree with everything else you've said, but I couldn't resist. Superstring theory is an extremely tentative theory at this point. Really it's not even complete, and many people don't even think it's science since it has produced no testable predictions that aren't predicted by other theory. Maybe it's something someone should keep working on, but it's really surviving more on sexiness than actual science.
This may also be a cautionary tale about the use of linear models (Newtonian gravity) versus nonlinear ones -- interactions among masses distort the solution. If one assumes the wrong things and gets an answer that doesn't fit the observations, perhaps its time to change the assumptions, not add unseen dark matter, epicycles, etc.
Well, I think if you have reason to believe that your model is flawed and then you come back with results assuming strange stuff (unseen mass) then it's a no brainer that there's a problem with your model. I'd have to assume (perhaps poorly) that people have thought of this before but maybe they just haven't come up with the right way to model such complex behaviour before using general relativity. Simply coming up with strange answers that aren't intuitive isn't a reason to assume the model you're using is wrong.
Epicycles actually do eventually work in predicting the motion of the planets. The problem is of course they also predict unseen forces. Everyone now thinks epicycles is totally crazy of course. I guess my point is that once you know the real answer, all the other completely wrong theories sound crazy. It seems a little unfair to play "monday morning physicist" if I may murder a common expression.
That's what dark matter is by definition, right? Matter that based on current theories should exist, but cannot be accounted for, hence "dark" matter, dark in the same sense as "dark Africa" was in centuries past, unknown.
Naw, the dark in dark matter just means you can't "see" it. Dark matter (if it exists) is thought to be different from normal matter because it doesn't interact very much with normal matter (and thus you can't "see" it). Normal matter like an atom with will absorb and re-emit photons for instance. An example of matter we know about that doesn't interact very much with normal matter would be neutrinos. Right now there's millions of them going right through your body with no interaction at all. Somewhere I heard that a single neutrino could pass through 9 light years of lead and only have a 50% chance of interacting with it. (Meaning you have only a 50% chance of observing it). In fact there's certain neutrinos that are candidates for being a part of dark matter.
This sounds awful unscientific. I mean, what if in archaeology, I had this theory that an unkown creator created everything. There should be evidence for that, right? We just haven't found it yet. Riiiiiight.
Well, the big difference is science creates testable predictions and is falsifiable. Religion and philosophy don't produce testable predictions, and thus aren't science. Currently people are looking for these dark matter particles. If we look and look and they can't be found, then something else must be going on. It's often been the case in science that theory has predicted the existence of something, and the evidence has only come much later. A good example of this would be the cosmic microwave background radiation. It was predicted in the 1940s and only found (by accident in fact) in 1964. If general relativity pans out in explaining the observed rotation of galaxies, I think you'll see the search for dark matter die out. Not overnight to be sure of course, but it will happen.
Huh. I'm actually amazed someone was able to glide commercial airliner in for a safe landing. I think the point of stands though of not being able to rely on finding a runway though. The glide length at 50,000 feet would be about 113 miles. Not really far enough to be in site of a safe landing strip within most parts of the world.
And your slashdot wild ass guess is wrong. Planes aren't designed and maintained like cars where a breakdown could occur at any time forcing you to stop. Commercial jets are basically giant bricks with massive engines attatched. If the engines were to fail there's no gliding down to a nice touchdown at some airfield, they'd basically fall like rocks. Airlines don't rely on finding a runway in time because by the time you found one you'd be long dead. Do planes sometimes divert to an unscheduled landing do to mechanical malfunctions? Well of course, but it's more a matter of not taking an un-necessary risk rather than it actually being risky.
If you want actual evidence we have plenty of flights going over vast oceans all the time and the plane is designed such that multiple engines would have to fail to cause the plane to crash. The riskiest time for any air travel is by far the takeoff and landing and not at all the long cruise phase. Think about all the air disasters of the last 20 years or so. By far they're all takeoff and landings. The one exception I can think of is the metal fatigue incident where a section of the plane came off maybe 7-10 years ago. The other exceptions are terrorism and the military accidentally shooting down a flight.
I think the parents question is perfectly valid. What is considered "information"? I'd consider a blog information, but is a painting some random artist creates included in this list of "information"? Is my laundry list information? How about my individual handwriting in my laundy list?
The question of is something valuable isn't exactly an either-or proposition, but a matter of assigning a probability that a certain piece of information is valuable. Couldn't we agree that say the presidents day to day activities are more likely to be important in 100 years than say a single 13 year olds blog? Does that mean that 13 year olds blogs are worthless? Well no, but they aren't the thing I'd first choose to preserve.
The question I have is, is the greater difficulty in control over online information balanced by the greater ease of keeping it around? Google doesn't delete messages from email for this very reason. We tend to throw stuff away because it takes up too much space, or because it just becomes clutter. But with increased storage space every year and better ability to keep track of it (and seperate it from things we consider important), why ever throw away information?
Online information portability is obviously a problem. How do you move someones blog somewhere else, and have it mean anything in say 50 years? I think these problems will be solved as people expect information to be more portable and standardized. The solutions I think will come from the short term portability and needs rather than a few people wanting to preserve something for the next 100 years though. Many people make the assumption that standards are short lived things that are here today, gone tommorow. I'd have to disagree on a historical basis. How old are reel to reel tapes, and you can still find a player at say a thrift store. CD-audio has been around for 25 years and is still the default medium for music today. Ascii has developed I don't know how long ago and yet still is quite popular and if you have a computer that can't read it, you've got a fairly useless computer. Standards have a way of sno-balling and gathering momentum to live on a long time.
Given scientests have managed to make light go slower
That's not entirely accurate. The speed of actual photons always travels at C. The speed of propogation of a light signal doesn't always travel at C. The difference is that when light travels through a medium it's absorbed, and then re-emitted by atoms. This takes some amount of time that takes more time than it would normally take to cross the distance of an atom. It's kind of like having a bunch of people in a line far apart playing telephone. You then yell something to the first person, and they repeat it to the next person in line. The speed of sound is still constant in the experiment, but the speed of propogation of your message depends on how many people/meter you have.
I still haven't been able to figure out why MySQL is more popular than Postgres. I suppose if you don't use the features that postgres provides you don't care much, but why invest yourself in a technology that's more limiting? At this point I'm curious if MySQL popularity is fading, and Postgres is gaining all the converts.
Juggling multiple methods of authentication is too complex for the average Joe.
I agree, so why not make it a method of authentication the average joe is familiar with? Physical objects are much easier to keep secure than details like bank account numbers. We all carry around keys and don't have many problems keeping track of which key goes where. If a bank gave everyone a smart card reader and a smart card so they can do online banking, that would be a much better solution than we have now. Thankfully, that average Joe is also the same moron who will fall victim to phishing instead of me. I'll never lose my money, so it's not my problem. A connundrum, if you will - the only people smart enough to do anything about it (or be willing to do anything about it) are the ones that such scams don't apply to anyway.
Well, you aren't hurt directly by phishing scams, but indirectly I think you are. Phishing scams make the whole online world seem less secure. If it's less secure then there will be fewer services offered online because more people will perceive it as "unsafe". It's sort of like the internet being a "bad neighborhood". That reputation only serves to hinder its growth. I've heard random people telling their friend how they won't use their credit card on a website because they think it's unsafe. And yet they'll gladly hand it over to a waiter/waitress.
hum.. isnt that exactly what i just said? "remove any code from parties that havent agreed to the new license"..
You also said in your first sentence that they couldn't go closed source, and compared the product to linux. That makes it sound like you're trying to say they can't do it, or it'd be very difficult to do. The big difference is they've said there hasn't been many contributions to Nessus by anyone outside of Nessus. This makes it very easy to rip out those sections that they don't own.
They cant go "closed source" - they've licensed it under the GPL. Unless they rewrite the app from scratch, or remove any code from parties that havent agreed to the new license... If linus wanted to close-source linux all the sudden, he couldnt do it either.
That's actually not true at all. They still own the code, the GPL is a license, not relinquishing ownership. What they can't do is use any code contributed by anyone outside the company. That code they'll have to re-write since it's licensed under the GPL and doesn't belong to them. And obviously, the existing version cant be relicensed either. The latest release under the GPL is stuck there from now until forever.
They can't relinquish the license of course. Anyone that wants to take that code and maintain it themselves is obviously free to do so.
I wouldn't be terribly confident about that immunity from almost 90 years ago. If you're a big believer in it, you should be the first to volunteer to be injected with the virus. There's probbably more immunity to it in the populace than their was in 1918, but we've had almost 3 generations to lose any genetic immunity to this strain of flu.
However, there's nothing ridiculous about Taiwan being the base for a Chinese government in exile, any more than it was for France's African colonies being a similar base for the Free French during World War II.
I beg to differ. Comparing France during WWII to China today is ridiculous. France was taken over by an outside force and the government set up by Germany was never accepted by the people of France. The survival of that government was also obviously contingent upon Germany winning a war it was fighting at the time. It's extremely easy to see how the french governement in exhile had a perfectly valid claim on being the legitimate government during WWII. There's no such similar situation in China at all right now. Taiwan claiming to be the legitimate government of China is about as valid as me claiming to be the king of Spain.
The US not recognizing China was a purely political move because we had to "fight communism" and not recognizing the communist government in China was seen by some as some kind of pathetic way to do that.
And note that even though Taiwan is ruled by a pro-independence party, they still haven't declared formal independence or changed the official name of the country.
(disclaimer, I am not an expert on China and Taiwan but read the Wikipedia entry and think I know something about foreign relations)
The problem is that the PRC has made it clear they're more happy with Taiwan remaining the ROC than claiming independence. My guess is that they like the patently ridiculous claim that Taiwan is the legitimate government of China a lot more than a very tenable claim that Taiwan is independent. Furthermore the supporters of the ROC also see re-unification with China as something that will happen in the future. In other words claiming to not be the ROC is a step away from re-unification, and China obviously wants to prevent that.
The main point is that if Taiwan were to formally declare indendence from China, China has made it clear they'll take actions against Taiwan. That might include economic sanctions, military invasion, etc. Taiwan sort of lives with a gun against its head if it says the wrong thing.
So.. what exists right now is a strange truce with both sides hoping they'll win the long battle. Taiwan remains silent but hopes children born in Taiwan will see themselves as having a Taiwaneese identity. China hopes that it will become a large enough ecomic power that re-unification will become in Taiwan's best interests.
A question to anyone that might know. How does someone born in Taiwan travel outside the "country"? If other countries won't officially recognize Taiwan (or ROC) as an actual country, how is a passport issued by ROC valid? Do people from Taiwan have to also obtain a passport from the PRC?
If somebody is going to contaminate an airport with levels of explosives high enough to trip the scanners for everyone, then they could also contaminate the entire airport with something a lot worse (toxins, bio weapons):(
Bad logic. Bio weapons are first hard to make, and second difficult to disperse so they kill a lot of people. Explosives are relatively easy to make, and if you only want to contaminate an area you don't need to disperse them to get into anyones body, just get them stick to everything in the environment and have a few billion molecules set off a detector.
After all, it's basically a terrorist act, ableit one with no human casualties -- but it would certainly spread terror, wouldn't you agree?
Umm.. No. Terror usually involves something actually frightening and people dying. Why would invalidating a technology which we don't have right now create terror? Are you afraid right now because we don't have this technology? Why would you be afraid when the technology doesn't work?
You missed the point. We're talking about cleaning the environment around the detector to prevent someone contaminating the area, not cleaning the bag the explosives are in.
Slashdot Mirror
Programaticaly created/discovered love is meaningless.
Spoken like a true romantic. I do have to wonder though why is "programatically created/discovered" love is any less meaningfull than say finding someone at a bar? You sound like you've bought into the whole hollywood garbage, and I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with the idea of finding out why people are attracted to one another and exploiting that. If you could really take some kind of test measuring brain chemicals, etc and increase your chances of finding someone you like what's wrong with that? Love doesn't have to be mysterious for it to work and be real.
This particular analysis does sound like garbage however. How you find "chemistry" through asking people questions I don't know. It sounds like the same old crap people have been doing for years dressed up by then saying it's brain chemistry.
That's true as well. The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on self interest.
Why doesn't NASA cooperate with other countries in exploration, technology etc?
To some degree they do. The ISS is funded and developed by multiple countries. The Cassini-Huygens probe was a co-operation between NASA and the ESA.
Why not get Russia, China and even India involved in design a new space orbiter? When they share costs and brain power wouldn't it be cheaper and faster?
It likely would be cheaper, but the problem is how politicians view federal dollars being spent. If money isn't spent in someones district, it might as well not matter. Who's going to build the orbiter? Who gets the money? The US wouldn't be too happy about pumping a big chunk of money for manned space exploration into another country. Manned space exploration is mostly about pork and not about science.
The mathematics of Superstring theory apparently explain all currently known phenomena, while signficantly reducing the complexity of the basic assumptions, and unifying the disjointed pieces of the standard model, in particular the heretofore unresolvable rift between relativity theory and sub-atomic theory.
Actually the mathematics is far more complicated than even general relativity. The big problem though is lack of testable predictions. If a theory isn't falsibiable it's philosophy, not science.
I do still have a question though, how does one falsify a claim that 90% of the universe's matter can't be detected?
Well, if it truly couldn't be detected then its existence isn't falsibiable. I'd call that philosophy and not science. I'm no expert on dark matter, but I believe most dark matter candidates do interact, though weakly with normal matter. They have various ways of trying to detect these particles but I have no clue as to how they actually go about it.
You _might_ be able to detect dark matter through the gravitational force that it does produce. Maybe you could somehow detect it through the same way people want to detect coliding black holes, by observing gravitational waves. Right now there's an experiment called LIGO that several Universities around the world have set up to detect such large astronomical objects colliding. It works by detecting the warping of space-time by measuring difference in distance between two points. If that kind of instrument could also detect large chunks of dark matter I have no idea, but I would think it's at least possible.
The other way to falsify (or at least eliminate) dark matter is just to come up with a theory that explains the observations without resorting to coming up with new predictions we have no evidence for. In science if you have two theories that have the same predictions, but one is simpler, the simple one wins. That's why dark matter is in danger here because general relativity doesn't predict new forms of matter we don't have evidence for.
Sounds more like religion than science if you ask me. So it's nice to see some substantial cracking in the edifice, and I'll be quite pleased if the whole dubious enterprise comes crashing down and we revert to science that's either grounded on more substantial claims or is man enough to admit it doesn't know.
Well, I think you have to understand that science is a process, not a set of facts. Sometimes the theory comes first and the evidence has to follow later. It took many years for general and special relativity to be accepted as correct. I do think that dark matter has gotten too much press and public exposure for something that doesn't really have any good evidence supporting it. Maybe your objection is merely that it's being presented as something that's accepted as true and not just an interesting but unaccepted theory. If so I wouldn't disagree with you at all.
I think the comparison between Luminiferous Aether and Dark Matter is one of the most prudent ones I've heard in a long while. Making something up to force your data to fit is a pretty bad idea. We can't be wrong.
Except this has happened many times in physics with successfull results. The neutrino was a predicted particle that interacts weakly with normal matter. It was predicted in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli to explain the result of experiments measuring beta decay. The particle wasn't actually detected until 1956. Does this mean Dark Matter must exist? Obviously no, and if this new calculation pans out it most likely doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean that proposing something new to fit your data is bad science. It obviously is good science, just make sure your prediction can be falsified.
It was revised and improved with relativity theory, which is itself being revised and improved today with multidimensional, superstring theory.
I know this is a minor point in your post, and I agree with everything else you've said, but I couldn't resist. Superstring theory is an extremely tentative theory at this point. Really it's not even complete, and many people don't even think it's science since it has produced no testable predictions that aren't predicted by other theory. Maybe it's something someone should keep working on, but it's really surviving more on sexiness than actual science.
This may also be a cautionary tale about the use of linear models (Newtonian gravity) versus nonlinear ones -- interactions among masses distort the solution. If one assumes the wrong things and gets an answer that doesn't fit the observations, perhaps its time to change the assumptions, not add unseen dark matter, epicycles, etc.
Well, I think if you have reason to believe that your model is flawed and then you come back with results assuming strange stuff (unseen mass) then it's a no brainer that there's a problem with your model. I'd have to assume (perhaps poorly) that people have thought of this before but maybe they just haven't come up with the right way to model such complex behaviour before using general relativity. Simply coming up with strange answers that aren't intuitive isn't a reason to assume the model you're using is wrong.
Epicycles actually do eventually work in predicting the motion of the planets. The problem is of course they also predict unseen forces. Everyone now thinks epicycles is totally crazy of course. I guess my point is that once you know the real answer, all the other completely wrong theories sound crazy. It seems a little unfair to play "monday morning physicist" if I may murder a common expression.
That's what dark matter is by definition, right? Matter that based on current theories should exist, but cannot be accounted for, hence "dark" matter, dark in the same sense as "dark Africa" was in centuries past, unknown.
Naw, the dark in dark matter just means you can't "see" it. Dark matter (if it exists) is thought to be different from normal matter because it doesn't interact very much with normal matter (and thus you can't "see" it). Normal matter like an atom with will absorb and re-emit photons for instance. An example of matter we know about that doesn't interact very much with normal matter would be neutrinos. Right now there's millions of them going right through your body with no interaction at all. Somewhere I heard that a single neutrino could pass through 9 light years of lead and only have a 50% chance of interacting with it. (Meaning you have only a 50% chance of observing it). In fact there's certain neutrinos that are candidates for being a part of dark matter.
This sounds awful unscientific. I mean, what if in archaeology, I had this theory that an unkown creator created everything. There should be evidence for that, right? We just haven't found it yet. Riiiiiight.
Well, the big difference is science creates testable predictions and is falsifiable. Religion and philosophy don't produce testable predictions, and thus aren't science. Currently people are looking for these dark matter particles. If we look and look and they can't be found, then something else must be going on. It's often been the case in science that theory has predicted the existence of something, and the evidence has only come much later. A good example of this would be the cosmic microwave background radiation. It was predicted in the 1940s and only found (by accident in fact) in 1964. If general relativity pans out in explaining the observed rotation of galaxies, I think you'll see the search for dark matter die out. Not overnight to be sure of course, but it will happen.
Huh. I'm actually amazed someone was able to glide commercial airliner in for a safe landing. I think the point of stands though of not being able to rely on finding a runway though. The glide length at 50,000 feet would be about 113 miles. Not really far enough to be in site of a safe landing strip within most parts of the world.
And your slashdot wild ass guess is wrong. Planes aren't designed and maintained like cars where a breakdown could occur at any time forcing you to stop. Commercial jets are basically giant bricks with massive engines attatched. If the engines were to fail there's no gliding down to a nice touchdown at some airfield, they'd basically fall like rocks. Airlines don't rely on finding a runway in time because by the time you found one you'd be long dead. Do planes sometimes divert to an unscheduled landing do to mechanical malfunctions? Well of course, but it's more a matter of not taking an un-necessary risk rather than it actually being risky.
If you want actual evidence we have plenty of flights going over vast oceans all the time and the plane is designed such that multiple engines would have to fail to cause the plane to crash. The riskiest time for any air travel is by far the takeoff and landing and not at all the long cruise phase. Think about all the air disasters of the last 20 years or so. By far they're all takeoff and landings. The one exception I can think of is the metal fatigue incident where a section of the plane came off maybe 7-10 years ago. The other exceptions are terrorism and the military accidentally shooting down a flight.
I think the parents question is perfectly valid. What is considered "information"? I'd consider a blog information, but is a painting some random artist creates included in this list of "information"? Is my laundry list information? How about my individual handwriting in my laundy list?
The question of is something valuable isn't exactly an either-or proposition, but a matter of assigning a probability that a certain piece of information is valuable. Couldn't we agree that say the presidents day to day activities are more likely to be important in 100 years than say a single 13 year olds blog? Does that mean that 13 year olds blogs are worthless? Well no, but they aren't the thing I'd first choose to preserve.
The question I have is, is the greater difficulty in control over online information balanced by the greater ease of keeping it around? Google doesn't delete messages from email for this very reason. We tend to throw stuff away because it takes up too much space, or because it just becomes clutter. But with increased storage space every year and better ability to keep track of it (and seperate it from things we consider important), why ever throw away information?
Online information portability is obviously a problem. How do you move someones blog somewhere else, and have it mean anything in say 50 years? I think these problems will be solved as people expect information to be more portable and standardized. The solutions I think will come from the short term portability and needs rather than a few people wanting to preserve something for the next 100 years though. Many people make the assumption that standards are short lived things that are here today, gone tommorow. I'd have to disagree on a historical basis. How old are reel to reel tapes, and you can still find a player at say a thrift store. CD-audio has been around for 25 years and is still the default medium for music today. Ascii has developed I don't know how long ago and yet still is quite popular and if you have a computer that can't read it, you've got a fairly useless computer. Standards have a way of sno-balling and gathering momentum to live on a long time.
Given scientests have managed to make light go slower
That's not entirely accurate. The speed of actual photons always travels at C. The speed of propogation of a light signal doesn't always travel at C. The difference is that when light travels through a medium it's absorbed, and then re-emitted by atoms. This takes some amount of time that takes more time than it would normally take to cross the distance of an atom. It's kind of like having a bunch of people in a line far apart playing telephone. You then yell something to the first person, and they repeat it to the next person in line. The speed of sound is still constant in the experiment, but the speed of propogation of your message depends on how many people/meter you have.
I still haven't been able to figure out why MySQL is more popular than Postgres. I suppose if you don't use the features that postgres provides you don't care much, but why invest yourself in a technology that's more limiting? At this point I'm curious if MySQL popularity is fading, and Postgres is gaining all the converts.
Juggling multiple methods of authentication is too complex for the average Joe.
I agree, so why not make it a method of authentication the average joe is familiar with? Physical objects are much easier to keep secure than details like bank account numbers. We all carry around keys and don't have many problems keeping track of which key goes where. If a bank gave everyone a smart card reader and a smart card so they can do online banking, that would be a much better solution than we have now.
Thankfully, that average Joe is also the same moron who will fall victim to phishing instead of me. I'll never lose my money, so it's not my problem. A connundrum, if you will - the only people smart enough to do anything about it (or be willing to do anything about it) are the ones that such scams don't apply to anyway.
Well, you aren't hurt directly by phishing scams, but indirectly I think you are. Phishing scams make the whole online world seem less secure. If it's less secure then there will be fewer services offered online because more people will perceive it as "unsafe". It's sort of like the internet being a "bad neighborhood". That reputation only serves to hinder its growth. I've heard random people telling their friend how they won't use their credit card on a website because they think it's unsafe. And yet they'll gladly hand it over to a waiter/waitress.
hum.. isnt that exactly what i just said? "remove any code from parties that havent agreed to the new license"..
You also said in your first sentence that they couldn't go closed source, and compared the product to linux. That makes it sound like you're trying to say they can't do it, or it'd be very difficult to do. The big difference is they've said there hasn't been many contributions to Nessus by anyone outside of Nessus. This makes it very easy to rip out those sections that they don't own.
They cant go "closed source" - they've licensed it under the GPL. Unless they rewrite the app from scratch, or remove any code from parties that havent agreed to the new license... If linus wanted to close-source linux all the sudden, he couldnt do it either.
That's actually not true at all. They still own the code, the GPL is a license, not relinquishing ownership. What they can't do is use any code contributed by anyone outside the company. That code they'll have to re-write since it's licensed under the GPL and doesn't belong to them.
And obviously, the existing version cant be relicensed either. The latest release under the GPL is stuck there from now until forever.
They can't relinquish the license of course. Anyone that wants to take that code and maintain it themselves is obviously free to do so.
I wouldn't be terribly confident about that immunity from almost 90 years ago. If you're a big believer in it, you should be the first to volunteer to be injected with the virus. There's probbably more immunity to it in the populace than their was in 1918, but we've had almost 3 generations to lose any genetic immunity to this strain of flu.
However, there's nothing ridiculous about Taiwan being the base for a Chinese government in exile, any more than it was for France's African colonies being a similar base for the Free French during World War II.
I beg to differ. Comparing France during WWII to China today is ridiculous. France was taken over by an outside force and the government set up by Germany was never accepted by the people of France. The survival of that government was also obviously contingent upon Germany winning a war it was fighting at the time. It's extremely easy to see how the french governement in exhile had a perfectly valid claim on being the legitimate government during WWII. There's no such similar situation in China at all right now. Taiwan claiming to be the legitimate government of China is about as valid as me claiming to be the king of Spain.
The US not recognizing China was a purely political move because we had to "fight communism" and not recognizing the communist government in China was seen by some as some kind of pathetic way to do that.
And note that even though Taiwan is ruled by a pro-independence party, they still haven't declared formal independence or changed the official name of the country.
(disclaimer, I am not an expert on China and Taiwan but read the Wikipedia entry and think I know something about foreign relations)
The problem is that the PRC has made it clear they're more happy with Taiwan remaining the ROC than claiming independence. My guess is that they like the patently ridiculous claim that Taiwan is the legitimate government of China a lot more than a very tenable claim that Taiwan is independent. Furthermore the supporters of the ROC also see re-unification with China as something that will happen in the future. In other words claiming to not be the ROC is a step away from re-unification, and China obviously wants to prevent that.
The main point is that if Taiwan were to formally declare indendence from China, China has made it clear they'll take actions against Taiwan. That might include economic sanctions, military invasion, etc. Taiwan sort of lives with a gun against its head if it says the wrong thing.
So.. what exists right now is a strange truce with both sides hoping they'll win the long battle. Taiwan remains silent but hopes children born in Taiwan will see themselves as having a Taiwaneese identity. China hopes that it will become a large enough ecomic power that re-unification will become in Taiwan's best interests.
A question to anyone that might know. How does someone born in Taiwan travel outside the "country"? If other countries won't officially recognize Taiwan (or ROC) as an actual country, how is a passport issued by ROC valid? Do people from Taiwan have to also obtain a passport from the PRC?
If somebody is going to contaminate an airport with levels of explosives high enough to trip the scanners for everyone, then they could also contaminate the entire airport with something a lot worse (toxins, bio weapons)
Bad logic. Bio weapons are first hard to make, and second difficult to disperse so they kill a lot of people. Explosives are relatively easy to make, and if you only want to contaminate an area you don't need to disperse them to get into anyones body, just get them stick to everything in the environment and have a few billion molecules set off a detector.
After all, it's basically a terrorist act, ableit one with no human casualties -- but it would certainly spread terror, wouldn't you agree?
Umm.. No. Terror usually involves something actually frightening and people dying. Why would invalidating a technology which we don't have right now create terror? Are you afraid right now because we don't have this technology? Why would you be afraid when the technology doesn't work?
You missed the point. We're talking about cleaning the environment around the detector to prevent someone contaminating the area, not cleaning the bag the explosives are in.