Your entire post could be summed up as "I understand a little about radio and microwaves and its effects on animals and humans, and assume nobody else has ever studied this completely new phenomenon".
The truth is people HAVE studied radio and microwaves and its effects on animals/humans for many many years. They've also studied the 50/60 HZ radiation produced by power lines. The conclusions are that it's not harmful. Speculating about what it COULD do and coming up with pet theories about just how it MIGHT harm someone is not science, it's nonsense.
Your own ignorance is not other peoples ignorance. People like yourself who are willfully ignorant and who sit around speculating about how the unobserved harmful effect just MIGHT work are the reason I see stupid marketing on floor heating product about how their amazing technology cancels the EM radiation. Next I'll see marketing on bricks about how their amazing brick technology cancels all the virtual particles created in the empty space within atoms in the bricks. This makes it so the bricks don't gain mass over time.
I had to reply on one more point. So you would have the knowledge that would help you to get the job you were interviewing for. Isn't that, after all, the objective ??
In fact that is NOT the objective. The objective is to find a job you like that pays what you feel is fair. Getting any old job that you happen to interview is a TERRIBLE objective that might wind up making you terribly unhappy. There's a lot of poorly run companies run by people who don't value their employees, don't run their company very well, or expect you to work insane amounts of hours without complaint (because it's "normal"). After some thought I felt this company focusing on this one narrow skill set was simply a bad sign. This was actually several years ago, so there was no recession driving me to look for a job in a company I didn't feel was right.
And the knowledge you gained would be of no value whatsoever in any other job or project?
Of limited value. Let me put it this way, I got a better job for a better company not long afterward. I haven't really had the need to focus on SQL performance since. If I did I'd read up on it. Frankly, you don't sound like someone who's interested in computer programming as such
You don't sound like someone with a broad enough scope of knowledge to realize that some skills are more useful than others, and we all have limited amounts of time. SQL performance isn't something that's a terribly broad skill set. Try to realize that software development is big enough that there's an overwhelming amount of things to learn about, and new things every day. Choosing the right things with wide scope, cross multiple boundries and are widely valued is a better approach than focusing on every little thing that comes along.
I wasn't aware that Colleges and Universities were for-profit driven businesses. I just don't accept the premise that "freshmen lecture" is driven by profit motive.
Degree mills and correspondence schools aren't really anything new. Online education isn't really either. I remember 25 years ago QuantumLink (the predecessor to AOL) had an online university program. At the time I was a dumb kid and thought the same thing the author of this article thought. 25 years later it didn't change the entire landscape of education, and neither will this. Whiz-bang technology might make some parts of education easier, but the distance aspect of online education is always going to make things more difficult.
Also, like it or not there's a HUGE component of education that's simply driven by the name and reputation of the school you went to. How many people really want to proudly say they went and graduated from the $99 online school? As others have pointed out we already have a 2nd tier of education with Junior colleges. I certainly wouldn't want to start comparing the actual quality level of one vs. the other, but what I DO question is whether there's really a need for a 3rd tier of these Walmart schools (low low prices!).
A test is only as good as it was designed. The question is, how do you know if you're measuring what you think you're measuring?
One time when I was applying for a job I was told I was going to be tested on writing fast SQL code, so I should be sure to be up on it. I heard from one person at the company that this was something they deeply valued. I bought a book on optimizing SQL and started reading it. After a few days of reading I decided fuck it, why should I be ALREADY be spending my own time doing what this company desires? There was no guarantee they'd hire me anyway, so there's a good chance I'd be learning all this for nothing. If that's such a big deal to them it's something they need to train people for, not expect everyone to know a relatively specialized skill up front.
Are you aware that DNS has the ability to publish more than simply an IP address? Like say.. a key?
If DNSSEC supplies a secure channel to a trusted authority (which it sounds like it does), then I see no reason why it can't replace the certificate authorities. Likely the biggest impediment to this is simply the time required for DNSSEC to be supported down to the individual machine level.
You had some credibility up until just after this statement: It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable.
Anyone who seriously prefers government censorship to the normal peer review process has simply lost his mind. Why should any president suppress publication of things he finds "objectionable"?
I don't see much substance to your argument anyway. It really all stems from the word "patch" and "flotilla"? That's the big "scientific conspiracy" and politics at play here? All you have to do is read the damn article and it clearly says the plastic is microscopic. Great conspiracy you've got their.
Your other point seems to stem from the number of animals killed a year due to garbage. You sure spout off a lot of claims about non-peer reviewed and use a lot of inflammatory language, but I sure don't see any evidence to support that. Does the truth or falsity of a single fact in a 574 page paper really bring into question the whole story? Sorry, but this critical thinker is far more skeptical of you than I am of the NOAA.
Your post just makes me laugh. Ever considered being a straight man?
Maybe you just haven't heard the right comedians before. It's not all dick jokes and "you just might be a redneck" jokes. George Carlin was of course one of the true geniuses of our time. Pointing out the absurdities of life and still being able to sleep at night takes a truly great comedian.
This story remind me of the George Carlin bit on the environment:
The planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.
So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that's begun
but I always try to remember there or those who can talk on the phone safely (I'm a commercial driver and am trained to multi task
I have my doubt that this is possible and not just another form of self-deception. Even if it is it doesn't matter. For the sake of argument let's assume you're correct. 99% of the people are NOT "trained to multi-task" and are dangerous. How would you propose a law that separates out the 99% from the 1%? Why is the 1% a priority where resources should be spent just so they can continue to use cell phones while driving?
My point was really to compare the level of self-deception involved, not a direct comparison of the morality of heroin use with texting while driving. I would agree that I think heroin use is more responsible than texting while driving though.
A sinner? So you're comparing an action with potentially fatal consequences to yourself and others to a sin like having sex out of wedlock while Christian? This goes beyond what constitutes a sin.
Your self-deception is just classic. Yes, I'm sure you're one of "the safe texters", and it's everyone else that's the problem.
Your post reminds me a Usenet post I read about 15 years ago by a guy who did heroin "safely" because he did nice acid/base extractions, filtered with cotton, and never shared needles. Both of you are fooling yourselves.
What happened to the option of just waiting until you stop driving? Is it really worth your life and limbs and those of others to return the latest text RIGHT NOW?
A couple times a month I see some idiot clearly not paying attention on the road and making dangerous decisions. The only clear pattern I've ever observed is that 9 times out of 10 it's someone on a cell-phone. Just yesterday some moron in a mini-van came close to merging right into me, and sure enough there was a cell phone next to his head. I've never noticed a pattern in car, gender, race, or bumper-stickers... but the person holding a cell phone up to their ear is a very clear pattern. I've never seen someone texting, so I have to believe it's rather rare.
Unfortunately there's still no law in Minnesota against using a cell phone while driving. For some reason there's a ban on kids using a cell phone while driving, but apparently when you get older you gain a magical ability to drive and hold your cell phone at the same time. I believe most states are the same way.
So if you ask me the big problem is just plain old cell phone use, not texting. Texting while driving is idiotic and should be illegal, but concentrating on it and increasing penalties to ridiculous 15 year jail terms while ignoring the obvious problem of people using cell phones while driving is equally foolish. According to http://www.ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/laws/cellphone_laws.html Cell phone usage while driving is not illegal in Utah.
The belief that it's not possible is just plain silly
The believe that "the future" just magically solves all problems and all things will be possible be possible is at least as silly. Unfortunately we don't have any derogatory words that are adequate to describe this level of naivety. Pointing to something nobody could have foreseen hundreds of years ago as proof that this we're just ignorant fools now and the problem will just go away because of advances in technology is beyond foolish.
In practice it's going to be difficult to find suitable materials, but you're definitely not going to succeed if you don't try
Which is also true for the more practical ways of solving our energy problems. We clearly can't try EVERYTHING, so why would we try the ones that sound incredibly impractical and foolhardy?
So using VPN level of encryption on a home router is not going to happen until processing power is increased dramatically on the cheap CPUs they use.
Huh? You speak as if "VPN encryption" is an algorithm who's security and performance can be measures against "Wireless Encryption".
The fact is that "VPN Encryption" could be the same damn algorithm that the wireless router uses (AES). It could be a poor algorithm with weak encryption. The truth is there's no single thing called "VPN Encryption".
Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Not really. WPA relies on the same RC4 algorithm that was used in WEP. WPA on RC4+TKIP was little more than a patch so access points could use the same hardware with a few software modifications. It's been known for years that RC4 is a particularly weak algorithm.
It's possible that AES might someday be cracked. It's possible ANY algorithm might someday be cracked (including anything a VPN or SSL based connection uses). There's really nothing different here between "wireless encryption" and anything else.
People that actually worry about the strength of AES vs 3DES or whatever have missed the point. They're both very strong algorithms. So strong in fact that a real attacker will find a different approach than try to directly break the algorithm. Which do you think is stronger, the locks on your doors, or your encryption algorithm? The point of security is to make something hard enough to not be worth the effort, not to make the system "perfect". Focusing on one aspect of security without looking at the system as a whole as well as the threats is pure folly.
I've been having tremendous issues with having to install subtlely different JVM's for different applications because they cannot keep straight where the JVM's are installed
I don't think this has anything to do with the language or the compiler, but more to do with the relationship between the OS maker and Sun. Sun only recently opened up and allowed less restrictive re-distribution of the JVM, so you'll see open source versions of Java included with linux distributions these days. Before that happened it was more customary to package up the JVM with your product (and thus your woes). Microsoft of course see themselves as a competitor to Java, so they're loathe to include a JVM in their OS.
The other party to lay blame on is the application developers. There's no reason why they can't put looking for an existing JVM in their setup process (and many do), or if you want to do it "right" on linux, make an RPM or DEB. Java has been useful for large protocols and projects where programmers like to say "and then a miracle occurs" when they hand off processing to other programmers, but for performance sensitive, business critical, programs?
You could insert any language in the world into that statement and find some truth behind it. Shit, some people use Visual Basic for "performance sensitive, business critical programs". I think those people are insane, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that they canceled everyone's ability to charge parking to work phones, not just yours. I'd bet a few people abused the privilege and charged parking to their phone that wasn't work-related. Instead of trying to sort out the abuses, it's easier to just cancel everyones ability to do it.
It actually is quite possible, in terms of natural selection, that in the long run, this would mean a more successful nation
Right. All you have to do is wait thousands of years for natural selection to just magically solve the problem. And the second point is, that it would of course be even *more* successful, to pull them *all* up. But is that possible?
Of course. It's already happened elsewhere. Shouldn't the most wealthy country in the world be able to prevent disease in it's own country that only normally occurs in extremely poor countries?
My personal opinion is, that this is intentional, because 1. our government is not *that* dumb, and 2. look at who profits from this most.
Where does this idea that there's this single entity called "The Government" that's making decisions? There is no "The Government" in that sense. It's really just a collection of people who make individual decisions. Some of whose decisions carry more weight than others. I'll guarantee you that the people in public health know this was a distinct possibility. But the legislators making funding decisions answer to different bosses. I guess you could call it intentional, if by intentional you mean the people in power just didn't really care.
The problem isn't with "The Government", the problem is with "The People", or at least a very vocal portion of them who only seem to care about "low low taxes" and also the people who scream about the illegal aliens access to government services. Who do you think is going to hurt the most when taxes are cut and services are lowered as a result? There's no need to invent some big conspiracy here. The causes are quite obvious to anyone who pays attention.
Now maybe the string theorists, such as Michio Kaku, will spend a little more time back at the drawing board and a little less time pretending to be Carl Sagan crossed with Alan Alda.
I doubt it. There is no such thing as "String theory". It should be more accurately called "String Theories". It's like a multi-headed hydra that lives forever. Falsify one part of it and 3 other theories pop up to replace it.
The only thing that can really kill String Theories is a experimentally verified competing theory that's unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity. Kill the body and the head will die.
Since Pi is irrational, does that mean that a "perfect" circle cannot actually exist?
No, but because the universe isn't a perfect plane with infinitely divisible pieces of matter it does. It may even be the case that space-time itself is quantized into discreet units, though I don't think anyone has demonstrated this experimentally.
Slashdot Mirror
Your entire post could be summed up as "I understand a little about radio and microwaves and its effects on animals and humans, and assume nobody else has ever studied this completely new phenomenon".
The truth is people HAVE studied radio and microwaves and its effects on animals/humans for many many years. They've also studied the 50/60 HZ radiation produced by power lines. The conclusions are that it's not harmful. Speculating about what it COULD do and coming up with pet theories about just how it MIGHT harm someone is not science, it's nonsense.
Your own ignorance is not other peoples ignorance. People like yourself who are willfully ignorant and who sit around speculating about how the unobserved harmful effect just MIGHT work are the reason I see stupid marketing on floor heating product about how their amazing technology cancels the EM radiation. Next I'll see marketing on bricks about how their amazing brick technology cancels all the virtual particles created in the empty space within atoms in the bricks. This makes it so the bricks don't gain mass over time.
I had to reply on one more point.
So you would have the knowledge that would help you to get the job you were interviewing for. Isn't that, after all, the objective ??
In fact that is NOT the objective. The objective is to find a job you like that pays what you feel is fair. Getting any old job that you happen to interview is a TERRIBLE objective that might wind up making you terribly unhappy. There's a lot of poorly run companies run by people who don't value their employees, don't run their company very well, or expect you to work insane amounts of hours without complaint (because it's "normal"). After some thought I felt this company focusing on this one narrow skill set was simply a bad sign. This was actually several years ago, so there was no recession driving me to look for a job in a company I didn't feel was right.
And the knowledge you gained would be of no value whatsoever in any other job or project?
Of limited value. Let me put it this way, I got a better job for a better company not long afterward. I haven't really had the need to focus on SQL performance since. If I did I'd read up on it.
Frankly, you don't sound like someone who's interested in computer programming as such
You don't sound like someone with a broad enough scope of knowledge to realize that some skills are more useful than others, and we all have limited amounts of time. SQL performance isn't something that's a terribly broad skill set. Try to realize that software development is big enough that there's an overwhelming amount of things to learn about, and new things every day. Choosing the right things with wide scope, cross multiple boundries and are widely valued is a better approach than focusing on every little thing that comes along.
I wasn't aware that Colleges and Universities were for-profit driven businesses. I just don't accept the premise that "freshmen lecture" is driven by profit motive.
Degree mills and correspondence schools aren't really anything new. Online education isn't really either. I remember 25 years ago QuantumLink (the predecessor to AOL) had an online university program. At the time I was a dumb kid and thought the same thing the author of this article thought. 25 years later it didn't change the entire landscape of education, and neither will this. Whiz-bang technology might make some parts of education easier, but the distance aspect of online education is always going to make things more difficult.
Also, like it or not there's a HUGE component of education that's simply driven by the name and reputation of the school you went to. How many people really want to proudly say they went and graduated from the $99 online school? As others have pointed out we already have a 2nd tier of education with Junior colleges. I certainly wouldn't want to start comparing the actual quality level of one vs. the other, but what I DO question is whether there's really a need for a 3rd tier of these Walmart schools (low low prices!).
And some people are just very good at taking tests, and fall apart when you ask them to actually write any code.
Do you have any actual evidence that tests improve your selection of candidates, or are you just blindly believing in tests?
A test is only as good as it was designed. The question is, how do you know if you're measuring what you think you're measuring?
One time when I was applying for a job I was told I was going to be tested on writing fast SQL code, so I should be sure to be up on it. I heard from one person at the company that this was something they deeply valued. I bought a book on optimizing SQL and started reading it. After a few days of reading I decided fuck it, why should I be ALREADY be spending my own time doing what this company desires? There was no guarantee they'd hire me anyway, so there's a good chance I'd be learning all this for nothing. If that's such a big deal to them it's something they need to train people for, not expect everyone to know a relatively specialized skill up front.
In other words, the fish bowl works both ways.
Are you aware that DNS has the ability to publish more than simply an IP address? Like say.. a key?
If DNSSEC supplies a secure channel to a trusted authority (which it sounds like it does), then I see no reason why it can't replace the certificate authorities. Likely the biggest impediment to this is simply the time required for DNSSEC to be supported down to the individual machine level.
You had some credibility up until just after this statement:
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable.
Anyone who seriously prefers government censorship to the normal peer review process has simply lost his mind. Why should any president suppress publication of things he finds "objectionable"?
I don't see much substance to your argument anyway. It really all stems from the word "patch" and "flotilla"? That's the big "scientific conspiracy" and politics at play here? All you have to do is read the damn article and it clearly says the plastic is microscopic. Great conspiracy you've got their.
Your other point seems to stem from the number of animals killed a year due to garbage. You sure spout off a lot of claims about non-peer reviewed and use a lot of inflammatory language, but I sure don't see any evidence to support that. Does the truth or falsity of a single fact in a 574 page paper really bring into question the whole story? Sorry, but this critical thinker is far more skeptical of you than I am of the NOAA.
Here's just a small hint: It's just possible you may be taking things a tad too literally. You might find some answers yourself at your local library.
Your post just makes me laugh. Ever considered being a straight man?
Maybe you just haven't heard the right comedians before. It's not all dick jokes and "you just might be a redneck" jokes. George Carlin was of course one of the true geniuses of our time. Pointing out the absurdities of life and still being able to sleep at night takes a truly great comedian.
This story remind me of the George Carlin bit on the environment:
but I always try to remember there or those who can talk on the phone safely (I'm a commercial driver and am trained to multi task
I have my doubt that this is possible and not just another form of self-deception. Even if it is it doesn't matter. For the sake of argument let's assume you're correct. 99% of the people are NOT "trained to multi-task" and are dangerous. How would you propose a law that separates out the 99% from the 1%? Why is the 1% a priority where resources should be spent just so they can continue to use cell phones while driving?
My point was really to compare the level of self-deception involved, not a direct comparison of the morality of heroin use with texting while driving. I would agree that I think heroin use is more responsible than texting while driving though.
A sinner? So you're comparing an action with potentially fatal consequences to yourself and others to a sin like having sex out of wedlock while Christian? This goes beyond what constitutes a sin.
Your self-deception is just classic. Yes, I'm sure you're one of "the safe texters", and it's everyone else that's the problem.
Your post reminds me a Usenet post I read about 15 years ago by a guy who did heroin "safely" because he did nice acid/base extractions, filtered with cotton, and never shared needles. Both of you are fooling yourselves.
What happened to the option of just waiting until you stop driving? Is it really worth your life and limbs and those of others to return the latest text RIGHT NOW?
A couple times a month I see some idiot clearly not paying attention on the road and making dangerous decisions. The only clear pattern I've ever observed is that 9 times out of 10 it's someone on a cell-phone. Just yesterday some moron in a mini-van came close to merging right into me, and sure enough there was a cell phone next to his head. I've never noticed a pattern in car, gender, race, or bumper-stickers... but the person holding a cell phone up to their ear is a very clear pattern. I've never seen someone texting, so I have to believe it's rather rare.
Unfortunately there's still no law in Minnesota against using a cell phone while driving. For some reason there's a ban on kids using a cell phone while driving, but apparently when you get older you gain a magical ability to drive and hold your cell phone at the same time. I believe most states are the same way.
So if you ask me the big problem is just plain old cell phone use, not texting. Texting while driving is idiotic and should be illegal, but concentrating on it and increasing penalties to ridiculous 15 year jail terms while ignoring the obvious problem of people using cell phones while driving is equally foolish. According to http://www.ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/laws/cellphone_laws.html Cell phone usage while driving is not illegal in Utah.
The belief that it's not possible is just plain silly
The believe that "the future" just magically solves all problems and all things will be possible be possible is at least as silly. Unfortunately we don't have any derogatory words that are adequate to describe this level of naivety. Pointing to something nobody could have foreseen hundreds of years ago as proof that this we're just ignorant fools now and the problem will just go away because of advances in technology is beyond foolish.
In practice it's going to be difficult to find suitable materials, but you're definitely not going to succeed if you don't try
Which is also true for the more practical ways of solving our energy problems. We clearly can't try EVERYTHING, so why would we try the ones that sound incredibly impractical and foolhardy?
So using VPN level of encryption on a home router is not going to happen until processing power is increased dramatically on the cheap CPUs they use.
Huh? You speak as if "VPN encryption" is an algorithm who's security and performance can be measures against "Wireless Encryption".
The fact is that "VPN Encryption" could be the same damn algorithm that the wireless router uses (AES). It could be a poor algorithm with weak encryption. The truth is there's no single thing called "VPN Encryption".
Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Not really. WPA relies on the same RC4 algorithm that was used in WEP. WPA on RC4+TKIP was little more than a patch so access points could use the same hardware with a few software modifications. It's been known for years that RC4 is a particularly weak algorithm.
It's possible that AES might someday be cracked. It's possible ANY algorithm might someday be cracked (including anything a VPN or SSL based connection uses). There's really nothing different here between "wireless encryption" and anything else.
People that actually worry about the strength of AES vs 3DES or whatever have missed the point. They're both very strong algorithms. So strong in fact that a real attacker will find a different approach than try to directly break the algorithm. Which do you think is stronger, the locks on your doors, or your encryption algorithm? The point of security is to make something hard enough to not be worth the effort, not to make the system "perfect". Focusing on one aspect of security without looking at the system as a whole as well as the threats is pure folly.
I've been having tremendous issues with having to install subtlely different JVM's for different applications because they cannot keep straight where the JVM's are installed
I don't think this has anything to do with the language or the compiler, but more to do with the relationship between the OS maker and Sun. Sun only recently opened up and allowed less restrictive re-distribution of the JVM, so you'll see open source versions of Java included with linux distributions these days. Before that happened it was more customary to package up the JVM with your product (and thus your woes). Microsoft of course see themselves as a competitor to Java, so they're loathe to include a JVM in their OS.
The other party to lay blame on is the application developers. There's no reason why they can't put looking for an existing JVM in their setup process (and many do), or if you want to do it "right" on linux, make an RPM or DEB.
Java has been useful for large protocols and projects where programmers like to say "and then a miracle occurs" when they hand off processing to other programmers, but for performance sensitive, business critical, programs?
You could insert any language in the world into that statement and find some truth behind it. Shit, some people use Visual Basic for "performance sensitive, business critical programs". I think those people are insane, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that they canceled everyone's ability to charge parking to work phones, not just yours. I'd bet a few people abused the privilege and charged parking to their phone that wasn't work-related. Instead of trying to sort out the abuses, it's easier to just cancel everyones ability to do it.
It actually is quite possible, in terms of natural selection, that in the long run, this would mean a more successful nation
Right. All you have to do is wait thousands of years for natural selection to just magically solve the problem.
And the second point is, that it would of course be even *more* successful, to pull them *all* up. But is that possible?
Of course. It's already happened elsewhere. Shouldn't the most wealthy country in the world be able to prevent disease in it's own country that only normally occurs in extremely poor countries?
My personal opinion is, that this is intentional, because 1. our government is not *that* dumb, and 2. look at who profits from this most.
Where does this idea that there's this single entity called "The Government" that's making decisions? There is no "The Government" in that sense. It's really just a collection of people who make individual decisions. Some of whose decisions carry more weight than others. I'll guarantee you that the people in public health know this was a distinct possibility. But the legislators making funding decisions answer to different bosses. I guess you could call it intentional, if by intentional you mean the people in power just didn't really care.
The problem isn't with "The Government", the problem is with "The People", or at least a very vocal portion of them who only seem to care about "low low taxes" and also the people who scream about the illegal aliens access to government services. Who do you think is going to hurt the most when taxes are cut and services are lowered as a result? There's no need to invent some big conspiracy here. The causes are quite obvious to anyone who pays attention.
The article doesn't specify what the actual remaining charge is, only that it's about not revealing the network passwords.
Can someone explain how not revealing a password is actually illegal? Contempt of court?
Now maybe the string theorists, such as Michio Kaku, will spend a little more time back at the drawing board and a little less time pretending to be Carl Sagan crossed with Alan Alda.
I doubt it. There is no such thing as "String theory". It should be more accurately called "String Theories". It's like a multi-headed hydra that lives forever. Falsify one part of it and 3 other theories pop up to replace it.
The only thing that can really kill String Theories is a experimentally verified competing theory that's unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity. Kill the body and the head will die.
Since Pi is irrational, does that mean that a "perfect" circle cannot actually exist?
No, but because the universe isn't a perfect plane with infinitely divisible pieces of matter it does. It may even be the case that space-time itself is quantized into discreet units, though I don't think anyone has demonstrated this experimentally.