Grandma Mable gets scanned because the TSA isn't racist.
Grandma Mabel gets scanned because if the TSA never scanned Grandma Mabel then any halfway competent terrorists -- one of the fairly small number capable of doing things like acquiring real explosives and assembling a workable bomb -- would notice, and start hiring old ladies to carry stuff through security.
I'm not saying that the TSA is competent or effective, but I do know that you can't have classes of people who are completely excluded from scrutiny.
I cannot believe someone thought it was a good idea to FedEx radioactive material. Someone needs to be fired.
Why would it be wrong to hire a shipping company - in this case, FedEx - which has extensive experience in handling moderately hazardous materials and is properly licensed to do so?
Material meets the White I threshold if the measured radioactivity at the surface of the shipping package does not exceed 0.5 millirem per hour; most White I packages actually fall far below that level. The legal maximum exposure for civilians in the U.S. is 500 millirem per year, and 'radiation workers' are permitted ten times that. Even if we assume that the package is right at the edge of what's permissible, you would have to strap the box directly to your ass for more than a month to get close to the civilian limit.
Could one get a higher dose if you opened the package and removed the radioactive material from its inner container(s)? Sure -- but that takes a special kind of stupid. All of the packaging is going to be emblazoned with the 'radiation' trefoil symbol; you've got to assume that even if the package were routed to the wrong destination, the receiver is going to hand it right back to the FedEx guy. (Unless, of course, it's a recipient who regularly handles radioactives, in which case, still no worries.)
This isn't a case where someone decided to cut corners and put radioactive material in an unmarked box to save a few bucks on shipping. It was properly packaged, properly labelled material, accompanied by all the appropriate paperwork and handed over to an approved, accredited, regulated shipper. Yes, someone at FedEx screwed up, but it looks like their procedures for handling lost packages seem to have worked as they should. This is a non-story which is being blown out of proportion by people who don't understand and can't appropriately weigh the risks of handling radioactive materials. ~~~~
Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?
While I realize that the submitter was just cracking a joke, it's actually pretty lame on an important level (...probably on some unimportant ones, too, but I digress).
The DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) system is in many ways the antithesis to the obscure TSA color-coded alerts. DEFCON assigns its lowest level (5) to the 'normal' state of preparedness -- none of this nonsense with a perpetual orange alert; if something is usual practice then that's the lowest condition.
Under DEFCON rules (or the terorrism-related FPCON rules), members of the military have specific, clearly delineated responsibilities and tasks. There is a firm grasp of the meaning and intent of each condition. In contrast, telling civilians they're facing threat level Orange (or Yellow, or Red) doesn't mean anything. We don't know what to do differently - if anything - and we don't know what might happen, or how to respond, or when the condition might be returned to normal.
Of course, I also recognize that my message header could serve as an apt description of the whole color-coded threat warning system....
'I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.'
Was I the only one that picked up on this part of it and immediately thought of "thought crimes"?
I hope so.
Knowing why your enemy is fighting, and why your enemy wants to continue being your enemy, is a useful thing in formulating policy - foreign or domestic. Saying "Terrorists are terrorists because they're nasty bad evil people" may in many cases be true -- but it would be more useful to know what made them into nasty, bad, evil people in order to try to avoid making too many more of them.
There has never been even one single case of a terrorist boarding any train in the United States with the intent to cause it harm. There has never even been intelligence suggesting that this is a credible threat.
Until 9/11, there hadn't been a single case of a terrorist boarding any commercial jetliner in the United States with the intent to fly it into the Pentagon. To be fair, I'm with you on pretty much everything that you're saying, but we should be cautious about statements along the lines of "It's never happened before, so we needn't worry about keeping it that way". I agree strongly that we shouldn't be focusing our attention on what Bruce Schneier has dubbed "movie-plot threats"; devoting large amounts of resources to defeating narrow, specific scenarios where our countermeasures would be easily defeated by small shifts in terrorist tactics is a mugs' game that benefits only manufacturers of security theater equipment.
Truth be told, I'm kind of baffled that there hasn't been an attack on train (or subway) infrastructure in the United States. The only two sensible explanations I can come up with are (1) all of the terrorists in the United States are woefully incompetent, and unable to get hold of a few pounds of commercial explosives; or (2) there just aren't very many terrorists looking to attack U.S. infrastructure. Either way, I'm sleeping pretty comfortably.
...namely a locked and reinforced cockpit door and armed air marshals.
I agree with you entirely on the locked cockpit doors, but the air marshals program is irrelevant, costly and ineffective.
There are roughly four thousand air marshals in the United States, and they are deployed in teams of two (or more). Meanwhile, there are something like thirty thousand flights per day (taking off or landing at U.S. airports). The fraction of flights with an air marshal on board runs to an estimated 1-2%. The air marshals program, despite its massive cost, has a negligible chance of 'getting lucky' and catching a terrorist in the act. Had there been air marshals flying at current levels back in 2001, they would have had a less than ten percent chance of being aboard to stop even one of the four suicide hijackings.
Let's be honest -- the paradigm has already changed. Before the last plane crashed in that Pennsylvania field, the window was closed on hijacking an aircraft for use as a weapon; passengers won't sit still for it. In principle, air marshals could constructively be used aboard a few flights where there was good intelligence to suggest a highly elevated risk of attacks, but practically speaking the same goal could be accomplished more effectively through more thorough security screening of those at-risk flights.
no love for the safe-crackin', bongo-playin', Challenger-investigatin' Richard Feynman?
I'm pretty sure that - while absolutely cool - Feynman fails on the established criterion (2) reasonably young. Now deceased, he was last 'reasonably young' during World War II. Sidney Crosby (our reference non-science 'hero') was only six months old when Feynmann passed away.
I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit,
There is a difference between deficit and debt. In any event, while the cost (and cost overrun) on the JWST is a substantial amount of money, it is very small relative to the total debt or annual deficit. The complete NASA budget is less than $20 billion per year; even if the government chooses to destoy its entire space program it's a useless place to try to resolve the deficit. If you want to free up a couple of billion dollars in construction costs, cancel a Virginia-class attack submarine, or pare back the order for F-35 fighter jets (15 jets - out of a contracted 2443 - would save two billion dollars).
our 9.6% unemployment rate,
How does a high-tech project, employing highly-trained workers to the full extent of their abilities (and not incidentally keeping them in the United States, rather than seeing them move to other jurisdictions) hurt employment?
our sluggish exports market,
How does a space telescope hurt U.S. exports?
our extended overseas military conflicts,
How does building a space telescope affect overseas military operations?
our wide-open borders,
Yep, those damn Canadians keep getting in. Fortunately, the JWST is an infrared instrument, so in its off-hours it can be used to scan for illegal immigrants crossing the border under cover of darkness.
and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...
How is shutting down prestigious research projects going to improve the United States' global reputation? Let's let China do the cutting-edge space research from now on -- that ought to bolster our standing on the global stage. (What the hell does "leader of the free world" mean, anyway? I really hope it's more "we're a shining example" and less "we're in charge because we're scariest".)
but what do I know?
Not nearly as much as you'd like to think, apparently. The U.S. federal civil service has close to two million employees -- not counting the armed forces or the post office. Why is it that people assume that an organization of that scale is only capable of doing one thing at a time, and that there cannot be multiple concurrent projects directed at multiple priorities?
If my goal is to use your GMail account for spam then yes, I will change the password. If my goal is to monitor your emails I most certainly will not change the password, and will just log in every day to read your correspondence.
...Of course, if I'm forced to change my password once per month, the guy reading my email who finds out that "SooperSekrit53" stopped working is going to guess that the new password is "SooperSekrit54".
If my goal is to use your GMail account for spam then yes, I will change the password. If my goal is to monitor your emails I most certainly will not change the password, and will just log in every day to read your correspondence.
That's an excellent point. Unfortunately, even a regular change-of-password routine means that the malicious party gets a month, or three months, or six months, or what-have-you length of time following your account.
This is why I am annoyed that so few systems implement the simple precaution of displaying the last date, time, and location from which I (putatively) logged in. At negligible cost, that information would allow me to detect a compromised account at next login, rather than remaining unknowingly insecure until my next password change.
You can change your password as often as you like, but if you don't use a strong password then you're always going to be at risk of a brute force hack or be a victim of the 'over the shoulder' spy.
I'll grant you the over-the-shoulder issue, though except for extremely dedicated watchers that is easily defeated by trivial modification. The canonical "password" falls to the shoulder surfer, but "pasSword" or "pasword" or "password." or even "psword" are going to be missed. (A keylogger gets them all, of course, but that's also going to get genuinely 'strong' passwords.) Meanwhile, brute-force attacks are of concern for encrypted documents and the like (where you can take an unlimited number of attempts) but are nearly useless against things like account logins which will lock you out after three to five failed attempts.
I'm from Canada.. and I've never been in the situation, but as I understand it...
In Canada, just as in the United States, we have uninformed people with no legal training or law enforcement experience willing to make inaccurate and misleading pronouncements about how screwed up our laws are.
Canadian law provides for the use of force - up to and including lethal force - to repel forcible entry into one's home. Section 40 of the Criminal Code of Canada (my emphasis added):
Every one who is in peaceable possession of a dwelling-house, and every one lawfully assisting him or acting under his authority, is justified in using as much force as is necessary to prevent any person from forcibly breaking into or forcibly entering the dwelling-house without lawful authority.
I suppose they add some things, but surely the process must roughly obey conservation of mass.
That's the nice thing, sometimes, about biology. You can grow more of it, provided appropriate conditions and nutrients. This process would indeed be totally clinically useless - though still scientifically interesting - if it relied on a one-to-one production of blood cells from skin cells.
I see (at least) two major reasons why the scientists would choose to use skin fibroblasts as a starting material. First, skin cells are quite easy to harvest, and your body is already built to repair and replace missing skin. Second, and more important, skin fibroblasts are pretty hardy cells, and they can be grown in culture for at least a limited time. Roughly speaking, you can coax ordinary human adult skin fibroblasts to divide about thirty times in culture, corresponding to a remarkable billion-to-one expansion of their population; each division will probably take a day or two. I haven't had time to pull down the full Nature paper, so I don't know how many cell divisions they were able to carry through prior to the transformation into blood cells, or what fraction of fibroblasts were successfully transformed, but you can bet that they're getting far more than a milliliter of blood from a cubic centimeter of skin.
First of all, if this were an indicator, it would seem logical that Internet Explorer users would trend lower incomes than anyone else.
Not necessarily. Obviously no one is foolish enough to think that there is a causal relationship between browser usage and creditworthiness, so one must wonder what variables are likely to co-vary and generate this apparent correlation (if real). It may be as simple as "People who use alternative browsers are, on average, significantly younger than people who use IE." While your guesstimate about income may be true among individuals of the same age ( I'm not going to guarantee that it's accurate -- there are probably a lot of highly-educated grad students and postdocs using alternative browsers and living on Kraft Dinner while the rest of their age cohort are drawing six figures as plumbers), those differences may be swamped by the differences in ages between the two groups.
Older people (in general) have a longer employment track record, more community ties, more assets, and greater overall financial stability. Younger people - even high-income younger people - are more likely to make poor financial choice and more likely to default on loans. And if they do get into a financial bind, they're more likely to ditch the car than to give up the house.
Fortunately for the rest of us, one cannot plagarize ideas. Reformulating a concept in your own words does not count as plagarism, nor should it.
You seem to be infected by a different sort of IP bug.
Plagiarism is not the same thing as copyright infringement (though it's not uncommon for the same act to involve elements of both). One can plagiarize public domain sources. One can plagiarize ideas.
Plagiarism is what happens when a writer presents other people's work (their words or their ideas) as his own, without giving due credit to the source. Pretending that you thought of something when you're actually just copying another author's reasoning is intellectual dishonesty, and squarely within the realm of plagiarism.
If you copy someone's words verbatim, there is an added obligation to specifically identify the copied passage by blockquoting, using quotation marks, or otherwise clearly setting off the passage from the rest of your writing. If you're just paraphrasing, there's no obligation to use quotation marks (that would be silly) but there remains a need to properly name your source (through footnotes or other means). Rewriting someone else's work in your own words is otherwise still very much plagiarism.
Yet not smart enough to *require* enough plutonium in the chamber for a return trip.
This is a bug they uncovered during testing, and it will be fixed in the next iteration of the product. Any hacker will tell you that you get the proof-of-principle prototype running first, then add the idiot-proofing (error handling for software, interlocks for hardware). Heck, maybe there was just a malfunction in the Plutonium Fill Level Sensor assembly; it's not exactly something you buy off the shelf at the local hardware store.
How many years did we build automobiles before manufacturers added an idiot light and warning chime to warn drivers when they were low on fuel? How many otherwise smart people have forgotten to fill their tanks because they were busy (say) designing time machines and got distracted?
A family with three or more children will need to take two vehicles to go on a family vacation if they cannot afford a station wagon/SUV/minivan. That is in no way more efficient than them using a station wagon/SUV/minivan. It is probably significantly less efficient.
What fraction of families in the United States have three or more children? The census data (see Table HH-4) say that in 2009 the average number of people per household was just 2.56. A shade under 10 percent of households contain five or more people (and not all of those will be two parents and their three kids), only about 3.5 percent clock in with six or more people.
Even then -- how often does the two- and three-child family need a large vehicle to move their cargo for a vacation? The family can use a smaller, less-expensive, more-efficient vehicle for their day-to-day lives, and rent a minivan or trailer for a week or two when they need the extra capacity.
This is actually something more of us should be doing right now. Forget saving the planet, for a moment -- we'd all save hundreds or thousands of real dollars buying and operating smaller vehicles and renting the extra capacity on an as-needed basis.
If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.
...if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards.
...at the price point where the manufacturers wished to sell them. There is a substantial amount of price elasticity in both the supply and demand for a given model or even a given style of vehicle. If SUVs and passenger minivans had been properly included in CAFE, then sticker prices would have risen until the consumer market shrank to meet the permitted supply. More consumers would have figured out how to make due with acceptably fuel-efficient sedans; for most families (and for pretty well all individuals and couples) the SUV or minivan is a convenient luxury, not a credible necessity.
Manufacturers, meanwhile, would have been pressured (and incented) to built larger passenger vehicles to better standards of fuel economy, to take advantage of the new market for fuel-efficient medium-large vehicles in the window between CAFE-compliant cars and gas-guzzling, price-prohibitive light trucks. Remember, the nominal purpose for the light-truck loophole in CAFE was not to allow every household a cheap minivan; it was to avoid penalizing businesses (especially small businesses) for whom light trucks were a legitimate requirement for their work. The same goal could - and should - have been achieved through a directed tax deduction/credit, but American automakers were too heavily dependent on their high-margin light trucks, and their lobbyists hobbled CAFE's scope accordingly.
Something which sounds slightly more interesting, but which is actually an equivalent statement, is
1 is not equal to zero;
0.1 is not equal to zero;
0.00001 is not equal to zero; but
0.0000...(infinite number of zeroes)...1 is exactly equal to 0
Casual inspection reveals that this must be so, as it is just 1 - 0.99999..., but you'd be surprised how many people get uncomfortable with infinitesimally small numbers being equal to zero.
Without, isnt really just an inflatable replica and not a weapon?
Tricking an enemy into diluting his forces to cover an imaginary threat can be more militarily useful than actually having all those tanks. If the enemy diverts an armored division a couple of hundred miles off course to face an inflatable 'threat', those tanks are out of the real battle just as surely as if they had been destroyed -- and Team Inflatable didn't have to risk any real hardware or soldiers to do it.
Is a tailored computer virus a 'weapon'?
How about a field guide to industrial sabotage?
What about carefully 'adjusted' railway signals that occasionally misreport the occupancy of a stretch of track?
A weapon doesn't always have to go BANG -- and some of the most effective ones don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Grandma Mable gets scanned because the TSA isn't racist.
Grandma Mabel gets scanned because if the TSA never scanned Grandma Mabel then any halfway competent terrorists -- one of the fairly small number capable of doing things like acquiring real explosives and assembling a workable bomb -- would notice, and start hiring old ladies to carry stuff through security.
I'm not saying that the TSA is competent or effective, but I do know that you can't have classes of people who are completely excluded from scrutiny.
I cannot believe someone thought it was a good idea to FedEx radioactive material. Someone needs to be fired.
Why would it be wrong to hire a shipping company - in this case, FedEx - which has extensive experience in handling moderately hazardous materials and is properly licensed to do so?
FedEx Ground will handle Class 7 Radioactive Material I materials (bearing the 'radioactive white I' placards and labels) only; that's the lowest class.
Material meets the White I threshold if the measured radioactivity at the surface of the shipping package does not exceed 0.5 millirem per hour; most White I packages actually fall far below that level. The legal maximum exposure for civilians in the U.S. is 500 millirem per year, and 'radiation workers' are permitted ten times that. Even if we assume that the package is right at the edge of what's permissible, you would have to strap the box directly to your ass for more than a month to get close to the civilian limit.
Could one get a higher dose if you opened the package and removed the radioactive material from its inner container(s)? Sure -- but that takes a special kind of stupid. All of the packaging is going to be emblazoned with the 'radiation' trefoil symbol; you've got to assume that even if the package were routed to the wrong destination, the receiver is going to hand it right back to the FedEx guy. (Unless, of course, it's a recipient who regularly handles radioactives, in which case, still no worries.)
This isn't a case where someone decided to cut corners and put radioactive material in an unmarked box to save a few bucks on shipping. It was properly packaged, properly labelled material, accompanied by all the appropriate paperwork and handed over to an approved, accredited, regulated shipper. Yes, someone at FedEx screwed up, but it looks like their procedures for handling lost packages seem to have worked as they should. This is a non-story which is being blown out of proportion by people who don't understand and can't appropriately weigh the risks of handling radioactive materials. ~~~~
Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?
While I realize that the submitter was just cracking a joke, it's actually pretty lame on an important level (...probably on some unimportant ones, too, but I digress).
The DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) system is in many ways the antithesis to the obscure TSA color-coded alerts. DEFCON assigns its lowest level (5) to the 'normal' state of preparedness -- none of this nonsense with a perpetual orange alert; if something is usual practice then that's the lowest condition.
Under DEFCON rules (or the terorrism-related FPCON rules), members of the military have specific, clearly delineated responsibilities and tasks. There is a firm grasp of the meaning and intent of each condition. In contrast, telling civilians they're facing threat level Orange (or Yellow, or Red) doesn't mean anything. We don't know what to do differently - if anything - and we don't know what might happen, or how to respond, or when the condition might be returned to normal.
Of course, I also recognize that my message header could serve as an apt description of the whole color-coded threat warning system....
'I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.'
Was I the only one that picked up on this part of it and immediately thought of "thought crimes"?
I hope so.
Knowing why your enemy is fighting, and why your enemy wants to continue being your enemy, is a useful thing in formulating policy - foreign or domestic. Saying "Terrorists are terrorists because they're nasty bad evil people" may in many cases be true -- but it would be more useful to know what made them into nasty, bad, evil people in order to try to avoid making too many more of them.
There has never been even one single case of a terrorist boarding any train in the United States with the intent to cause it harm. There has never even been intelligence suggesting that this is a credible threat.
Until 9/11, there hadn't been a single case of a terrorist boarding any commercial jetliner in the United States with the intent to fly it into the Pentagon. To be fair, I'm with you on pretty much everything that you're saying, but we should be cautious about statements along the lines of "It's never happened before, so we needn't worry about keeping it that way". I agree strongly that we shouldn't be focusing our attention on what Bruce Schneier has dubbed "movie-plot threats"; devoting large amounts of resources to defeating narrow, specific scenarios where our countermeasures would be easily defeated by small shifts in terrorist tactics is a mugs' game that benefits only manufacturers of security theater equipment.
Truth be told, I'm kind of baffled that there hasn't been an attack on train (or subway) infrastructure in the United States. The only two sensible explanations I can come up with are (1) all of the terrorists in the United States are woefully incompetent, and unable to get hold of a few pounds of commercial explosives; or (2) there just aren't very many terrorists looking to attack U.S. infrastructure. Either way, I'm sleeping pretty comfortably.
...namely a locked and reinforced cockpit door and armed air marshals.
I agree with you entirely on the locked cockpit doors, but the air marshals program is irrelevant, costly and ineffective.
There are roughly four thousand air marshals in the United States, and they are deployed in teams of two (or more). Meanwhile, there are something like thirty thousand flights per day (taking off or landing at U.S. airports). The fraction of flights with an air marshal on board runs to an estimated 1-2%. The air marshals program, despite its massive cost, has a negligible chance of 'getting lucky' and catching a terrorist in the act. Had there been air marshals flying at current levels back in 2001, they would have had a less than ten percent chance of being aboard to stop even one of the four suicide hijackings.
Air marshals travel the country - and the world - displacing paying first-class ticketholders to serve as a second-rate deterrent.
Let's be honest -- the paradigm has already changed. Before the last plane crashed in that Pennsylvania field, the window was closed on hijacking an aircraft for use as a weapon; passengers won't sit still for it. In principle, air marshals could constructively be used aboard a few flights where there was good intelligence to suggest a highly elevated risk of attacks, but practically speaking the same goal could be accomplished more effectively through more thorough security screening of those at-risk flights.
Rogers wouldn't even call me back when I was in the hospital with my dad who was going into major surgery.
I hope you're dad's okay now, but I have to ask -- what kind of cell phone problem hospitalizes your father and requires major surgical intervention?
no love for the safe-crackin', bongo-playin', Challenger-investigatin' Richard Feynman?
I'm pretty sure that - while absolutely cool - Feynman fails on the established criterion (2) reasonably young. Now deceased, he was last 'reasonably young' during World War II. Sidney Crosby (our reference non-science 'hero') was only six months old when Feynmann passed away.
Yes. The Thin Armani Line.
Really more of a pinstripe, actually.
I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit,
There is a difference between deficit and debt. In any event, while the cost (and cost overrun) on the JWST is a substantial amount of money, it is very small relative to the total debt or annual deficit. The complete NASA budget is less than $20 billion per year; even if the government chooses to destoy its entire space program it's a useless place to try to resolve the deficit. If you want to free up a couple of billion dollars in construction costs, cancel a Virginia-class attack submarine, or pare back the order for F-35 fighter jets (15 jets - out of a contracted 2443 - would save two billion dollars).
our 9.6% unemployment rate,
How does a high-tech project, employing highly-trained workers to the full extent of their abilities (and not incidentally keeping them in the United States, rather than seeing them move to other jurisdictions) hurt employment?
our sluggish exports market,
How does a space telescope hurt U.S. exports?
our extended overseas military conflicts,
How does building a space telescope affect overseas military operations?
our wide-open borders,
Yep, those damn Canadians keep getting in. Fortunately, the JWST is an infrared instrument, so in its off-hours it can be used to scan for illegal immigrants crossing the border under cover of darkness.
and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...
How is shutting down prestigious research projects going to improve the United States' global reputation? Let's let China do the cutting-edge space research from now on -- that ought to bolster our standing on the global stage. (What the hell does "leader of the free world" mean, anyway? I really hope it's more "we're a shining example" and less "we're in charge because we're scariest".)
but what do I know?
Not nearly as much as you'd like to think, apparently. The U.S. federal civil service has close to two million employees -- not counting the armed forces or the post office. Why is it that people assume that an organization of that scale is only capable of doing one thing at a time, and that there cannot be multiple concurrent projects directed at multiple priorities?
If my goal is to use your GMail account for spam then yes, I will change the password. If my goal is to monitor your emails I most certainly will not change the password, and will just log in every day to read your correspondence.
If my goal is to use your GMail account for spam then yes, I will change the password. If my goal is to monitor your emails I most certainly will not change the password, and will just log in every day to read your correspondence.
That's an excellent point. Unfortunately, even a regular change-of-password routine means that the malicious party gets a month, or three months, or six months, or what-have-you length of time following your account.
This is why I am annoyed that so few systems implement the simple precaution of displaying the last date, time, and location from which I (putatively) logged in. At negligible cost, that information would allow me to detect a compromised account at next login, rather than remaining unknowingly insecure until my next password change.
You can change your password as often as you like, but if you don't use a strong password then you're always going to be at risk of a brute force hack or be a victim of the 'over the shoulder' spy.
I'll grant you the over-the-shoulder issue, though except for extremely dedicated watchers that is easily defeated by trivial modification. The canonical "password" falls to the shoulder surfer, but "pasSword" or "pasword" or "password." or even "psword" are going to be missed. (A keylogger gets them all, of course, but that's also going to get genuinely 'strong' passwords.) Meanwhile, brute-force attacks are of concern for encrypted documents and the like (where you can take an unlimited number of attempts) but are nearly useless against things like account logins which will lock you out after three to five failed attempts.
I'm from Canada.. and I've never been in the situation, but as I understand it...
In Canada, just as in the United States, we have uninformed people with no legal training or law enforcement experience willing to make inaccurate and misleading pronouncements about how screwed up our laws are.
Canadian law provides for the use of force - up to and including lethal force - to repel forcible entry into one's home. Section 40 of the Criminal Code of Canada (my emphasis added):
I suppose they add some things, but surely the process must roughly obey conservation of mass.
That's the nice thing, sometimes, about biology. You can grow more of it, provided appropriate conditions and nutrients. This process would indeed be totally clinically useless - though still scientifically interesting - if it relied on a one-to-one production of blood cells from skin cells.
I see (at least) two major reasons why the scientists would choose to use skin fibroblasts as a starting material. First, skin cells are quite easy to harvest, and your body is already built to repair and replace missing skin. Second, and more important, skin fibroblasts are pretty hardy cells, and they can be grown in culture for at least a limited time. Roughly speaking, you can coax ordinary human adult skin fibroblasts to divide about thirty times in culture, corresponding to a remarkable billion-to-one expansion of their population; each division will probably take a day or two. I haven't had time to pull down the full Nature paper, so I don't know how many cell divisions they were able to carry through prior to the transformation into blood cells, or what fraction of fibroblasts were successfully transformed, but you can bet that they're getting far more than a milliliter of blood from a cubic centimeter of skin.
First of all, if this were an indicator, it would seem logical that Internet Explorer users would trend lower incomes than anyone else.
Not necessarily. Obviously no one is foolish enough to think that there is a causal relationship between browser usage and creditworthiness, so one must wonder what variables are likely to co-vary and generate this apparent correlation (if real). It may be as simple as "People who use alternative browsers are, on average, significantly younger than people who use IE." While your guesstimate about income may be true among individuals of the same age ( I'm not going to guarantee that it's accurate -- there are probably a lot of highly-educated grad students and postdocs using alternative browsers and living on Kraft Dinner while the rest of their age cohort are drawing six figures as plumbers), those differences may be swamped by the differences in ages between the two groups.
Older people (in general) have a longer employment track record, more community ties, more assets, and greater overall financial stability. Younger people - even high-income younger people - are more likely to make poor financial choice and more likely to default on loans. And if they do get into a financial bind, they're more likely to ditch the car than to give up the house.
For an article on units of mass, I found it disappointing that you forgot Volkswagens.
Let's say a bag of wood weighs 8 pound 9 ounces, and you want to buy 3 bags. What is the total weight in pound and ounces?
24 pounds, 27 ounces. Piece of cake.
Versus, you have 8.9kg of wood, and you want to buy 3 bags, what is the total weight in kg?
Twenty-four, plus twenty-seven, er, move the decimal, carry the two, ah...damn. Why does metric have to be so bloody difficult?
You seem to be infected by the IP bug.
Fortunately for the rest of us, one cannot plagarize ideas. Reformulating a concept in your own words does not count as plagarism, nor should it.
You seem to be infected by a different sort of IP bug.
Plagiarism is not the same thing as copyright infringement (though it's not uncommon for the same act to involve elements of both). One can plagiarize public domain sources. One can plagiarize ideas.
Plagiarism is what happens when a writer presents other people's work (their words or their ideas) as his own, without giving due credit to the source. Pretending that you thought of something when you're actually just copying another author's reasoning is intellectual dishonesty, and squarely within the realm of plagiarism.
If you copy someone's words verbatim, there is an added obligation to specifically identify the copied passage by blockquoting, using quotation marks, or otherwise clearly setting off the passage from the rest of your writing. If you're just paraphrasing, there's no obligation to use quotation marks (that would be silly) but there remains a need to properly name your source (through footnotes or other means). Rewriting someone else's work in your own words is otherwise still very much plagiarism.
Yet not smart enough to *require* enough plutonium in the chamber for a return trip.
This is a bug they uncovered during testing, and it will be fixed in the next iteration of the product. Any hacker will tell you that you get the proof-of-principle prototype running first, then add the idiot-proofing (error handling for software, interlocks for hardware). Heck, maybe there was just a malfunction in the Plutonium Fill Level Sensor assembly; it's not exactly something you buy off the shelf at the local hardware store.
How many years did we build automobiles before manufacturers added an idiot light and warning chime to warn drivers when they were low on fuel? How many otherwise smart people have forgotten to fill their tanks because they were busy (say) designing time machines and got distracted?
A family with three or more children will need to take two vehicles to go on a family vacation if they cannot afford a station wagon/SUV/minivan. That is in no way more efficient than them using a station wagon/SUV/minivan. It is probably significantly less efficient.
What fraction of families in the United States have three or more children? The census data (see Table HH-4) say that in 2009 the average number of people per household was just 2.56. A shade under 10 percent of households contain five or more people (and not all of those will be two parents and their three kids), only about 3.5 percent clock in with six or more people.
Even then -- how often does the two- and three-child family need a large vehicle to move their cargo for a vacation? The family can use a smaller, less-expensive, more-efficient vehicle for their day-to-day lives, and rent a minivan or trailer for a week or two when they need the extra capacity.
This is actually something more of us should be doing right now. Forget saving the planet, for a moment -- we'd all save hundreds or thousands of real dollars buying and operating smaller vehicles and renting the extra capacity on an as-needed basis.
If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.
This isn't a bug; it's a feature.
...if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards.
Manufacturers, meanwhile, would have been pressured (and incented) to built larger passenger vehicles to better standards of fuel economy, to take advantage of the new market for fuel-efficient medium-large vehicles in the window between CAFE-compliant cars and gas-guzzling, price-prohibitive light trucks. Remember, the nominal purpose for the light-truck loophole in CAFE was not to allow every household a cheap minivan; it was to avoid penalizing businesses (especially small businesses) for whom light trucks were a legitimate requirement for their work. The same goal could - and should - have been achieved through a directed tax deduction/credit, but American automakers were too heavily dependent on their high-margin light trucks, and their lobbyists hobbled CAFE's scope accordingly.
1 is not equal to zero;
0.1 is not equal to zero;
0.00001 is not equal to zero; but
0.0000...(infinite number of zeroes)...1 is exactly equal to 0
Casual inspection reveals that this must be so, as it is just 1 - 0.99999..., but you'd be surprised how many people get uncomfortable with infinitesimally small numbers being equal to zero.
Without, isnt really just an inflatable replica and not a weapon?
Tricking an enemy into diluting his forces to cover an imaginary threat can be more militarily useful than actually having all those tanks. If the enemy diverts an armored division a couple of hundred miles off course to face an inflatable 'threat', those tanks are out of the real battle just as surely as if they had been destroyed -- and Team Inflatable didn't have to risk any real hardware or soldiers to do it.
Is a tailored computer virus a 'weapon'?
How about a field guide to industrial sabotage?
What about carefully 'adjusted' railway signals that occasionally misreport the occupancy of a stretch of track?
A weapon doesn't always have to go BANG -- and some of the most effective ones don't.