New York State's Public Service Commission is regulating your telephone service here, not the FCC.
Have a nice day.
The FCC
PS: Maybe they're interested in regulating this network because it interacts with the conventional telephone services--including 911. Perhaps they want to have a regulatory framework in place so that people don't get screwed by crappy service.
How good is good enough? People are used to five nines of reliability from POTS. They probably wouldn't notice much if that slipped to four nines (about an hour of downtime per year). Should the PSC be able to step in if your pseudo-phone company slips to three nines? (Eight hours down per year.) Two nines? (Three days.) PSC regulation may or may not mean additional taxes, levies, and bureaucracy. It may or may not also mean the benefits of regulation--quality of service standards with real teeth; an enforcement body in billing and service disputes.
How do they know how far in time they can look with those telescopes? Have photons lost too much energy after that distance?
There's a couple of parameters of interest here.
First of all, when you're looking at objects a looooong way off, there's a question of how many photons you get to collect from that object per unit time. If you collect too few photons, anything you might see gets lost in the noise associated with your detector (your 'camera'). You can see stuff further away with a bigger primary mirror (more photons collected) and a better detector (less noise). If you know the parameters involved--brightness of object, mirror size, detector quality--you can make a reasonable estimate of the effective distance you can observe.
For these objects that are really far away and reallly old, you run into another problem that limits how far back you can see. Very distant objects are significantly redshifted. The expansion of the universe has effectively stretched out these photons to much longer wavelengths--partly through Doppler shift, partly through the stretching of space itself. This redshift is correlated with distance, and these distant objects that should glow brightly in the visible and ultraviolet actually show up well into the infrared.
Ground-based telescopes can't see this stuff at all, no matter how big their mirrors--water vapour in the atmosphere screens out infrared radation. Space telescopes can see it, but warm equipment produces infrared radiation that can swamp the signal. Consequently, the JWST carries a cargo of liquid helium (designed to last five years) to cool some of its instruments to operate at 7 kelvin.
By combining a larger mirror with cooler instrumentation, the JWST can see further back in time than Hubble. Based on their knowledge of those parameters and a smattering of astrophysics, NASA can peg a rough estimate of just how far that is.
Linux distribution vendors only have the right to charge equivalent costs to Windows if and when their distribution is equivalent or better than Windows in all respects, out of the box.
Windows distribution vendors only have the right to charge more than Linux if and when their distribution is equivalent or better than Linux in all respects, out of the box.
There exist areas where Linux performs better. There exist areas where Windows performs better. Which one any given company or individual is willing to pay more for depends on his or her specific needs, wants, skills, and budget. Linux is ready for parts of the desktop market--to lump all desktop purchasers into one group is far too coarse a classification.
Why not just have patrons rigged up to a type of grounding strap while pumping gas?
The United States already has an embarrassingly low level of seatbelt law compliance--do you expect people will actually be willing to go to the trouble of attaching a grouding strap?
If they refuse to understand 'put this seat belt on or your body will be forcefully ejected from the vehicle through the windshield', how can we explain that little tiny invisible bits of electricity are dangerous?
However, this is not a clear libel case. It must meet two requirements. It must a proven false statement. It must have the intent of damaging the person's character or reputation.
This depends a bit on the jurisdiction. Certainly in the U.S., the bar is set pretty high on what constitutes actionable defamation. Other jurisdictions are less forgiving. Compare, for example, with Canada. The conditions are effectively
The statements must be false; and
the statements must be damaging to the reputation of the plaintiff.
There is generally no need to prove malicious intent, as there is in the United States. My understanding is that the U.K. and many other European jurisdictions have similarly less-restrictive provisions. Consequently, the AdTI will have to be very careful in its promotion of this 'study' if they try to sell the book overseas. Mind, I'm sure that their lawyers will be very careful in the wording of their claims....
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
The original seller made an honest offer. He had the real product, and it was a legitimate auction.
He only decided to send the dummy laptop after it was established that the buyer was using a false name, phone number, and escrow site, with the intent to defraud the seller. If the buyer has no intention of holding up his end of the contract (paying for the laptop) then the seller is not bound to send a real laptop.
If the buyer attempts to recover the import duties through civil court, then he exposes himself to criminal prosecution. Further, his claim in civil court would likely be easily denied based on the doctrine of unclean hands--that is, "...a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit."
Mostly legitimate double-entry bookkeeping, I would imagine. As others have pointed out, it's one of the right ways to do your books. Every transaction generates two corresponding entries, in such a way that the balance at the end of the day comes to zero. Railroad Tycoon is a good place to get a handle on the basics.:)
So--if you spend one billion dollars on a rocket, then you generate two billion dollars' worth of transactions--the billion dollars out to Lockheed Martin, and a billion dollars on paper for the assets received.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Take some hypothetical cases to illustrate the accounting. If NASA receives a bundle of cash from the federal government, that's two entries. If it transfers the funds internally from its general accounts to its satellite launching division, that's two more entries. If the satellite division subcontracts part of the project to an outside company, that's another two entries. You get six dollars in apparent traffic for one real dollar actually spent.
If someone makes a typo somewhere, then it gets even worse. Someone inadvertantly records a transfer to the satellite division as being transferred to the Shuttle. Oops--wrong expense code or something. A routine check catches the error a week later. Since you're not allowed to delete entries from the ledger--it makes it too easy to cheat--you now have to generate two more pairs of entries: one to reverse to original typo, and one to record the actual transfer.
If NASA amalgamates two programs into one, or splits a larger program into two or more parts, then reassigning the assets also generates transactions.
The $565 billion figure is an artifact of good accounting--it has precious little real meaning.
You haven't lived until you've torn a chunk of the drivers seat out with your ass because of an unexpected turn.
Instead of paying to install and maintain these 'smart' lane markers, wouldn't it be cheaper on back roads to just a) paint some damn lines every ten or fifteen years, and b) put up a reflective sign before sharp corners?
From this perspective, a human perspective, it makes complete sense to have differing systems of measurement. There would be obvious advantages if we all spoke the same language, but no one is proposing that we make everyone learn Chinese (quit being ethnocentric!).
Don't tell George Bush that he's using Arabic numerals...
four 4 x 5 cards can fit on a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.
Well, yes, as long as you're willing to trim a quarter inch off each side and a half inch from the top and bottom. With trimming, you can also get four 4 x 5 cards out of an A4 sheet....
Four 2" x 3.5" business cards can fit on an 8.5 x 11 page, too, as long as you're willing to do the trimming.:D
His argument "Foot-Lbs. I know what that is - that's obvious! Newton - what the fuck is a Newton."
But...foot-pounds are a measure of torque, whereas a newton (lowercase 'n' for the metric unit) is a measure of force. The appropriate comparisons would be pounds vs. newtons, or foot-pounds vs. newton-meters.
What's a foot-pound? (Briefly.) A force of one pound applied at a distance of one foot. What's a newton-meter? A force of one newton applied at a distance of one meter.
Both presuppose an understanding of what is meant by the terms foot, pound, newton, and/or meter. For the benefit of your engineer friend, there's about 4.5 newtons to the pound, and 10% more than three feet to the meter. Consequently, a newton-meter is about three quarters of a pound-foot.
Hey, wait a second... we're playing the game not to get the maximum lives returned, but instead to avoid the worst-case senario that has only struck once. That's somewhat a broken logic.
On the other hand, since the hijacking-a-plane-to-use-as-a-weapon was so spectacularly successful the first time around, you're much more likely to see it attempted again. A pretty good counterargument is that passengers wouldn't sit still for such a hijacking any more--then you get into questions of how well-armed the terrorists are, and how many on the flight, and so forth.
The worst-case scenario also doesn't kill just the people on the plane--it kills two thousand people in the skyscraper you just demolished. So if one decides whether or not to shoot down a hijacked plane, one has to consider the cost of shooting down the plane--two hundred lives, guaranteed--versus the cost of not shooting down the plane--two hundred on the plane plus two thousand on the ground, with some unknown probability. If that probability is greater than (in this example) nine percent, you save more lives--albeit a different set of lives--shooting down all the planes as a preventative measure. How many domestic airline hijackings have there been in the United States in recent years? What fraction have resulted in the loss of the aircraft?
Which is not to say that I don't agree with the parent post in many respects. The fact that the United States Government has developed a colour-coded system to describe how terrified people should be strongly suggests that the War on Terror is working out about as well as the War on Drugs. I do think it is important to consider all the aspects of shooting down hijacked aircraft, particularly with respect to groundside costs as well as the lives in the air. Publically embracing a policy that encourages shooting down hijacked aircraft may also discourage hijackings in general, though meaningfully evaluating such a claim is virtually impossible.
I'm also quite certain that the response to a successful hijacking would depend on exactly where the plane was located. If it happened over South Dakota, the plane would get a fighter escort but not necessarily a missile. If the hijacked aircraft were near New York, the response would be more dramatic.
There are alot of technical problems with high resolution pictures from space, but think about this; the Hubble Telescope was sent into space to avoid atmospheric distortion. Yet military pictures looking the other way (space to earth) this distortion is non-existant, yet it should be there.
The resolution limits of a telescope are bound by the laws of physics. The military has excellent hardware, and probably some image processing algorithms that are head and shoulders above what civilians have access to, but they can't circumvent the wave nature of light. Unless the military has been sneaking ten-meter telescopes into space, then they're not anywhere close to reading license plates. For what it's worth, I do have formal training in physics, and optical systems is one of my areas of expertise. There are lots of more interesting conspiracy theories out there--why not pursue one of those?
There are charlatans out there, but that does not mean that every wild idea is the uttering of some nutball.
True...but most of the wild ideas are the utterings of nutballs.
You want acceptance? Prove it. Publish in a peer-reviewed journal; don't just hold a press conference. Invite criticism; don't rant about censorship on a website.
Scientists, just like everyone else, have a bit of inertia. If you want to introduce something radically new, you have to expect resistance. Quite frankly, the system wouldn't be working if people accepted dramatic findings without questioning them.
...pseudo-science like the shit the FDA passes off as research?
You're right. We should abandon clinical trials as a means to evaluate the efficacy of new drugs and therapies. We should just take the word of Pfizer and/or the faith healer down the street.
The term "pseudo-science" is used by the closed-minded to justify their continued obsessions with The Way Things Are(TM).
Actually, the term "pseudo-science" is used to describe the use of sloppy or incomplete data--possibly in combination with outright fabrication--and inadvertant or wilful ignorance to present theory as incontrovertible fact...particularly on Fox. Pseudo-science involves presenting as fact ideas that are either unsupported or directly contradicted by experiment. Usually it is liberally dosed with dogmatic statements about Establishment conspiracies.
For argument's sake... tell me again why we can read license tags from space but cannot get some decent pictures of the Mars surface?
For the sake of argument, let's assume that it is possible to read license plates from space. The angular size of the numbers on a license plate (~1 inch) as viewed from low Earth orbit (~200 mi) is on the order of about 1e-7 radians.
The closest approch of Mars to Earth in the last fifty thousand years was about thirty-five million miles. Assuming the same angular resolution, that same telescope pointed at Mars should be able to resolve details about five miles across under absolutely ideal conditions.
In practice, the idea that satellites can read license plates is a myth. See here.
Can spy satellites actually read automobile license plates?
Probably not. They most certainly can tell how many people are standing around a car, and perhaps what type of car it is, but actually reading the license plate is not an easy task. Look at the physics: Say the telescope has a 1 m (39 inch) primary and is orbiting 322 km (200 miles) altitude. The theoretical resolution of the telescope (i.e. the best possible) is 0.114 arcseconds (at visible wavelengths). At 322 km, the 7.6 cm (3 inch) tall license plate characters subtend an angle of about 0.048 arcseconds - less than half the size needed to be resolved. A spy satellite, under the *best* of conditions could tell the car *has* a license plate, but given the license plate is most likely being viewed obliquely, and probably at a range *greater* than the satellite's altitude and looking though the atmosphere, one quickly determines spy satellites cannot resolve a license plate.
To actually read license plates, you'd need to put something like the Keck telescope in orbit--and ten-meter scopes don't generally fly well. Even then, you can't get great pictures of Mars. The only way to get high-resolution photographs of Mars is to send a probe there and take pictures from Mars orbit--which is exactly what NASA has been doing. So far, there hasn't been anything which suggests more than microbial life on Mars, and even that's still very much an open question. We do know there aren't obvious large-scale features of civilization--dams, highways, walls, skyscrapers.
RFID tags are very different. They can be read anywhere, by anyone, to uniquely identify you, and track your every movement.
You can always wrap your RFID card in tinfoil when you're not using the building doors. Agreed, a system with magstrip cards would accomplish the same goals, but cards and readers tend to suffer more from wear and tear, in addition to being more vulnerable to vandalism.
Further, simply because it would be possible for MIT to track all of the building staff and students using this technology does not make the university likely to do so. If such a thing were to happen, the building's residents would protest vociferously. There would be a tremendous amount of bad press. RMS would be rightly pissed off. People would probably work actively to defeat the system. Quite frankly, MIT doesn't care where people are inside the building, and they don't have the time or the money to monitor that. Such a tracking scheme could be easily defeated--for example, by leaving your card locked in your desk once you were indoors.
Icidentally, there are such things as reconfigurable locks, so you'd just have to spend a few minutes changing them all, and then reissuing keys. You could do it on a monthly basis just to be safe...
...and we both know that for a university, such a solution would be absurd. In addition to the time spent changing the locks, you'd have to station a security guard by the doors for a couple of days each month to manage the key exchange. Reiterating my first point, to say that something is possible does not make it reasonable.
Aside--I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people working in that building already had cellular phones constantly broadcasting their whereabouts....
RMS didn't say there was no reason to do it, he said it can be just as secure as the rest of the campus without the RFID... Therefore, no justification for the additional privacy-intruding security measures. It's like you're arguing against something completely different.
Just because RMS says something...well, it doesn't necessarily make it true.
Keys are pretty weak access control; as soon as someone loses one or takes one with them when they move to a new institution then the game is over. Keys can be duplicated by the unscrupulous, as well. In contrast, RFID cards are both more difficult to replicate, and the use of individual cards can be disallowed in the event of loss. (Doing something similar with keys would require replacing all the locks and reissuing all the keys.)
The university wants to know who enters the building at night and on weekends in the event that something untoward occurs. To achieve the same level of information, they would have to station video cameras by every entrance, and even then that doesn't generate names.
This is not exactly an unusual precaution. I imagine that this building will contain a lot of expensive and one-of-a-kind tools and equipment that people rightly want to secure. I work in a research lab in a large hospital; I have to swipe a card at the elevator if I want access after hours because that's when there are fewer people around actively keeping an eye on things. Several of the labs have further card access for specific rooms. My understanding is that card access is not uncommon even at MIT.
Are the winners required to share their techniques to claim the prize?
The winners' pages are going to be ranked, indexed, and cached by Google. My question is, how would they avoid sharing their techniques? (Even if they block Google from caching, they've still got to leave their web pages up until the end of the contest...)
However could leaving CD's in colder conditions (such as refrigerating or freezing) the CD do anything to preserve it? Just a thought...
Spontaneous chemical reactions proceed more quickly at higher temperatures. This includes those reactions which degrade the discs.
Similarly, such reactions will be slowed by low temperatures. However, there is a caveat--exposing the discs to extremes in temperature will cause thermal expansion and contraction. The plastic will also be more brittle at low temperatures. As you lower the storage temperature, you're trading mechanical damage for chemical decay; there's probably an optimum point, but finding it would require a significant effort.
Aside: very warm storage conditions (a car in the summer sun, for example) are the worst of both worlds--accelerated chemical decay, plus physical stress up to warping and even melting. CD-Rs are also photosensitive, so keep them out of the sun!
What about the case of Monsanto vs. Schmeiser where a Canadian canola farmer's crop was contaminated by Monsanto's Round-Up Ready crop and who was subsequently sued by Monsanto for violating their patents by growing seed with their designed genes without a license. The farmer lost, but is still appealing.
So Monsanto used GM agricultural products to screw a farmer through the patent and legal system. Yes, you could (and did) say that the farmer in question was harmed by GM foods...but it would be equally appropriate to attribute the harm to a flawed legal system. This situation is loosely analagous to saying that software distributed under the GPL is harmful because it might be 'contaminated' with closed source code inserted without permission of the copyright holder.
What the grandparent was no doubt referring to is that nobody has ever suffered physical harm (illness or injury) as a consequence of GM foods. I can't think of a counterexample; I'm curious if anyone knows of one...?
For below-two-minute results, they didn't even include travel time in the library. I have access to an excellent university library system. If I need in-depth detailed knowledge from primary sources, it's the place to be. I pulled some journal articles from 1881 last night. But it takes two minutes (at least) just to walk from the front doors to the stacks...if you don't need to check the catalogue.
Slashdot Mirror
New York State's Public Service Commission is regulating your telephone service here, not the FCC.
Have a nice day.
The FCC
PS: Maybe they're interested in regulating this network because it interacts with the conventional telephone services--including 911. Perhaps they want to have a regulatory framework in place so that people don't get screwed by crappy service.
How good is good enough? People are used to five nines of reliability from POTS. They probably wouldn't notice much if that slipped to four nines (about an hour of downtime per year). Should the PSC be able to step in if your pseudo-phone company slips to three nines? (Eight hours down per year.) Two nines? (Three days.) PSC regulation may or may not mean additional taxes, levies, and bureaucracy. It may or may not also mean the benefits of regulation--quality of service standards with real teeth; an enforcement body in billing and service disputes.
There's a couple of parameters of interest here.
First of all, when you're looking at objects a looooong way off, there's a question of how many photons you get to collect from that object per unit time. If you collect too few photons, anything you might see gets lost in the noise associated with your detector (your 'camera'). You can see stuff further away with a bigger primary mirror (more photons collected) and a better detector (less noise). If you know the parameters involved--brightness of object, mirror size, detector quality--you can make a reasonable estimate of the effective distance you can observe.
For these objects that are really far away and reallly old, you run into another problem that limits how far back you can see. Very distant objects are significantly redshifted. The expansion of the universe has effectively stretched out these photons to much longer wavelengths--partly through Doppler shift, partly through the stretching of space itself. This redshift is correlated with distance, and these distant objects that should glow brightly in the visible and ultraviolet actually show up well into the infrared.
Ground-based telescopes can't see this stuff at all, no matter how big their mirrors--water vapour in the atmosphere screens out infrared radation. Space telescopes can see it, but warm equipment produces infrared radiation that can swamp the signal. Consequently, the JWST carries a cargo of liquid helium (designed to last five years) to cool some of its instruments to operate at 7 kelvin.
By combining a larger mirror with cooler instrumentation, the JWST can see further back in time than Hubble. Based on their knowledge of those parameters and a smattering of astrophysics, NASA can peg a rough estimate of just how far that is.
Windows distribution vendors only have the right to charge more than Linux if and when their distribution is equivalent or better than Linux in all respects, out of the box.
There exist areas where Linux performs better. There exist areas where Windows performs better. Which one any given company or individual is willing to pay more for depends on his or her specific needs, wants, skills, and budget. Linux is ready for parts of the desktop market--to lump all desktop purchasers into one group is far too coarse a classification.
The United States already has an embarrassingly low level of seatbelt law compliance--do you expect people will actually be willing to go to the trouble of attaching a grouding strap?
If they refuse to understand 'put this seat belt on or your body will be forcefully ejected from the vehicle through the windshield', how can we explain that little tiny invisible bits of electricity are dangerous?
This depends a bit on the jurisdiction. Certainly in the U.S., the bar is set pretty high on what constitutes actionable defamation. Other jurisdictions are less forgiving. Compare, for example, with Canada. The conditions are effectively
The statements must be false; and
the statements must be damaging to the reputation of the plaintiff.
There is generally no need to prove malicious intent, as there is in the United States. My understanding is that the U.K. and many other European jurisdictions have similarly less-restrictive provisions. Consequently, the AdTI will have to be very careful in its promotion of this 'study' if they try to sell the book overseas. Mind, I'm sure that their lawyers will be very careful in the wording of their claims....
IANAL, YMMV.
The original seller made an honest offer. He had the real product, and it was a legitimate auction.
He only decided to send the dummy laptop after it was established that the buyer was using a false name, phone number, and escrow site, with the intent to defraud the seller. If the buyer has no intention of holding up his end of the contract (paying for the laptop) then the seller is not bound to send a real laptop.
If the buyer attempts to recover the import duties through civil court, then he exposes himself to criminal prosecution. Further, his claim in civil court would likely be easily denied based on the doctrine of unclean hands--that is, "...a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit."
Mostly legitimate double-entry bookkeeping, I would imagine. As others have pointed out, it's one of the right ways to do your books. Every transaction generates two corresponding entries, in such a way that the balance at the end of the day comes to zero. Railroad Tycoon is a good place to get a handle on the basics. :)
So--if you spend one billion dollars on a rocket, then you generate two billion dollars' worth of transactions--the billion dollars out to Lockheed Martin, and a billion dollars on paper for the assets received.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Take some hypothetical cases to illustrate the accounting. If NASA receives a bundle of cash from the federal government, that's two entries. If it transfers the funds internally from its general accounts to its satellite launching division, that's two more entries. If the satellite division subcontracts part of the project to an outside company, that's another two entries. You get six dollars in apparent traffic for one real dollar actually spent.
If someone makes a typo somewhere, then it gets even worse. Someone inadvertantly records a transfer to the satellite division as being transferred to the Shuttle. Oops--wrong expense code or something. A routine check catches the error a week later. Since you're not allowed to delete entries from the ledger--it makes it too easy to cheat--you now have to generate two more pairs of entries: one to reverse to original typo, and one to record the actual transfer.
If NASA amalgamates two programs into one, or splits a larger program into two or more parts, then reassigning the assets also generates transactions.
The $565 billion figure is an artifact of good accounting--it has precious little real meaning.
Instead of paying to install and maintain these 'smart' lane markers, wouldn't it be cheaper on back roads to just a) paint some damn lines every ten or fifteen years, and b) put up a reflective sign before sharp corners?
Don't tell George Bush that he's using Arabic numerals...
Well, yes, as long as you're willing to trim a quarter inch off each side and a half inch from the top and bottom. With trimming, you can also get four 4 x 5 cards out of an A4 sheet....
Four 2" x 3.5" business cards can fit on an 8.5 x 11 page, too, as long as you're willing to do the trimming. :D
But...foot-pounds are a measure of torque, whereas a newton (lowercase 'n' for the metric unit) is a measure of force. The appropriate comparisons would be pounds vs. newtons, or foot-pounds vs. newton-meters.
What's a foot-pound? (Briefly.) A force of one pound applied at a distance of one foot. What's a newton-meter? A force of one newton applied at a distance of one meter.
Both presuppose an understanding of what is meant by the terms foot, pound, newton, and/or meter. For the benefit of your engineer friend, there's about 4.5 newtons to the pound, and 10% more than three feet to the meter. Consequently, a newton-meter is about three quarters of a pound-foot.
504 gallons to go 1 mile!
From here, the gas mileage of a modern aircraft carrier is seventeen feet per gallon...so he's getting 40% less distance per unit of fuel.
Consequently, I speculate that his vehicle must be an aircraft carrier...operating on land.
My only question is, where the hell does he park it?
On the other hand, since the hijacking-a-plane-to-use-as-a-weapon was so spectacularly successful the first time around, you're much more likely to see it attempted again. A pretty good counterargument is that passengers wouldn't sit still for such a hijacking any more--then you get into questions of how well-armed the terrorists are, and how many on the flight, and so forth.
The worst-case scenario also doesn't kill just the people on the plane--it kills two thousand people in the skyscraper you just demolished. So if one decides whether or not to shoot down a hijacked plane, one has to consider the cost of shooting down the plane--two hundred lives, guaranteed--versus the cost of not shooting down the plane--two hundred on the plane plus two thousand on the ground, with some unknown probability. If that probability is greater than (in this example) nine percent, you save more lives--albeit a different set of lives--shooting down all the planes as a preventative measure. How many domestic airline hijackings have there been in the United States in recent years? What fraction have resulted in the loss of the aircraft?
Which is not to say that I don't agree with the parent post in many respects. The fact that the United States Government has developed a colour-coded system to describe how terrified people should be strongly suggests that the War on Terror is working out about as well as the War on Drugs. I do think it is important to consider all the aspects of shooting down hijacked aircraft, particularly with respect to groundside costs as well as the lives in the air. Publically embracing a policy that encourages shooting down hijacked aircraft may also discourage hijackings in general, though meaningfully evaluating such a claim is virtually impossible.
I'm also quite certain that the response to a successful hijacking would depend on exactly where the plane was located. If it happened over South Dakota, the plane would get a fighter escort but not necessarily a missile. If the hijacked aircraft were near New York, the response would be more dramatic.
The most effective strategy is to use a password in Welsh. Unfortunately, it takes too long to type, and even I can't spell it correctly.
I've driven from lake tahoe...
Maybe my opinion would change if I hiked the state parks rather than just drive thru their highways, but from what I've seen that's my opinion.
How quintessentially American--evaluating an entire region based on what can be seen from the Interstate, cruising past at sixty miles an hour...
The resolution limits of a telescope are bound by the laws of physics. The military has excellent hardware, and probably some image processing algorithms that are head and shoulders above what civilians have access to, but they can't circumvent the wave nature of light. Unless the military has been sneaking ten-meter telescopes into space, then they're not anywhere close to reading license plates. For what it's worth, I do have formal training in physics, and optical systems is one of my areas of expertise. There are lots of more interesting conspiracy theories out there--why not pursue one of those?
True...but most of the wild ideas are the utterings of nutballs.
You want acceptance? Prove it. Publish in a peer-reviewed journal; don't just hold a press conference. Invite criticism; don't rant about censorship on a website.
Scientists, just like everyone else, have a bit of inertia. If you want to introduce something radically new, you have to expect resistance. Quite frankly, the system wouldn't be working if people accepted dramatic findings without questioning them.
You're right. We should abandon clinical trials as a means to evaluate the efficacy of new drugs and therapies. We should just take the word of Pfizer and/or the faith healer down the street.
The term "pseudo-science" is used by the closed-minded to justify their continued obsessions with The Way Things Are(TM).
Actually, the term "pseudo-science" is used to describe the use of sloppy or incomplete data--possibly in combination with outright fabrication--and inadvertant or wilful ignorance to present theory as incontrovertible fact...particularly on Fox. Pseudo-science involves presenting as fact ideas that are either unsupported or directly contradicted by experiment. Usually it is liberally dosed with dogmatic statements about Establishment conspiracies.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that it is possible to read license plates from space. The angular size of the numbers on a license plate (~1 inch) as viewed from low Earth orbit (~200 mi) is on the order of about 1e-7 radians.
The closest approch of Mars to Earth in the last fifty thousand years was about thirty-five million miles. Assuming the same angular resolution, that same telescope pointed at Mars should be able to resolve details about five miles across under absolutely ideal conditions.
In practice, the idea that satellites can read license plates is a myth. See here.
To actually read license plates, you'd need to put something like the Keck telescope in orbit--and ten-meter scopes don't generally fly well. Even then, you can't get great pictures of Mars. The only way to get high-resolution photographs of Mars is to send a probe there and take pictures from Mars orbit--which is exactly what NASA has been doing. So far, there hasn't been anything which suggests more than microbial life on Mars, and even that's still very much an open question. We do know there aren't obvious large-scale features of civilization--dams, highways, walls, skyscrapers.Meter sticks, being 9.3% longer than a yard stick, are actually the best tool for effecting punishment.
Once again, the metric system is demonstrably superior. Have a nice day. :D
You can always wrap your RFID card in tinfoil when you're not using the building doors. Agreed, a system with magstrip cards would accomplish the same goals, but cards and readers tend to suffer more from wear and tear, in addition to being more vulnerable to vandalism.
Further, simply because it would be possible for MIT to track all of the building staff and students using this technology does not make the university likely to do so. If such a thing were to happen, the building's residents would protest vociferously. There would be a tremendous amount of bad press. RMS would be rightly pissed off. People would probably work actively to defeat the system. Quite frankly, MIT doesn't care where people are inside the building, and they don't have the time or the money to monitor that. Such a tracking scheme could be easily defeated--for example, by leaving your card locked in your desk once you were indoors.
Icidentally, there are such things as reconfigurable locks, so you'd just have to spend a few minutes changing them all, and then reissuing keys. You could do it on a monthly basis just to be safe...
Aside--I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people working in that building already had cellular phones constantly broadcasting their whereabouts....
Just because RMS says something...well, it doesn't necessarily make it true.
Keys are pretty weak access control; as soon as someone loses one or takes one with them when they move to a new institution then the game is over. Keys can be duplicated by the unscrupulous, as well. In contrast, RFID cards are both more difficult to replicate, and the use of individual cards can be disallowed in the event of loss. (Doing something similar with keys would require replacing all the locks and reissuing all the keys.)
The university wants to know who enters the building at night and on weekends in the event that something untoward occurs. To achieve the same level of information, they would have to station video cameras by every entrance, and even then that doesn't generate names.
This is not exactly an unusual precaution. I imagine that this building will contain a lot of expensive and one-of-a-kind tools and equipment that people rightly want to secure. I work in a research lab in a large hospital; I have to swipe a card at the elevator if I want access after hours because that's when there are fewer people around actively keeping an eye on things. Several of the labs have further card access for specific rooms. My understanding is that card access is not uncommon even at MIT.
The winners' pages are going to be ranked, indexed, and cached by Google. My question is, how would they avoid sharing their techniques? (Even if they block Google from caching, they've still got to leave their web pages up until the end of the contest...)
Spontaneous chemical reactions proceed more quickly at higher temperatures. This includes those reactions which degrade the discs. Similarly, such reactions will be slowed by low temperatures. However, there is a caveat--exposing the discs to extremes in temperature will cause thermal expansion and contraction. The plastic will also be more brittle at low temperatures. As you lower the storage temperature, you're trading mechanical damage for chemical decay; there's probably an optimum point, but finding it would require a significant effort.
Aside: very warm storage conditions (a car in the summer sun, for example) are the worst of both worlds--accelerated chemical decay, plus physical stress up to warping and even melting. CD-Rs are also photosensitive, so keep them out of the sun!
What about the case of Monsanto vs. Schmeiser where a Canadian canola farmer's crop was contaminated by Monsanto's Round-Up Ready crop and who was subsequently sued by Monsanto for violating their patents by growing seed with their designed genes without a license. The farmer lost, but is still appealing.
So Monsanto used GM agricultural products to screw a farmer through the patent and legal system. Yes, you could (and did) say that the farmer in question was harmed by GM foods...but it would be equally appropriate to attribute the harm to a flawed legal system. This situation is loosely analagous to saying that software distributed under the GPL is harmful because it might be 'contaminated' with closed source code inserted without permission of the copyright holder.
What the grandparent was no doubt referring to is that nobody has ever suffered physical harm (illness or injury) as a consequence of GM foods. I can't think of a counterexample; I'm curious if anyone knows of one...?
For below-two-minute results, they didn't even include travel time in the library. I have access to an excellent university library system. If I need in-depth detailed knowledge from primary sources, it's the place to be. I pulled some journal articles from 1881 last night. But it takes two minutes (at least) just to walk from the front doors to the stacks...if you don't need to check the catalogue.