You've picked your nit accurately and with great force.
The Slashdotter Jane Q. Public had repeatedly claimed the
Nature article was bunkum because it was based on the concept of
radiative forcing. For example:
I should also point out that the entire concept of "radiative
forcing" this is based on was refuted a few years ago, and so far
that refutation has not been successfully challenged.
To me, it would be rather earth shattering news if a Nature
article was based on a theory that was debunked five years ago.
I looked up radiative forcing to try to find out what JQP was
talking about. JQP was kind enough to supply references for the
so-called refutation which should have made my task easier. The
references were utter nonsense that defied basic physics with
silly hand waving arguments.
Since JQP's erroneous comments were not moderated into oblivion,
correcting their spread of grossly unscientific misinformation
which cast aspersions on the fine Nature article is about as far
from nit-picking as one can get.
the temperature of the box will rise without limit
wow. Total Science Fail
Given the assumptions of a perfect insulator and constant energy
input, what is the limiting temperature? What happens to energy
conservation when that temperature limit is reached?
As I said before, there are, of course, limits due to imperfect
insulation and the finite temperature of the surface of the Sun
but these limits are far above the temperatures reached in
the upper atmosphere.
What is the limiting temperature of the strength of solar
heating?
What is the limiting temperature of a perfectly insulated
box with a constant input of energy?
Neither one of the fine articles linked to in the summary mention
radiative forcing. Neither do either of the two
references you cite as proofs that radiative forcing has been
debunked. The
Wikipedia describes radiative forcing as:
In climate science, radiative forcing is defined as the
difference of radiant energy received by the earth and energy
radiated back to space.
There is no mention of it being refuted (or even controversial);
not in the Wikipedia article and not in the two references you
cited. In fact, since radiative forcing is a rather simple
definition it is hard to imagine how it could be refutable.
Furthermore,
this reference of yours, despite having pretty pictures, seems to
be based on utter nonsense with the main point being:
Internal [actual greenhouse] temperature cannot
exceed maximum strength of solar heating input.
This is utter nonsense because it makes a direct comparison
between heat and temperature. It would be helpful if the article
mentioned what the temperature limit of the strength of solar
heating was. But if they did that, the utter nonsense would
be apparent because the temperature of a solar furnace can be
many thousands of degrees (either Celsius or Fahrenheit) so if
there is limiting temperature, it must be so high as to be
meaningless in discussions of global warming.
Another way to see it is that if you can trap solar energy in a
box that has perfect insulation (energy comes in but it does not
go out) then the temperature of the box will rise without limit.
Of course there is no such thing as a perfect insulator so there
are limits to how high a temperature you can achieve but these
limits are not a direct property of the solar radiation. There
is a temperature limit, of a sort, to solar radiation but the
limit is the temperature of the surface of the Sun, which again
has no bearing on discussion of global warming.
What they are exploiting is that in naive implementations
of RSA the amount of computer power needed during en/decryption
varies with each binary digit in the key. If the digit is zero
then no computation is done and if it is one that a tight loop
is executed.
There have been other side channel attacks that exploit this
weakness in naive implementations. The obvious fix is to
slightly change the algorithm so the same computation is done
whether the digit is a zero or a one. This reduces the
efficiency by a factor of two but it makes these side channel
attacks much more difficult.
In fact, the authors contacted GPG before publicly releasing
this exploit and the
fix is in place:
Q9 How vulnerable is GnuPG now?
We have disclosed our attack to GnuPG developers under
CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked
with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and
of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these
countermeasures and resisting our current key-extraction attack,
were released concurrently with the first public posting of these
results. Some of the effects we found (including RSA key
distinguishability) remain present.
...
Q13: What countermeasures are available?
One obvious countermeasure is to use sound dampening equipment,
[...]
Alternatively, one can employ algorithmic techniques to reduce
the usefulness of the emanations to attacker. These techniques
ensure the rough-scale behavior of the algorithm is independent
of the inputs it receives; they usually carry some performance
penalty, but are often already used to thwart other side-channel
attacks. This is what we helped implement in GnuPG (see Q9).
Also, how many tons of mercury and lead MORE are we as a nation
going to mine, refine, transport, and ultimately toss into the
local landfill each year using these newer bulbs over the old
style ones? Oops, I forgot I wasn't supposed to mention that.
A brochure sent out by my power company said the amount of
mercury released due to burning more coal for powering
incandescent bulbs is far greater that the amount of mercury
used in a CFL that replaces them.
Popular Mechanics
agrees:
Each [CFL] bulb contains an average of 5 milligrams of mercury,
... Over the 7500-hour average range of one CFL, then, a plant
will emit 13.16 mg of mercury to sustain a 75-watt incandescent
bulb but only 3.51 mg of mercury to sustain a 20-watt CFL (the
lightning equivalent of a 75-watt traditional bulb). Even if the
mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the
atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more
milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime.
Assange posted footage of an Apache helicopter crew murdering
innocent civilians. How could he possibly have that footage
if he wasn't involved in the murders? It is clear that
Assange or his associates would have to have installed
the video recording device in the helicopter.
You can get away with perjury all you want because judges don't
care [...]
That is only because you are an individual and not a corporation.
We live in a feudal society where individuals are serfs and
corporations are the lords and masters. The purpose of the courts
now is to protect corporations from individuals. Crimes against
serfs are usually not considered significant but if an uppity
serf rebels against a corporation then there is hell to pay.
I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting
part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that
they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that
rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look
realistic because the color values are right: they all have the
same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.
FTFA:
[Tim Jenison] was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years.
He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. "Looking at their
Vermeers," he says, "I had an epiphany" -- the first of several.
"The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer
so realistic? Because he got the values right," meaning
the color values.
The point of using an optical aid was to get the colors
right.
Came a day he said, "I think I'll go on water. Nothing more."
From then on, for about ten days, he only had water. He was
bed-ridden and had little strength but spoke with me daily. In
the morning of August 24, 1983, two weeks after his 100th
birthday, when it seemed he was slipping away, I sat beside him
on his bed.
IMO this was the most peaceful and dignified death imaginable.
This is the way I would like to go.
The US has more prisoners per capita and also more total
prisoners than any other country on earth. This is a huge drag
on the economy. Not only is there a massive cost for keeping all
of these mostly non-violent people imprisoned, we are also
deprived of their contribution to the economy. Locking someone
up often destroys not just their life but the lives of their
children and other family members.
Passing more laws against non-violent crimes to lock up more
non-violent people is going full tilt in the WRONG
DIRECTION!
FTFA:
"We apparently caught them between runs, so to speak, so this
takes away one tool they have in their illegal trade. The law
does help us and is on our side," says [Lt. Michael Combs with
State Highway Patrol].
Lt. Combs is delusional if he thinks his "side" can possibly win
their war on drugs. It is possible that outlawing secret
compartments is a natural extension of the war on drugs but that just
shows how idiotic and insane the war on drugs is. Even if they
took away all of our remaining civil liberties, the war on drugs
would still be unwinnable. How much more must the American
people sacrifice for the sake of this unwinnable war?
OTOH, Mr. Gurley is lucky he was not pulled over in
the state of New Mexico where at least two different
people have been forced to undergo
enemas, colonoscopies, and anal probing
based on acting nervous after a routine traffic
stop:
After Eckert was pulled over, a Deming police officer said that
he saw Eckert "was avoiding eye contact with me," his "left hand
began to shake," and he stood "erect (with) his legs together,"
We are wasting billions of dollars; we are destroying millions
of lives; we are militarizing our civil police departments;
we are trashing our civil liberties; and we are destroying at
least one neighboring country all in the name of a war on drugs
that is impossible to win. It is stupid, it is sick, it is
insane. It must stop.
I first heard about the idea of Fractal
cosmology in Mandelbrot's book from 1982, The Fractal
Geometry of Nature. The idea is quite simple: there is
structure at every scale in the Universe, at least up to some
cutoff.
It is kind of funny that some people are surprised when structure
is discovered at larger and larger scales as we are able to make
observations at longer and longer distance scales. It is much
more sensible to expect to see more structure as we see more of
the Universe instead of the more common (and hubristic)
expectation that we have already seen all the structure there is
to see.
So let's compromise. I'm a conservative: after realizing that we
have (for example) HUNDREDS of freakin' destroyers in our Navy,
not to mention that we're building planes that are being put in
storage because we don't need them, and on and on... I'd be
willing to accept substantial and severe cuts in military
spending. Stop being the world's policeman. Don't touch military
pay and benefits, because those folks have earned it. But there's
plenty that could be trimmed, billions and billions of dollars.
OK... so what are my liberal friends willing to surrender in
return? It's got to be something near and dear to their hearts.:)
So... according to you a compromise means that you are willing
to get rid of something we both agree is wasteful and unnecessary
only if I am willing to give up something I believe is essential,
non-wasteful, and perhaps even provides good ROI. This is
exactly the kind of "compromise" the Tea Party recently proposed.
They were only willing to do something they agreed needed to be
done if others would make significant concessions in unrelated
areas.
Doing something we both agree should be done is not a compromise;
it is agreement. Demanding additional concessions in other areas
before you are willing to do what you agree should be done is
about as far away from compromise as possible; it is extortion
and hostage-taking. It's basically saying "we're going to ruin
it for everyone unless we get our way".
You have perfectly encapsulated the reason why there
are no longer any compromises in DC.
It's us, the voters, who let all these things happened.
We routinely keep on voting in career politicians [...]
This is because of the misguided notation that if you don't
vote for either career politician from column D or career
politician from column R then you are wasting your vote.
Even reverse-shattering an egg is theoretically possible, if the
egg's bits were perfectly arranged in the final "shattered"
configuration and gravity were reversed (as in, the video were
shot upside-down, basically). It's extremely unlikely that you'd
get the arrangement perfect, but it's possible.
[...] The entropy argument has real merits, but it almost never
applies literally and perfectly in the macroscopic world where
it's so easy for humans to manipulate entropy in either
direction.
The entropy argument applies more literally and more perfectly
than almost any other argument about anything. Your argument
based on something that is "extremely unlikely,... but possible"
is at best utter nonsense. I could say it is extremely unlikely
but possible that I will guess the keys to all the encryption
used throughout the world and also have Scarlett Johansson fall
in love with me and marry me on the same day. But all of that is
much more likely to happen than for you to ever make a self
assembling egg. Your notion of what is "theoretically possible"
is not at all the same as what a physicist (even a theoretical
physicist) means by that term.
As for human manipulation of entropy, we can't, not globally.
We certainly can't make self-assembling eggs. Your equating
the likelihood of a self assembling egg and a reversed video
that shows a ball rolling up-hill shows a breathtaking lack of
knowledge about physics and probability.
The whole purpose of buying Motorola was not that they
wanted to get into the hardware market, they were trying to
protect Android from patent lawsuits from third parties and
ironically enough from Motorola suing other Android
manufacturers.
Citation? Google said they wanted to use Motorola to
explore and demonstrate how to tightly integrate the
Android OS with hardware. It was to be Android done right,
just like their Chromebook was to be ChromeOS done right.
Saying that Motorola has nothing to do with Android is like
saying that you shouldn't include the cost of a $20,000 security
system to protect a $10,000 investment.
It is still not fair to charge all of Motorola's expenses to
Android. A lot of it is the cost of a software company entering
a hardware market. It is EXTREMELY unfair to at the same time
ignore all the ad revenue generated by Android in order to reach
your ridiculous conclusion that Android is running at a loss.
The only way you can say they are operating at a loss is to
ignore the ad income generated by Android devices and only count
the cost of the security system they bought. In addition, as I
implied before, it is hard to put a dollar figure on the savings
from not having to go to court.
Even if *you* think Android is a flaming failure, most of its big
competitors do not. They're running scared. They see Android's
stellar success as a fundamental threat to their proprietary OS
business models and are attacking Android with whatever means
they have available, fair or foul. Now that Android has
solidified its lead, it makes absolutely no sense to cripple it
by adopting the strategies of those who lost.
The sole purpose of Android was to increase service
revenue, but
their are millions of Android devices that don't use any Google
services especially in countries like China and India. Even in
the US, Amazon has a successful Android ecosystem that doesn't
use Google.
Citation? You seem to keep making stuff up to suit your whims.
What Google said was they wanted a slice of the smartphone market
that was not beholden to other players. They explicitly were
not looking to lock Android devices to Google services.
They wanted a portion of the market that was a level playing
field. The Kindle and other non-locked-in Android devices are
still a big win for Google. The world would be a different place
if those were all Apple or Window devices.
Even worse, Microsoft can get a per device fee from many Android
devices but Google can't.
I agree this is both unfortunate and extremely unfair.
It is also sad that the once mighty Microsoft has reduced itself
to the level of a patent troll. I'm sure Android would have
been even more spectacularly successful without the Microsoft
tax. Yet despite this handicap inflicted by a bitter competitor
and the dysfunctional US patent system, Android is still the
top dog. By far.
Yes, despite all the attacks from frightened competitors, Android
sales and activations are still through the roof. The ad
revenues must be mind boogling. Remember, the plan was never to
lock Android devices to Google services. The plan was to create
an open market where Google services could compete fairly. It's
been an incredible success. The only way you can spin it into
a failure is with obvious logical fallacies such as charging all
of Motorola's hardware expenses to Android while ignoring all
the mobile ad revenue. Any project can be made to look like
a failure if you only count expenses and ignore the major profit
stream. Say... are you from Hollywood?
Android is not Motorola. If Motorola is losing money it doesn't
follow that Android is. The cost for deploying Android was
relatively small. The advertising revenue has got to be
enormous.
By your logic Microsoft should have stopped making their mobile
OS after they burned Nokia to the ground or after the early
failures of their surface tablet. Not everything Google touches
turns into gold (like Android did). Sometimes it is difficult for
software companies to get into the hardware business. It is not
unusual to start out with years of losses. Also, you are
probably ignoring what Google gained when they acquired the
Motorola patents. Their patent portfolio was thin and they and
their hardware partners were getting hammered by software
lawsuits. The Motorola portfolio gives them ammunition to shoot
back and it also opens the door to cross license agreements.
Trying to identify Android with Motorola seems like a deliberate
attempt to obfuscate the situation in order to make Android look
like a failure instead of the rip-roaring success it actually is.
Google's plan for Android was to make sure they would not get
shut out of the smart phone ads business. The plan far exceeded
expectations all around.
Yes by paying Apple $1 billion a year for being the default
search engine on iPhones....
First, the dominance of the Android OS in the marketplace has
very little to do with paying Apple to use the Google search
engine. That was a totally separate deal and I'm sure Google
made plenty of money on that deal. It's not like they were
paying Apple to take a dive and back out of the smartphone
market. Second, the article you linked to was from 2011, back
when Android was just starting its meteoric rise to dominance.
It would be interesting to see what the new numbers are now that
Android is the big kid on the block. As I said before, the
whole point of Android was so they wouldn't be beholden to
the likes of Apple.
You seem to be grabbing at straws and non-sequiturs in an attempt
to spin Android's incredible success as a massive failure. Have
you considered a career as a political consultant?
Google earnings beat estimates, but Motorola losses keep growing
The second FA is strictly about Facebook ads. It says:
One caveat that Slagen offered, however, is that the data changes with
industry, and that gaming and e-commerce industries, for instance,
did not see the same kind of massive iPhone/Android gulf in ROI.
The summary stinks of typical anti-Google FUD.
Google beat earnings estimates.
Google's Android OS drastically beat expectations on how soon it
would totally dominate the smartphone market. So some asshat
suggests that these results mean Google is doing poorly and it
is only a matter of time before Google joins Apple and Microsoft
(and others) by turning to the dark side.
Having a dominate market share in the smart phone sector is
HUGE. Google's plan for Android was to make sure they would
not get shut out of the smart phone ads business. The plan far
exceeded expectations all around.
It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did...
Manning never did an uncontrolled dump. He released documents to news
organizations so those organization could vet them and release only what was
proper to be released. That was the responsible thing to do under the
circumstances. It is the same thing Snowden did. It's true that someone in
one of the organizations Manning released to screwed up and published a private
key that let everyone see all the documents but that was clearly not Manning's
fault.
Please stop spreading the malicious lie that Bradley did an uncontrolled
dump.
I learned the density wave model of spiral galaxies in
graduate school in the late 1980s so I was surprised to see
you say:
The 60's are calling, and they want their theory back.
The popularization Alchemy of the Heavens (1995) and
the textbook Cosmology, the Science of the Universe
(2nd Edition 2000) both teach the density wave model.
While it is true that the density wave model was first
proposed in the 1960s, nothing has yet superseded it. IMO
the shock-wave model is just a variant of the density wave
model. The Harvard paper cited above assumes the
density wave model and has worked out in more detail how it
works.
The density wave model solves the "winding problem", which
the Wikipedia
explains as:
Since the angular speed of rotation of the galactic disk
varies with distance from the centre of the galaxy (via a
standard solar system type of gravitational model), a radial
arm (like a spoke) would quickly become curved as the galaxy
rotates. The arm would, after a few galactic rotations,
become increasingly curved and wind around the galaxy ever
tighter.
If there is an alternative to the density wave and
shock-wave models that solves the winding problem, I would
like to hear about it. The mass extinction paper itself
supports these models since it says the solar system passes
in and out of the spiral arms.
If you are merely criticizing the shock-wave model and
implying the density wave model is the correct
explanation (or vice versa), that was not clear from you
post. ISTM the distinctions between the density wave model
and the shock-wave model are minor compared to their overall
similarity. They both say the arms are waves traveling
through the star field at a speed that differs from the
speed of the stars themselves. The simulations in the
Harvard paper indicate the actual solution is a combination
of the shock-wave model and the density wave model which
is hardly surprising:
The new results fall somewhere in between the two
theories and suggest that the arms arise in the first
place as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds
- star forming regions or nurseries common in galaxies.
Introduced into the simulation, the clouds act as
"perturbers" and are enough to not only initiate the
formation of spiral arms but to sustain them indefinitely.
Hmmm... I strongly believe that things continue to exist when I no
longer observe them.
According to almost all interpretations of quantum mechanics that
belief of yours is demonstrably wrong. A classic example is the
double slit experiment. A series of single particle going through
a double slit and then hitting a screen will arrive at the screen
in a diffraction pattern. It is like each particle leaves the source
as a single entity then acts like a wave as it passes through the
two slits then reverts to acting like a particle again when it
hits the screen. If you assume those particles "continue to
exist" in corporeal form then it is impossible for them to form
the diffraction pattern that is found in experimental results.
According to Feynman's path integral approach each of these
particles simultaneously takes every possible classical path
to get from the source to the screen.
Einstein said:
Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
If you doubt Einstein would say something like this, I
suggest you read his essay Physics and Reality from
The Journal of the Franklin Institute. Vol 221, No. 3,
March, 1936. which is also available in his wonderful
little book Ideas and Opinions.
It depends on who is saying it. For Iraq, it was the Bush administration and Fox news claiming the existence of WMDs (but never seen).
Have you already forgotten about Judith Miller and the New York Times?
The Bush administration used her NYT articles (not Fox News reports)
as proof that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. She wrote and the NYT published many
accounts of Iraqi WMDs, including:
Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with
what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand
Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United
States to the brink of war.
Many of the stories of Iraq WMDs were fabricated by Ahmed Chalabi and other
Iraqi exiles intent on regime change. These fabrications were laundered by the
NYT and then used by the Bush administration as an excuse for the war they had
been plotting since before the 9/11 attacks.
As AmiMoJo already said, we don't yet know who used the chemical
weapons Syria: an out-of-character, insanely stupid and bumbling
Assad or clever rebels intent on regime change. Launching punitive
attacks without yet knowing if we are being played for fools
again would be asinine.
I think you *may* have misinterpreted what was said. Earlier
in the article it was noted that Cooper is the shadow home
secretary which means she is a member of the political party
that is not currently in power. The article also reports
that she said the police must explain why terrorism powers
were used.
It seems to me that is a skewer aimed at the party in power.
If the police respond to her request then they can either
fall on their swords and take the blame for this idiotic
incident or pass the buck up the chain of command and let
the blame fall on the political party currently in power.
In that context, her comment:
The public support for these powers must not be endangered by a
perception of misuse
can be seen as part of that skewer in the understated way Britons
are famous for. It is forcing the hand of those in power to
divulge who was responsible for this screw-up. The ruling party
desperately wants everyone to stay mum. The most likely excuse
they will use is that to divulge any part of the secret decision
making process would weaken their power to fight terrorism.
Cooper's comment about public perception undercuts this excuse
by making the point that staying mum would endanger their ability
to wield these powers.
I think it was a clever ploy to make sure party in power takes
the blame for this without opening herself up to charges that
she is weak on terrorism.
The laws concerning whistleblowing don't exist in the same
text when one is bound by security clearances and the rule
of law when those clearances are breached are a whole
different can of worms.
So the rule of law only applies to underlings and not
to the people on top? Do you really honestly think that
is how the rule of law is supposed to work?
In his book With Liberty and Justice for Some Glenn
Greenwald explains:
the United States has become a country that does not apply
the rule of law to its elite class, which is another way
of saying the United States does not apply the rule of law.
If everyone followed your logic, and there were no brave,
patriotic souls like Snowden and Manning willing to report
massive law breaking by the elite class then the rule
of law and government of the people, by the people, for
the people, would perish from the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
You've picked your nit accurately and with great force.
The Slashdotter Jane Q. Public had repeatedly claimed the Nature article was bunkum because it was based on the concept of radiative forcing. For example:
I should also point out that the entire concept of "radiative forcing" this is based on was refuted a few years ago, and so far that refutation has not been successfully challenged.
To me, it would be rather earth shattering news if a Nature article was based on a theory that was debunked five years ago. I looked up radiative forcing to try to find out what JQP was talking about. JQP was kind enough to supply references for the so-called refutation which should have made my task easier. The references were utter nonsense that defied basic physics with silly hand waving arguments.
Since JQP's erroneous comments were not moderated into oblivion, correcting their spread of grossly unscientific misinformation which cast aspersions on the fine Nature article is about as far from nit-picking as one can get.
the temperature of the box will rise without limit
wow. Total Science Fail
Given the assumptions of a perfect insulator and constant energy input, what is the limiting temperature? What happens to energy conservation when that temperature limit is reached?
As I said before, there are, of course, limits due to imperfect insulation and the finite temperature of the surface of the Sun but these limits are far above the temperatures reached in the upper atmosphere.
What is the limiting temperature of the strength of solar heating?
What is the limiting temperature of a perfectly insulated box with a constant input of energy?
Neither one of the fine articles linked to in the summary mention radiative forcing. Neither do either of the two references you cite as proofs that radiative forcing has been debunked. The Wikipedia describes radiative forcing as:
In climate science, radiative forcing is defined as the difference of radiant energy received by the earth and energy radiated back to space.
There is no mention of it being refuted (or even controversial); not in the Wikipedia article and not in the two references you cited. In fact, since radiative forcing is a rather simple definition it is hard to imagine how it could be refutable.
Furthermore, this reference of yours, despite having pretty pictures, seems to be based on utter nonsense with the main point being:
Internal [actual greenhouse] temperature cannot exceed maximum strength of solar heating input.
This is utter nonsense because it makes a direct comparison between heat and temperature. It would be helpful if the article mentioned what the temperature limit of the strength of solar heating was. But if they did that, the utter nonsense would be apparent because the temperature of a solar furnace can be many thousands of degrees (either Celsius or Fahrenheit) so if there is limiting temperature, it must be so high as to be meaningless in discussions of global warming.
Another way to see it is that if you can trap solar energy in a box that has perfect insulation (energy comes in but it does not go out) then the temperature of the box will rise without limit. Of course there is no such thing as a perfect insulator so there are limits to how high a temperature you can achieve but these limits are not a direct property of the solar radiation. There is a temperature limit, of a sort, to solar radiation but the limit is the temperature of the surface of the Sun, which again has no bearing on discussion of global warming.
What they are exploiting is that in naive implementations of RSA the amount of computer power needed during en/decryption varies with each binary digit in the key. If the digit is zero then no computation is done and if it is one that a tight loop is executed.
There have been other side channel attacks that exploit this weakness in naive implementations. The obvious fix is to slightly change the algorithm so the same computation is done whether the digit is a zero or a one. This reduces the efficiency by a factor of two but it makes these side channel attacks much more difficult.
In fact, the authors contacted GPG before publicly releasing this exploit and the fix is in place:
Q9 How vulnerable is GnuPG now?
We have disclosed our attack to GnuPG developers under CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these countermeasures and resisting our current key-extraction attack, were released concurrently with the first public posting of these results. Some of the effects we found (including RSA key distinguishability) remain present.
Q13: What countermeasures are available?
One obvious countermeasure is to use sound dampening equipment, [...]
Alternatively, one can employ algorithmic techniques to reduce the usefulness of the emanations to attacker. These techniques ensure the rough-scale behavior of the algorithm is independent of the inputs it receives; they usually carry some performance penalty, but are often already used to thwart other side-channel attacks. This is what we helped implement in GnuPG (see Q9).
Also, how many tons of mercury and lead MORE are we as a nation going to mine, refine, transport, and ultimately toss into the local landfill each year using these newer bulbs over the old style ones? Oops, I forgot I wasn't supposed to mention that.
A brochure sent out by my power company said the amount of mercury released due to burning more coal for powering incandescent bulbs is far greater that the amount of mercury used in a CFL that replaces them. Popular Mechanics agrees:
Each [CFL] bulb contains an average of 5 milligrams of mercury,
Pick any two.
Assange posted footage of an Apache helicopter crew murdering innocent civilians. How could he possibly have that footage if he wasn't involved in the murders? It is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed the video recording device in the helicopter.
You can get away with perjury all you want because judges don't care [...]
That is only because you are an individual and not a corporation. We live in a feudal society where individuals are serfs and corporations are the lords and masters. The purpose of the courts now is to protect corporations from individuals. Crimes against serfs are usually not considered significant but if an uppity serf rebels against a corporation then there is hell to pay.
Parent:
I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.
FTFA:
[Tim Jenison] was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. "Looking at their Vermeers," he says, "I had an epiphany" -- the first of several. "The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right," meaning the color values.
The point of using an optical aid was to get the colors right.
[...] but letting a loved one literally die of starvation while you watch is a cruel legal reality.
For a different persecutive, please read this article by Helen Nearing: At The End Of A Good Life:
Came a day he said, "I think I'll go on water. Nothing more." From then on, for about ten days, he only had water. He was bed-ridden and had little strength but spoke with me daily. In the morning of August 24, 1983, two weeks after his 100th birthday, when it seemed he was slipping away, I sat beside him on his bed.
IMO this was the most peaceful and dignified death imaginable. This is the way I would like to go.
The US has more prisoners per capita and also more total prisoners than any other country on earth. This is a huge drag on the economy. Not only is there a massive cost for keeping all of these mostly non-violent people imprisoned, we are also deprived of their contribution to the economy. Locking someone up often destroys not just their life but the lives of their children and other family members.
Passing more laws against non-violent crimes to lock up more non-violent people is going full tilt in the WRONG DIRECTION!
FTFA:
"We apparently caught them between runs, so to speak, so this takes away one tool they have in their illegal trade. The law does help us and is on our side," says [Lt. Michael Combs with State Highway Patrol].
Lt. Combs is delusional if he thinks his "side" can possibly win their war on drugs. It is possible that outlawing secret compartments is a natural extension of the war on drugs but that just shows how idiotic and insane the war on drugs is. Even if they took away all of our remaining civil liberties, the war on drugs would still be unwinnable. How much more must the American people sacrifice for the sake of this unwinnable war?
OTOH, Mr. Gurley is lucky he was not pulled over in the state of New Mexico where at least two different people have been forced to undergo enemas, colonoscopies, and anal probing based on acting nervous after a routine traffic stop:
After Eckert was pulled over, a Deming police officer said that he saw Eckert "was avoiding eye contact with me," his "left hand began to shake," and he stood "erect (with) his legs together,"
We are wasting billions of dollars; we are destroying millions of lives; we are militarizing our civil police departments; we are trashing our civil liberties; and we are destroying at least one neighboring country all in the name of a war on drugs that is impossible to win. It is stupid, it is sick, it is insane. It must stop.
I first heard about the idea of Fractal cosmology in Mandelbrot's book from 1982, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. The idea is quite simple: there is structure at every scale in the Universe, at least up to some cutoff.
It is kind of funny that some people are surprised when structure is discovered at larger and larger scales as we are able to make observations at longer and longer distance scales. It is much more sensible to expect to see more structure as we see more of the Universe instead of the more common (and hubristic) expectation that we have already seen all the structure there is to see.
So let's compromise. I'm a conservative: after realizing that we have (for example) HUNDREDS of freakin' destroyers in our Navy, not to mention that we're building planes that are being put in storage because we don't need them, and on and on ... I'd be
willing to accept substantial and severe cuts in military
spending. Stop being the world's policeman. Don't touch military
pay and benefits, because those folks have earned it. But there's
plenty that could be trimmed, billions and billions of dollars.
OK ... so what are my liberal friends willing to surrender in
return? It's got to be something near and dear to their hearts. :)
So ... according to you a compromise means that you are willing
to get rid of something we both agree is wasteful and unnecessary
only if I am willing to give up something I believe is essential,
non-wasteful, and perhaps even provides good ROI. This is
exactly the kind of "compromise" the Tea Party recently proposed.
They were only willing to do something they agreed needed to be
done if others would make significant concessions in unrelated
areas.
Doing something we both agree should be done is not a compromise; it is agreement. Demanding additional concessions in other areas before you are willing to do what you agree should be done is about as far away from compromise as possible; it is extortion and hostage-taking. It's basically saying "we're going to ruin it for everyone unless we get our way".
You have perfectly encapsulated the reason why there are no longer any compromises in DC.
Nope, it was Burt Reynolds (and Farrah Fawcett) in the ambulance [...]
... with the lead pipe.
It's us, the voters, who let all these things happened.
We routinely keep on voting in career politicians [...]
This is because of the misguided notation that if you don't vote for either career politician from column D or career politician from column R then you are wasting your vote.
Even reverse-shattering an egg is theoretically possible, if the egg's bits were perfectly arranged in the final "shattered" configuration and gravity were reversed (as in, the video were shot upside-down, basically). It's extremely unlikely that you'd get the arrangement perfect, but it's possible.
[...] The entropy argument has real merits, but it almost never applies literally and perfectly in the macroscopic world where it's so easy for humans to manipulate entropy in either direction.
The entropy argument applies more literally and more perfectly than almost any other argument about anything. Your argument based on something that is "extremely unlikely, ... but possible"
is at best utter nonsense. I could say it is extremely unlikely
but possible that I will guess the keys to all the encryption
used throughout the world and also have Scarlett Johansson fall
in love with me and marry me on the same day. But all of that is
much more likely to happen than for you to ever make a self
assembling egg. Your notion of what is "theoretically possible"
is not at all the same as what a physicist (even a theoretical
physicist) means by that term.
As for human manipulation of entropy, we can't, not globally. We certainly can't make self-assembling eggs. Your equating the likelihood of a self assembling egg and a reversed video that shows a ball rolling up-hill shows a breathtaking lack of knowledge about physics and probability.
Duty Calls!
The whole purpose of buying Motorola was not that they wanted to get into the hardware market, they were trying to protect Android from patent lawsuits from third parties and ironically enough from Motorola suing other Android manufacturers.
Citation? Google said they wanted to use Motorola to explore and demonstrate how to tightly integrate the Android OS with hardware. It was to be Android done right, just like their Chromebook was to be ChromeOS done right.
Saying that Motorola has nothing to do with Android is like saying that you shouldn't include the cost of a $20,000 security system to protect a $10,000 investment.
It is still not fair to charge all of Motorola's expenses to Android. A lot of it is the cost of a software company entering a hardware market. It is EXTREMELY unfair to at the same time ignore all the ad revenue generated by Android in order to reach your ridiculous conclusion that Android is running at a loss. The only way you can say they are operating at a loss is to ignore the ad income generated by Android devices and only count the cost of the security system they bought. In addition, as I implied before, it is hard to put a dollar figure on the savings from not having to go to court.
Even if *you* think Android is a flaming failure, most of its big competitors do not. They're running scared. They see Android's stellar success as a fundamental threat to their proprietary OS business models and are attacking Android with whatever means they have available, fair or foul. Now that Android has solidified its lead, it makes absolutely no sense to cripple it by adopting the strategies of those who lost.
The sole purpose of Android was to increase service revenue, but their are millions of Android devices that don't use any Google services especially in countries like China and India. Even in the US, Amazon has a successful Android ecosystem that doesn't use Google.
Citation? You seem to keep making stuff up to suit your whims. What Google said was they wanted a slice of the smartphone market that was not beholden to other players. They explicitly were not looking to lock Android devices to Google services. They wanted a portion of the market that was a level playing field. The Kindle and other non-locked-in Android devices are still a big win for Google. The world would be a different place if those were all Apple or Window devices.
Even worse, Microsoft can get a per device fee from many Android devices but Google can't.
I agree this is both unfortunate and extremely unfair. It is also sad that the once mighty Microsoft has reduced itself to the level of a patent troll. I'm sure Android would have been even more spectacularly successful without the Microsoft tax. Yet despite this handicap inflicted by a bitter competitor and the dysfunctional US patent system, Android is still the top dog. By far.
Yes, despite all the attacks from frightened competitors, Android sales and activations are still through the roof. The ad revenues must be mind boogling. Remember, the plan was never to lock Android devices to Google services. The plan was to create an open market where Google services could compete fairly. It's been an incredible success. The only way you can spin it into a failure is with obvious logical fallacies such as charging all of Motorola's hardware expenses to Android while ignoring all the mobile ad revenue. Any project can be made to look like a failure if you only count expenses and ignore the major profit stream. Say ... are you from Hollywood?
Android is not Motorola. If Motorola is losing money it doesn't follow that Android is. The cost for deploying Android was relatively small. The advertising revenue has got to be enormous.
By your logic Microsoft should have stopped making their mobile OS after they burned Nokia to the ground or after the early failures of their surface tablet. Not everything Google touches turns into gold (like Android did). Sometimes it is difficult for software companies to get into the hardware business. It is not unusual to start out with years of losses. Also, you are probably ignoring what Google gained when they acquired the Motorola patents. Their patent portfolio was thin and they and their hardware partners were getting hammered by software lawsuits. The Motorola portfolio gives them ammunition to shoot back and it also opens the door to cross license agreements.
Trying to identify Android with Motorola seems like a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the situation in order to make Android look like a failure instead of the rip-roaring success it actually is.
Google's plan for Android was to make sure they would not get shut out of the smart phone ads business. The plan far exceeded expectations all around.
Yes by paying Apple $1 billion a year for being the default search engine on iPhones....
First, the dominance of the Android OS in the marketplace has very little to do with paying Apple to use the Google search engine. That was a totally separate deal and I'm sure Google made plenty of money on that deal. It's not like they were paying Apple to take a dive and back out of the smartphone market. Second, the article you linked to was from 2011, back when Android was just starting its meteoric rise to dominance. It would be interesting to see what the new numbers are now that Android is the big kid on the block. As I said before, the whole point of Android was so they wouldn't be beholden to the likes of Apple.
You seem to be grabbing at straws and non-sequiturs in an attempt to spin Android's incredible success as a massive failure. Have you considered a career as a political consultant?
The title of the first FA is:
Google earnings beat estimates, but Motorola losses keep growing
The second FA is strictly about Facebook ads. It says:
One caveat that Slagen offered, however, is that the data changes with industry, and that gaming and e-commerce industries, for instance, did not see the same kind of massive iPhone/Android gulf in ROI.
The summary stinks of typical anti-Google FUD.
Google beat earnings estimates. Google's Android OS drastically beat expectations on how soon it would totally dominate the smartphone market. So some asshat suggests that these results mean Google is doing poorly and it is only a matter of time before Google joins Apple and Microsoft (and others) by turning to the dark side.
Having a dominate market share in the smart phone sector is HUGE. Google's plan for Android was to make sure they would not get shut out of the smart phone ads business. The plan far exceeded expectations all around.
It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did ...
Manning never did an uncontrolled dump. He released documents to news organizations so those organization could vet them and release only what was proper to be released. That was the responsible thing to do under the circumstances. It is the same thing Snowden did. It's true that someone in one of the organizations Manning released to screwed up and published a private key that let everyone see all the documents but that was clearly not Manning's fault.
Please stop spreading the malicious lie that Bradley did an uncontrolled dump.
I learned the density wave model of spiral galaxies in graduate school in the late 1980s so I was surprised to see you say:
The 60's are calling, and they want their theory back.
The popularization Alchemy of the Heavens (1995) and the textbook Cosmology, the Science of the Universe (2nd Edition 2000) both teach the density wave model. While it is true that the density wave model was first proposed in the 1960s, nothing has yet superseded it. IMO the shock-wave model is just a variant of the density wave model. The Harvard paper cited above assumes the density wave model and has worked out in more detail how it works.
The density wave model solves the "winding problem", which the Wikipedia explains as:
Since the angular speed of rotation of the galactic disk varies with distance from the centre of the galaxy (via a standard solar system type of gravitational model), a radial arm (like a spoke) would quickly become curved as the galaxy rotates. The arm would, after a few galactic rotations, become increasingly curved and wind around the galaxy ever tighter.
If there is an alternative to the density wave and shock-wave models that solves the winding problem, I would like to hear about it. The mass extinction paper itself supports these models since it says the solar system passes in and out of the spiral arms.
If you are merely criticizing the shock-wave model and implying the density wave model is the correct explanation (or vice versa), that was not clear from you post. ISTM the distinctions between the density wave model and the shock-wave model are minor compared to their overall similarity. They both say the arms are waves traveling through the star field at a speed that differs from the speed of the stars themselves. The simulations in the Harvard paper indicate the actual solution is a combination of the shock-wave model and the density wave model which is hardly surprising:
The new results fall somewhere in between the two theories and suggest that the arms arise in the first place as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds - star forming regions or nurseries common in galaxies. Introduced into the simulation, the clouds act as "perturbers" and are enough to not only initiate the formation of spiral arms but to sustain them indefinitely.
Hmmm ... I strongly believe that things continue to exist when I no
longer observe them.
According to almost all interpretations of quantum mechanics that belief of yours is demonstrably wrong. A classic example is the double slit experiment. A series of single particle going through a double slit and then hitting a screen will arrive at the screen in a diffraction pattern. It is like each particle leaves the source as a single entity then acts like a wave as it passes through the two slits then reverts to acting like a particle again when it hits the screen. If you assume those particles "continue to exist" in corporeal form then it is impossible for them to form the diffraction pattern that is found in experimental results.
According to Feynman's path integral approach each of these particles simultaneously takes every possible classical path to get from the source to the screen.
Einstein said:
Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
If you doubt Einstein would say something like this, I suggest you read his essay Physics and Reality from The Journal of the Franklin Institute. Vol 221, No. 3, March, 1936. which is also available in his wonderful little book Ideas and Opinions.
It depends on who is saying it. For Iraq, it was the Bush administration and Fox news claiming the existence of WMDs (but never seen).
Have you already forgotten about Judith Miller and the New York Times? The Bush administration used her NYT articles (not Fox News reports) as proof that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. She wrote and the NYT published many accounts of Iraqi WMDs, including:
Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.
Many of the stories of Iraq WMDs were fabricated by Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles intent on regime change. These fabrications were laundered by the NYT and then used by the Bush administration as an excuse for the war they had been plotting since before the 9/11 attacks.
As AmiMoJo already said, we don't yet know who used the chemical weapons Syria: an out-of-character, insanely stupid and bumbling Assad or clever rebels intent on regime change. Launching punitive attacks without yet knowing if we are being played for fools again would be asinine.
I think you *may* have misinterpreted what was said. Earlier in the article it was noted that Cooper is the shadow home secretary which means she is a member of the political party that is not currently in power. The article also reports that she said the police must explain why terrorism powers were used.
It seems to me that is a skewer aimed at the party in power. If the police respond to her request then they can either fall on their swords and take the blame for this idiotic incident or pass the buck up the chain of command and let the blame fall on the political party currently in power.
In that context, her comment:
The public support for these powers must not be endangered by a perception of misuse
can be seen as part of that skewer in the understated way Britons are famous for. It is forcing the hand of those in power to divulge who was responsible for this screw-up. The ruling party desperately wants everyone to stay mum. The most likely excuse they will use is that to divulge any part of the secret decision making process would weaken their power to fight terrorism. Cooper's comment about public perception undercuts this excuse by making the point that staying mum would endanger their ability to wield these powers.
I think it was a clever ploy to make sure party in power takes the blame for this without opening herself up to charges that she is weak on terrorism.
The laws concerning whistleblowing don't exist in the same text when one is bound by security clearances and the rule of law when those clearances are breached are a whole different can of worms.
So the rule of law only applies to underlings and not to the people on top? Do you really honestly think that is how the rule of law is supposed to work?
In his book With Liberty and Justice for Some Glenn Greenwald explains:
the United States has become a country that does not apply the rule of law to its elite class, which is another way of saying the United States does not apply the rule of law.
If everyone followed your logic, and there were no brave, patriotic souls like Snowden and Manning willing to report massive law breaking by the elite class then the rule of law and government of the people, by the people, for the people, would perish from the earth.