I would assume this is the Bullet Cluster (1E 0657-56) combined X-ray and weak lensing
results that Maxim
reported at the
Six Years of Science with Chandra Symposium
last November. The interesting bit is that in this merging galaxy
cluster the hot gas (~ 30%) has collided and been brought to a stop while the dark matter
(~ 70%) haloes which are collisionless have passed through each other and are offset
from the gas. By plotting the weak lensing image (which shows the total mass) over
the X-ray image (which shows the baryons/gas) you can therefore see the existance of
dark matter, since the mass is in a totally different place from the gas you can see
in the X-ray. This isn't a fundamentally new result but it is a very nice visual
demonstration of the existance of dark matter. Rotation curves of galaxies and the
temperatures of galaxy clusters had proved it already but with this you don't need to
do any maths you can just see it. Page 25 of this
6.5 MB pdf is the one you want for the image.
What does an author getting sued for ripping off somebody have to do with my online rights?
Given the feature creep of "intellectual property" laws recently I think it is very relevant. An idea in a book is entirely analogous to a algorithm in a peice of code. If copyright can be extended to ideas (from expressions of ideas as it is intended) then that would have wide implications. That being said it is difficult to see how this action could be upheld without huge effects on the publishing industry and it is possible that it is all a publicity stunt to help the sales of both
books (note it is the same publisher for both) and possibly the upcoming film. The situation bears watching though.
It would take more energy than your reactors were producing to
run the vast desalinisation plants needed to get the salts out of the sea
water. And it would still be needle in a haystack time getting the
uranium atoms out of the huge pile of salt. And I bet the "3.3 parts
per billion" is by mass so in terms of particles, which is what
matters when you are trying to separate it, it is over a magnitude
lower than that already tiny number. If we could magically extract
uranium from sea water in violation of the second law of thermodynamics we wouldn't need
nuclear reactors or any other energy source in the first place.
The facts are that uranium
mine production peaked in the early eighties and while demand from reactors
continues to grow and prices are rising steeply most uranium used in
reactors comes from stockpiles built up during the cold war, which are now
being steadily depleted.
Wealth is a rather imprecise term. True the total amount of human made stuff is increasing as total
energy production is still increasing. However
per capita energy production peaked in 1979,
since then the world population has been growing
faster than world energy production, and so the
amount of energy available per person is falling.
This is because the rate of growth of energy production has slowed rather than population growth increasing. Third world countries and poor
people in first world countries (i.e. most of the
world's population) have been getting poorer for
at least the last twenty years. Of course things
will really start to bite when total world energy
production peaks within the next decade.
As I stated in my last comment "the benefits of free market exhanges" are due to the fact the
is unequal. In an equal exchange both sides would
lose. One side can gain only if the other side loses even more. The comparison with biology is useful in explaining this. The "free market" is quite analogous to predation. In order to have complex organisms like mammals, they need to be
able to feed off less complex organisms (an extremely unequal exchange). In a similar way a
city cannot exist in isolation. It must constantly
import energy and materials to sustain itself (it must eat). It is a disapative structure and like a living organism it must always consume more energy than it outputs in useful work (so any exchange it makes with its enviroment must be unequal).
Industrial capitalism is predicated on unequal exchange between a core of rich countries and
a periphary of third world countries. On a national scale a similar unequal exchange is needed between workers and the corporations that
employ them. The third world is not a load of
backward countries that haven't "caught up" yet
it is a necessary part of the world economic system. Just as lions can't survive without herds
of wildebeest to prey on, the first world cannot survive without a larger third world to exploit
for resources and cheap labour. Of course no one
wants to be the wildebeest in the economic system, but most people have to be since a large herd of
wildebeest can support only a small number of lions. Hence the need for all the economic mumbo-jumbo you are spouting to convince people that they are not wildebeest.
If the brain mass statistic isn't normalized by
height or some other overall measure of body size then it is probably totally irrelevant. I don't doubt that most rugby union (or NFL) players have a larger brain mass than I do, in proportion to their greater body mass, but I see little evidense that this translates into greater intelligence. Women have smaller bodies and hence smaller brains but as I know of no evidense that larger men are more intelligent I don't see any reason to think
that women having smaller brains, on average, would make them less intelligent.
Yes and no. That is true on a small scale in the same way that the arguement about solar panels is.
And in fact does happen. It has been estimated that the
last 10 percent of the oil that comes out of an oil well comes out at an energy loss. Money certainly does not equal energy, especially once
you factor in tax write offs etc. But overall the energy that runs society has to come from somewhere. It takes 10 Calories of fossil fuels with modern agriculture to produce one Calorie of food. If oil suddenly became energy negative most
of the population of the planet would starve in
a couple of years.
the laws of thermodynamics say otherwise. The first law is the conservation of energy and hence mass in most cases (i.e you can't win). If two people exchange objects nothing is magically created, there is no possiblity of a win-win situation. Existing objects have just been redistributed. The second law is the entropy law and states that on average an process will result in disorder increasing (i.e. you can't break even). Even in a perfectly equal exchange both sides will lose the time and energy necessary to
make the exchange and so both sides breaking even
is not possible.
However in the real world exchange only takes place where someone is going to profit and so
the exchange must always be unequal with one side
losing so that other can gain. The mechanism through which this is accomplished is pricing. This is possible because the real world does not
consist of a number of equal players exchanging
goods as modeled by economists. Instead you have
most people who have only one thing to sell, their
labour. By forcing the price of labour to be well
below the prices of the goods that can be produced
using it, systematic unequal (and therefore profitable for one party) exchange can be maintained.
In a similar way exchange between the first and
third world is based on pricing raw materials, fossil fuels etc. at well below the price of goods
that can be produced from them. In both cases this
results in net flow of wealth from the poor to the
rich which you might be forgiven for mistaking for
the creation of wealth, if you are a well off person in a rich country, and you don't look too
hard. You might want to check out The Power of the Machine by Alf Hornborg if you
are interested in learning more.
... because that is what our societies run on. If
it wasn't energy positive we would be dead. That being said the energy return ratio for oil is
falling as the most easily accessable oil is tapped and we have to turn to less accessable sources. The problem with evaluating any possible replacement is that you have to be very careful to take into account all of the cheap oil energy that ends up being used to make it work. Since any alternative energy source is by definition not being use to run our societies at
the present time, just because you can build a few
examples of a technology says nothing about whether it is feasible when scaled up. One or even
a million energy negative solar panels can be built on the back of the vast energy glut from
cheap oil we have at the moment without anyone
noticing but would be worse that useless once the
oil is gone.
Anything that can be forced on school children now
can be forced on the whole population once the children grow up and form a significant fraction of the adult population, since they will be habituated to it and put up little resistance. Given this, the following comment near the end
of the New York Times article is very disturbing:
"... they do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags. More immediately, they said, they could see using the technology to track whether students attend individual classes."
Natural uranium that comes out of the ground is
about 99 percent U-238 and about 1 percent U-235.
After it is enriched for reactor fuel it contains
about 2-3 percent U-235. The U-235 in the reactor
is induced to fission at a vastly increased rate.
It is nothing like natural decay which has a halflife of 700 million years. These reactions
produce vast amounts of neutrons that are captured
by the 98-97 percent U-238 to make plutonium etc. This
is unavoidable and being very careful doesn't help.
The neutrons are also captured by
other elements in the reactor appart from the
fuel and more material is contaminated during
manufacture and reprocessing of the fuel.
The fission products of U-235 are also very
radioactive.
Ultimately the whole reactor core becomes
waste when the reactors life ends. The highest
level waste is the spent fuel but there are
very large volumes of intermediate level waste
from other contaminated materials before you
even think about decomissioning the reactor.
As I said before you are taking mildly radioactive
material out of the ground and putting larger amounts of vastly more radioactive material back
when you are finished.
Finally the large amounts of the U-238 (plus plutonium contamination) is never going to end up back in the ground. It is used in depleted
uranium (DU), in weapons and after use is aerosolized as uranium oxide particles that
contaminate vast areas of the Balkans and the
middle east.
There are no veins of uranium under your house!
Radon comes from the traces of uranium in granite
rock but this is nothing near the concentation
of uranium ore and is not mined for uranium as
the amounts in it are tiny. Most Uranium mined
today comes from remote parts Canada and Australia
although most Uranium used today comes from storage since usage in reactors is more than double the rate it is being mined.
Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution.
The radioactivity of natural uranium is about 179,000,000 Becquerels per kilogram (179 MBq/kg)
(See Radioactivity in Minerals). Low, intermediate and high level nuclear waste is radioactive on the
order of 1 MBq/kg, 10 GBq/kg and 100 TBq/kg respectively (See What is nuclear waste?). Therefore intermediate and high level nuclear waste is about 100 and 1 million times more radioactive than natural uranium respectively. Also the amount
waste produced by operating a reactor is vastly
greater than the amount of fuel used. So a more
accurate description would be "taking mildly radioactive material out of the ground and returning a far greater amount of much more radioactive material to the ground" which
sounds like the definition of pollution to me.
Depending on the device, getting it to report a
different ID may be as easy as flashing some new
firmware. Anyway you can bypass whatever the sysadmin configures for the operating system on
the computer just by booting another OS like linux
off a CD. So for "security" you need to ensure that no untrusted OS can use the USB bus. Pressumably this new USB standard will embed the ID deeper into the hardware and cryptographically sign it by the hardware manufacturer so it is very difficult to fake. The device will just report
its indentification information to the OS not
"whether it is trusted". The OS will decide whether to trust it based on rules configured by
the sysadmin.
Of course there are always ways around any system as you point out, but you can
put DRM in the printer as well, so it will not
print out certain tagged documents etc. If you
follow this to its logical conclusion it will
make computers virtually useless to everybody
except large corporations/institutions, but since
these are the only people who have any say in these matters that can't be objection to it happening. And of course there is a huge chunk
of powerful people who I am sure see general
purpose computing in the hands of ordinary people
as the worst mistake of the 20th century.
The implementation I envision is a "trusted user" approach
The problem that MS is pretending to solve is not
user based but device based. A company will want
all users to be able to send information to a USB
printer connected to the computer but no users to
be able to send information to a random USB harddrive that is connected to the computer. Users
don't come into it. This is about indentifing and
locking out untrusted devices, at least from writes.
Of course this will really not solve the problem since
there are plenty of other ports on the computer
that could be used by a "spy". Serial ports are
slow but devices exist for them and with a bit of
hardware and software hacking USB devices could
also be made to work over serial by someone with
enough motivation. Shit, if you want speed convert
a USB harddrive to work off a monitor connection.
I'm sure you could get a reasonable transfer rate and write only is all you want.
If you aren't into soldering stuff just bring a
screw driver and another IDE harddrive into work,
slip in when no one is around and copy anything
you want onto it, and take it out again. In fact
portable storage devices aren't even the biggest
psuedo-problem you can think of. What about WiFi
cards? Slip a WiFi card into you work computer and
you can be copying data to the laptop in the boot
of your car in the car park all day, everyday. This sort of thing has no end. Once you DRM one
bus or connector you have to do the every single
bit of hardware to close every loop hole, which
is probably the whole point.
The Interface ID does have a purpose, it can't just be anything. It is the equivalent of the last byte in the present IPv4 address (e.g. *.001, *.047 etc.) and the ISP will need to know it in order to route packets to the correct computer on the subnet. Either
the ISP has to assign it at connection time (i.e. DHCP) or the connecting computer has to tell the
ISP what is at connection time (i.e. the inverse
of DHCP). The ISP has control and can be choose
what method to use and whether
to
be nice or not.
Unless, NIC manufacturers decide to "hard code" the selection of the Interface ID into the cards
firmware and force it to always be the MAC address
or EUI-64. In this case even the ISP doesn't get
a choice. This senario is probably the most likely
since the card manufacturers and ISPs probably don't care how the Interface IDs are choosen (provided there is a fixed system to follow) but
there will be a lot external pressure (and perhaps even legislation) from governments, RIAA, MPAA etc. to go this route.
Clearly that would be a solution, but only if ISPs
etc. allow it. The IPv6 protocol has the potential
to allow everyone's internet usage to be tracked
much more easily than IPv4. Obviously ISPs, governments etc. could be nice and allow the
"Interface IDs" to be randomly selected at every
connection, but how likely is that in the present
climate.
There is one small thing that the the article
leaves out; where the 64-bit "Interface ID" that
is the second half of the address will come from.
It isn't going to be some essentially random number assigned to that computer as it is for IPv4 (e.g *.001, *.027, *.145). The first 64 bits of the IPv6 address is routing information to get you to the right subnet, like the first 24 bits in IPv4 (e.g. 145.67.56.*). But unlike IPv4, that has only 8 bits left to identify the particular machine on the subnet, IPv6 has 64 bits available.
This vastly larger space doesn't just allow for
larger subnets, it is so big that it allows the values to unique, not just on the subnet but globally. So how are these unique values to be
chosen? From the unique IDs embedded in the NIC
hardware of course (i.e. your ethernet cards
MAC address or the EUI-64 standard that will
eventually replace it). So the two halves of the IPv6 address will contain routing information (where you are) and a unique ID (irespective of
where you are).
As wireless becomes more unbiquitous in the
future, using IPv4 addresses to track people will get more difficult. IPv6 provides the solution. As someone connects with a wireless device at different locations only the first 64 bits of
routing information will change, the second 64 bits, the unique ID will stay the same. Who you
are (or at least what NIC you are using) and where
you are is plastered one every IPv6 packet you
send.
But we do use natural gas
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The whole coal will last 100/200/250 years, or whatever, is total bullshit. Such numbers are based on taking some number for coal reserves and dividing it by present consumption. But present consumption is small because we get most of our energy from oil. Even in electricity generation coal generally makes up less than 50 percent of production (and it is used for very little else at present). If the switch from coal to oil and gas had not been made at the beginning of the the 20th century, all the coal on earth would have already been used up. Once oil and gas production starts to fall, coal consumption will rise dramatically and these numbers like 100 years will get a lot smaller.
Once you have the Chicken Pox virus, the Varicella Zoster virus, you have it for life. Your immune system will eventually beat it back and the Chicken Pox symptoms will disappear, but the virus will hide
out in the nerve roots around your spine for the rest of your life. If your immune system is weakened
by age, chemotherapy etc. the virus can break out again, burning is way up the nerves, usually on one side of your body, until it reaches the skin and causes rash and blistering. This is known as
Shingles and is very painful. Not something you are usually told when you get Chicken Pox as a kid.
Those who are dangerous to the highway system lose their ability to drive on the highway system.
This is not the same thing at all. An equivalent senario would be people being banned from travelling in (not just driving) any vehicle on a highway if they were caught drunk driving. Banning someone from being a passenger on any aircraft is
equivalent to banning someone from ever stepping into a car, bus or truck.
Of course as you note it is also different in that
a court is involved at some point (i.e. there is some sort of due process) in driving bans but there are other differences as well. The people
they are intending to ban from flying haven't done
anything. It isn't like they have a previous conviction for hijacking an airliner so they are
not allowed to fly on one again. It is that the
government does like them in some way, because they are suspected of being a "terrorist",
or for some other reason. Not only does stopping
people from flying based purely on suspicion very bad, but it puts a huge amount of extra power into the hands of the
government to persecute whatever people they don't like, as you note.
I have no problem with those who intentionally cause a security scare being barred from ever flying again, but they should at least have been convicted of an air-security related crime first.
This is a red herring though. Sure they might use
this system to pick on such people but its main
purpose will be to select people fitting a certain
"high risk" profile. Who would "intentionally cause a security scare" anyway? Sure a terrorist
group might phone in a fake bomb threat to cause
disruption (its cheaper than a real bomb) but then
you are not going to catch them are you. If this is going to be used to ban people from flying who
are carry the wrong book or aren't grovellingly
deferential enough to the security screeners then
that is another big problem.
When you say you're filling up your car with Petrol, it's a bit like saying you're taking the oil right out of the ground and immediately throwing it into your car.
Actually petrol is short for 'petroleum spirit' and
is one product of the fractional distillation of
petroleum. Other petroleum based products bearing
its name include 'petroleum jelly' and 'petroleum ether'.
The majority of people don't modify the software and there is nothing in the license about returning modifications to the copyright holder anyway. You have to give anyway the code of any modifications
that you distribute to the people you distribute them to but that will not neccessarily make its way
back to the copyright holder. Anyway there is nothing in the GPL about it being a contract and
that is why it is so easy to enforce. A contract
also requires agreement by both parties but since
the GPL is a license it is irelevant whether the
licensee agrees or not since without the license
she has no rights to the software.
IANAL but I am not sure that a license has any binding nature on the copyright holder. The "You may not impose any further restrictions..." bit is clearly aimed at the licensee when they pass the software onto other people not the copyright holder.
I can invite my neighbour to use my pool anytime she likes under certain conditions and that is a license. But the person doesn't have to break any of those conditions for me to be able to revoke the license whenever I like. If we had a contract that would be different but for a contract you need "consideration", the other party has to give me something in return, and in the case of the GPL that isn't true.
This issue has been brought up before
and discussed on the other site, but I have never seen a really convincing arguement for why it is wrong. If it is
correct then it has troubling implications, especially as copyrights can be transfered between
people, not always volentarily.
Imagine as an extreme example Linus being sued into bankrupcy by
a large corporation and the corporation getting all his assets, which would include not just his house and car, but all the copyrights to software
that he has written. If the GPL can be revoked then that corporation could bring Linux development and distribution to a crashing halt until such time as all Linus's code could be removed and reimplemented.
Slashdot Mirror
I would assume this is the Bullet Cluster (1E 0657-56) combined X-ray and weak lensing results that Maxim reported at the Six Years of Science with Chandra Symposium last November. The interesting bit is that in this merging galaxy cluster the hot gas (~ 30%) has collided and been brought to a stop while the dark matter (~ 70%) haloes which are collisionless have passed through each other and are offset from the gas. By plotting the weak lensing image (which shows the total mass) over the X-ray image (which shows the baryons/gas) you can therefore see the existance of dark matter, since the mass is in a totally different place from the gas you can see in the X-ray. This isn't a fundamentally new result but it is a very nice visual demonstration of the existance of dark matter. Rotation curves of galaxies and the temperatures of galaxy clusters had proved it already but with this you don't need to do any maths you can just see it. Page 25 of this 6.5 MB pdf is the one you want for the image.
What does an author getting sued for ripping off somebody have to do with my online rights?
Given the feature creep of "intellectual property" laws recently I think it is very relevant. An idea in a book is entirely analogous to a algorithm in a peice of code. If copyright can be extended to ideas (from expressions of ideas as it is intended) then that would have wide implications. That being said it is difficult to see how this action could be upheld without huge effects on the publishing industry and it is possible that it is all a publicity stunt to help the sales of both books (note it is the same publisher for both) and possibly the upcoming film. The situation bears watching though.
It would take more energy than your reactors were producing to run the vast desalinisation plants needed to get the salts out of the sea water. And it would still be needle in a haystack time getting the uranium atoms out of the huge pile of salt. And I bet the "3.3 parts per billion" is by mass so in terms of particles, which is what matters when you are trying to separate it, it is over a magnitude lower than that already tiny number. If we could magically extract uranium from sea water in violation of the second law of thermodynamics we wouldn't need nuclear reactors or any other energy source in the first place.
The facts are that uranium mine production peaked in the early eighties and while demand from reactors continues to grow and prices are rising steeply most uranium used in reactors comes from stockpiles built up during the cold war, which are now being steadily depleted.
The New York supreme court ruled in Banco Nacionale de Mexico v. Narco News et al. (Dec. 5, 2001) that "this court finds that Narco News is a media defendant and is entitled to heightened protection under the First Amendment (New York Times Co. v Sullivan, supra, 376 US, at 270-280)". See: NY Supreme Court Rules Online Coverage Protected Speech.
Wealth is a rather imprecise term. True the total amount of human made stuff is increasing as total energy production is still increasing. However per capita energy production peaked in 1979, since then the world population has been growing faster than world energy production, and so the amount of energy available per person is falling. This is because the rate of growth of energy production has slowed rather than population growth increasing. Third world countries and poor people in first world countries (i.e. most of the world's population) have been getting poorer for at least the last twenty years. Of course things will really start to bite when total world energy production peaks within the next decade.
As I stated in my last comment "the benefits of free market exhanges" are due to the fact the is unequal. In an equal exchange both sides would lose. One side can gain only if the other side loses even more. The comparison with biology is useful in explaining this. The "free market" is quite analogous to predation. In order to have complex organisms like mammals, they need to be able to feed off less complex organisms (an extremely unequal exchange). In a similar way a city cannot exist in isolation. It must constantly import energy and materials to sustain itself (it must eat). It is a disapative structure and like a living organism it must always consume more energy than it outputs in useful work (so any exchange it makes with its enviroment must be unequal).
Industrial capitalism is predicated on unequal exchange between a core of rich countries and a periphary of third world countries. On a national scale a similar unequal exchange is needed between workers and the corporations that employ them. The third world is not a load of backward countries that haven't "caught up" yet it is a necessary part of the world economic system. Just as lions can't survive without herds of wildebeest to prey on, the first world cannot survive without a larger third world to exploit for resources and cheap labour. Of course no one wants to be the wildebeest in the economic system, but most people have to be since a large herd of wildebeest can support only a small number of lions. Hence the need for all the economic mumbo-jumbo you are spouting to convince people that they are not wildebeest.
If the brain mass statistic isn't normalized by height or some other overall measure of body size then it is probably totally irrelevant. I don't doubt that most rugby union (or NFL) players have a larger brain mass than I do, in proportion to their greater body mass, but I see little evidense that this translates into greater intelligence. Women have smaller bodies and hence smaller brains but as I know of no evidense that larger men are more intelligent I don't see any reason to think that women having smaller brains, on average, would make them less intelligent.
Yes and no. That is true on a small scale in the same way that the arguement about solar panels is. And in fact does happen. It has been estimated that the last 10 percent of the oil that comes out of an oil well comes out at an energy loss. Money certainly does not equal energy, especially once you factor in tax write offs etc. But overall the energy that runs society has to come from somewhere. It takes 10 Calories of fossil fuels with modern agriculture to produce one Calorie of food. If oil suddenly became energy negative most of the population of the planet would starve in a couple of years.
the laws of thermodynamics say otherwise. The first law is the conservation of energy and hence mass in most cases (i.e you can't win). If two people exchange objects nothing is magically created, there is no possiblity of a win-win situation. Existing objects have just been redistributed. The second law is the entropy law and states that on average an process will result in disorder increasing (i.e. you can't break even). Even in a perfectly equal exchange both sides will lose the time and energy necessary to make the exchange and so both sides breaking even is not possible.
However in the real world exchange only takes place where someone is going to profit and so the exchange must always be unequal with one side losing so that other can gain. The mechanism through which this is accomplished is pricing. This is possible because the real world does not consist of a number of equal players exchanging goods as modeled by economists. Instead you have most people who have only one thing to sell, their labour. By forcing the price of labour to be well below the prices of the goods that can be produced using it, systematic unequal (and therefore profitable for one party) exchange can be maintained.
In a similar way exchange between the first and third world is based on pricing raw materials, fossil fuels etc. at well below the price of goods that can be produced from them. In both cases this results in net flow of wealth from the poor to the rich which you might be forgiven for mistaking for the creation of wealth, if you are a well off person in a rich country, and you don't look too hard. You might want to check out The Power of the Machine by Alf Hornborg if you are interested in learning more.
Anything that can be forced on school children now can be forced on the whole population once the children grow up and form a significant fraction of the adult population, since they will be habituated to it and put up little resistance. Given this, the following comment near the end of the New York Times article is very disturbing:
"... they do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags. More immediately, they said, they could see using the technology to track whether students attend individual classes."
Natural uranium that comes out of the ground is about 99 percent U-238 and about 1 percent U-235. After it is enriched for reactor fuel it contains about 2-3 percent U-235. The U-235 in the reactor is induced to fission at a vastly increased rate. It is nothing like natural decay which has a halflife of 700 million years. These reactions produce vast amounts of neutrons that are captured by the 98-97 percent U-238 to make plutonium etc. This is unavoidable and being very careful doesn't help.
The neutrons are also captured by other elements in the reactor appart from the fuel and more material is contaminated during manufacture and reprocessing of the fuel. The fission products of U-235 are also very radioactive. Ultimately the whole reactor core becomes waste when the reactors life ends. The highest level waste is the spent fuel but there are very large volumes of intermediate level waste from other contaminated materials before you even think about decomissioning the reactor. As I said before you are taking mildly radioactive material out of the ground and putting larger amounts of vastly more radioactive material back when you are finished.
Finally the large amounts of the U-238 (plus plutonium contamination) is never going to end up back in the ground. It is used in depleted uranium (DU), in weapons and after use is aerosolized as uranium oxide particles that contaminate vast areas of the Balkans and the middle east.
There are no veins of uranium under your house! Radon comes from the traces of uranium in granite rock but this is nothing near the concentation of uranium ore and is not mined for uranium as the amounts in it are tiny. Most Uranium mined today comes from remote parts Canada and Australia although most Uranium used today comes from storage since usage in reactors is more than double the rate it is being mined.
Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution.
The radioactivity of natural uranium is about 179,000,000 Becquerels per kilogram (179 MBq/kg) (See Radioactivity in Minerals). Low, intermediate and high level nuclear waste is radioactive on the order of 1 MBq/kg, 10 GBq/kg and 100 TBq/kg respectively (See What is nuclear waste?). Therefore intermediate and high level nuclear waste is about 100 and 1 million times more radioactive than natural uranium respectively. Also the amount waste produced by operating a reactor is vastly greater than the amount of fuel used. So a more accurate description would be "taking mildly radioactive material out of the ground and returning a far greater amount of much more radioactive material to the ground" which sounds like the definition of pollution to me.
Depending on the device, getting it to report a different ID may be as easy as flashing some new firmware. Anyway you can bypass whatever the sysadmin configures for the operating system on the computer just by booting another OS like linux off a CD. So for "security" you need to ensure that no untrusted OS can use the USB bus. Pressumably this new USB standard will embed the ID deeper into the hardware and cryptographically sign it by the hardware manufacturer so it is very difficult to fake. The device will just report its indentification information to the OS not "whether it is trusted". The OS will decide whether to trust it based on rules configured by the sysadmin.
Of course there are always ways around any system as you point out, but you can put DRM in the printer as well, so it will not print out certain tagged documents etc. If you follow this to its logical conclusion it will make computers virtually useless to everybody except large corporations/institutions, but since these are the only people who have any say in these matters that can't be objection to it happening. And of course there is a huge chunk of powerful people who I am sure see general purpose computing in the hands of ordinary people as the worst mistake of the 20th century.
The implementation I envision is a "trusted user" approach
The problem that MS is pretending to solve is not user based but device based. A company will want all users to be able to send information to a USB printer connected to the computer but no users to be able to send information to a random USB harddrive that is connected to the computer. Users don't come into it. This is about indentifing and locking out untrusted devices, at least from writes.
Of course this will really not solve the problem since there are plenty of other ports on the computer that could be used by a "spy". Serial ports are slow but devices exist for them and with a bit of hardware and software hacking USB devices could also be made to work over serial by someone with enough motivation. Shit, if you want speed convert a USB harddrive to work off a monitor connection. I'm sure you could get a reasonable transfer rate and write only is all you want.
If you aren't into soldering stuff just bring a screw driver and another IDE harddrive into work, slip in when no one is around and copy anything you want onto it, and take it out again. In fact portable storage devices aren't even the biggest psuedo-problem you can think of. What about WiFi cards? Slip a WiFi card into you work computer and you can be copying data to the laptop in the boot of your car in the car park all day, everyday. This sort of thing has no end. Once you DRM one bus or connector you have to do the every single bit of hardware to close every loop hole, which is probably the whole point.
The Interface ID does have a purpose, it can't just be anything. It is the equivalent of the last byte in the present IPv4 address (e.g. *.001, *.047 etc.) and the ISP will need to know it in order to route packets to the correct computer on the subnet. Either the ISP has to assign it at connection time (i.e. DHCP) or the connecting computer has to tell the ISP what is at connection time (i.e. the inverse of DHCP). The ISP has control and can be choose what method to use and whether to be nice or not.
Unless, NIC manufacturers decide to "hard code" the selection of the Interface ID into the cards firmware and force it to always be the MAC address or EUI-64. In this case even the ISP doesn't get a choice. This senario is probably the most likely since the card manufacturers and ISPs probably don't care how the Interface IDs are choosen (provided there is a fixed system to follow) but there will be a lot external pressure (and perhaps even legislation) from governments, RIAA, MPAA etc. to go this route.
Clearly that would be a solution, but only if ISPs etc. allow it. The IPv6 protocol has the potential to allow everyone's internet usage to be tracked much more easily than IPv4. Obviously ISPs, governments etc. could be nice and allow the "Interface IDs" to be randomly selected at every connection, but how likely is that in the present climate.
There is one small thing that the the article leaves out; where the 64-bit "Interface ID" that is the second half of the address will come from. It isn't going to be some essentially random number assigned to that computer as it is for IPv4 (e.g *.001, *.027, *.145). The first 64 bits of the IPv6 address is routing information to get you to the right subnet, like the first 24 bits in IPv4 (e.g. 145.67.56.*). But unlike IPv4, that has only 8 bits left to identify the particular machine on the subnet, IPv6 has 64 bits available.
This vastly larger space doesn't just allow for larger subnets, it is so big that it allows the values to unique, not just on the subnet but globally. So how are these unique values to be chosen? From the unique IDs embedded in the NIC hardware of course (i.e. your ethernet cards MAC address or the EUI-64 standard that will eventually replace it). So the two halves of the IPv6 address will contain routing information (where you are) and a unique ID (irespective of where you are).
As wireless becomes more unbiquitous in the future, using IPv4 addresses to track people will get more difficult. IPv6 provides the solution. As someone connects with a wireless device at different locations only the first 64 bits of routing information will change, the second 64 bits, the unique ID will stay the same. Who you are (or at least what NIC you are using) and where you are is plastered one every IPv6 packet you send.
The whole coal will last 100/200/250 years, or whatever, is total bullshit. Such numbers are based on taking some number for coal reserves and dividing it by present consumption. But present consumption is small because we get most of our energy from oil. Even in electricity generation coal generally makes up less than 50 percent of production (and it is used for very little else at present). If the switch from coal to oil and gas had not been made at the beginning of the the 20th century, all the coal on earth would have already been used up. Once oil and gas production starts to fall, coal consumption will rise dramatically and these numbers like 100 years will get a lot smaller.
The 88mm Flak 18 had a ceiling of only 9900m (32500 ft) and even the 88mm Flak 41 had a ceiling of only 15000m (49000 ft). See here.
Once you have the Chicken Pox virus, the Varicella Zoster virus, you have it for life. Your immune system will eventually beat it back and the Chicken Pox symptoms will disappear, but the virus will hide out in the nerve roots around your spine for the rest of your life. If your immune system is weakened by age, chemotherapy etc. the virus can break out again, burning is way up the nerves, usually on one side of your body, until it reaches the skin and causes rash and blistering. This is known as Shingles and is very painful. Not something you are usually told when you get Chicken Pox as a kid.
Those who are dangerous to the highway system lose their ability to drive on the highway system.
This is not the same thing at all. An equivalent senario would be people being banned from travelling in (not just driving) any vehicle on a highway if they were caught drunk driving. Banning someone from being a passenger on any aircraft is equivalent to banning someone from ever stepping into a car, bus or truck.
Of course as you note it is also different in that a court is involved at some point (i.e. there is some sort of due process) in driving bans but there are other differences as well. The people they are intending to ban from flying haven't done anything. It isn't like they have a previous conviction for hijacking an airliner so they are not allowed to fly on one again. It is that the government does like them in some way, because they are suspected of being a "terrorist", or for some other reason. Not only does stopping people from flying based purely on suspicion very bad, but it puts a huge amount of extra power into the hands of the government to persecute whatever people they don't like, as you note.
I have no problem with those who intentionally cause a security scare being barred from ever flying again, but they should at least have been convicted of an air-security related crime first.
This is a red herring though. Sure they might use this system to pick on such people but its main purpose will be to select people fitting a certain "high risk" profile. Who would "intentionally cause a security scare" anyway? Sure a terrorist group might phone in a fake bomb threat to cause disruption (its cheaper than a real bomb) but then you are not going to catch them are you. If this is going to be used to ban people from flying who are carry the wrong book or aren't grovellingly deferential enough to the security screeners then that is another big problem.
When you say you're filling up your car with Petrol, it's a bit like saying you're taking the oil right out of the ground and immediately throwing it into your car.
Actually petrol is short for 'petroleum spirit' and is one product of the fractional distillation of petroleum. Other petroleum based products bearing its name include 'petroleum jelly' and 'petroleum ether'.
The majority of people don't modify the software and there is nothing in the license about returning modifications to the copyright holder anyway. You have to give anyway the code of any modifications that you distribute to the people you distribute them to but that will not neccessarily make its way back to the copyright holder. Anyway there is nothing in the GPL about it being a contract and that is why it is so easy to enforce. A contract also requires agreement by both parties but since the GPL is a license it is irelevant whether the licensee agrees or not since without the license she has no rights to the software.
IANAL but I am not sure that a license has any binding nature on the copyright holder. The "You may not impose any further restrictions ..." bit is clearly aimed at the licensee when they pass the software onto other people not the copyright holder.
I can invite my neighbour to use my pool anytime she likes under certain conditions and that is a license. But the person doesn't have to break any of those conditions for me to be able to revoke the license whenever I like. If we had a contract that would be different but for a contract you need "consideration", the other party has to give me something in return, and in the case of the GPL that isn't true.
This issue has been brought up before and discussed on the other site, but I have never seen a really convincing arguement for why it is wrong. If it is correct then it has troubling implications, especially as copyrights can be transfered between people, not always volentarily.
Imagine as an extreme example Linus being sued into bankrupcy by a large corporation and the corporation getting all his assets, which would include not just his house and car, but all the copyrights to software that he has written. If the GPL can be revoked then that corporation could bring Linux development and distribution to a crashing halt until such time as all Linus's code could be removed and reimplemented.