20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.
A large part of that is that the government went on a spending spree that hasn't abated. The extra work is to provide the value that's sucked out to pay off the creditors and for the latest spending schemes. That value has to come from somewhere, whether it's devaluation of the currency (from more dollars chasing the goods) or the double-whammy of government borrowing sucking out the investment market, which means that money isn't making more consumer stuff AND it has to eventually be paid back, at interest, out of taxes.
There was some government debt for a long time. But the big fall-off-the-cliff turning point, IMHO, was when LBJ ran, first the Vietnam (undeclared) war, then also the Great Society welfare entitlement programs, on credit (meaning looting future generations). Then Nixon tried to fix things by unhooking the dollar from gold, and it's been unchecked government spending, explosive inflation, and accumulating debt and interest ever since.
No I disagree, as the data involved in matching is the result of a highly filtered process. There are many many data point's that don't support a match, as evidenced by the inability to replicate a match via any other method.
Simply using the matching data allows the filtering assumptions to go unchallenged.
If what's at issue is whether the tool selected the matches and hid the mismatches, and this can't be determined by comparing the defendant's genome against the tracable raw data that went into building the database, then the defendant's team gets to examine the software or the evidence is out. Agreed.
Defendant have the right to a thorough cross-examination. The database used, the filtering process are all relevant to the actrual likelihood of a match.
Here's where we're differing. I am claiming that, once a match is found, the quality of the match can be checked by comparing the raw data of the defendant's sample against the raw data that went into the database that was searched. Even if the data was reduced and encoded in some proprietary way to assist rapid searching and probability estimation by the proprietary tool, the match can be proven - as can the assertion that no exculpatory evidence was withheld - by providing the base data and ANY algorithm that performs the equivalent probability computation in a transparent way. If it gets the same numbers, that part of the issue is proven.
If there is some question of whether the tool used improperly obtained evidence in deciding to look at this guy's data, that would make its internals relevant. If there is some question that it may have identified other, equally good, matches and these were withheld from the defence, that might make the OPERATION of the tool relevant, without putting the workings of its innards into that category.
But IANAL. If the court says you're right on this it won't surprise me. (But their reasoning would be interesting.) Also: I won't complain if they kill database-fishing for "a wrong reason". B-)
Defendants have the right to compel testimony and other evidence to be produced if they can show it is relevant. Trade secret, patent, or copyright has no power to override constitution guarantees to due process.
Total agreement there.
Prosecutors should not be allowed pseudo-science or selective disclosure of data. In fact, knowing use of either constitute prosecutorial misconduct, [an offense] that can result in financial sanctions and or disbarment.
Total agreement there, too. (Also, IMHO: Such sanctions and/or disbarment should be invoked far more often than they are. B-) )
Our Right just keeps advocating policy that will heep even more money onto a wealthy class of citizens who are wealthier then they have ever been in American history.
Please don't confuse 'The Republican Party" with The Right". For at least the last three presidential election cycles the Republican Party has been solidly under the thumbs of one of its four major factions - the Neocons. (And this cycle that faction is finally being bumped by a new challenger which I'll call "The Plutocrats", in the form of the self-financed campaigns of Trump and Fiorina.)
The Classic/Paleo conservatives, religious right, and liberty wing (libertarians and other anti-tax, government-off-our-backs types) are more of the party but lately have negligible power.
From the perspective of the burden of proof placed on the Prosecution, they have to disclose how they arrived at this derived 'evidence' of a match via TrueAllele.
IMHO: Unless there is an issue with whether the database TrueAllele searched was obtained illegally (making any results of searching it for suspects "fruit of the poisoned tree"), they DON'T have to show how the match was found.
They just have to show that the match IS a match. This can be done with the data involved in the match standing on its own,
If he refuses to show his code to an expert witness and explain it, then the evidence can't be used.
Not true...
As I understand it, he should be able to get his program (or a modification of it) to produce as an output:
- The computation of the probabilities
- The data used to compute them, with annotation giving a trace back to its source.
- The assumptions behind the computation.
The issue of HOW IT IDENTIFIED this individual is separate from WHAT IT IDENTIFIED ABOUT HIM. The former is the "secret sauce" and would not be revealed. The latter is the evidence and can stand on its own. Further, it MUST be able to stand on its own - because if it can't, it's inadequate.
Now if part of his "expert testimony" is that his program did NOT find any other people who 'matched' and this is somehow relevant, THEN how it goes about doing the matching also becomes relevant and he's hosed.
Of course the defence is going to do their darndest to monkeywrench the prosecution, and threatening the tool builder with disclosure of his trade secrets is a good move tactically. It's up to the judge (and possibly the appeals judge) to call them on it if it's just an irrelevant thrash.
(I say this all as someone who personally believes that DNA evidence should only be used for defence, not prosecution, in criminal trials, because non-match is definitive while "match" is a difficult probability estimate based on assumptions about genetics, gene distribution, gene correlation, and on some very difficult to grasp probability computations. Hunting for matches in databases is, IMHO, subject to false positives and overestimation of the improbability of the match being false, based on underestimation of correlation and the genetic and familial mechanisms that might promote it.)
So with... selection pressure... Engineers, with the best intentions, would tend to design engines that pollute a bit more when off the test.
By "a bit", after 30+ years of selection pressure I wouldn't be surprised by as much as 25 to 50% extra NOx on "off the test" readings from just optimizing with only the test and field mileage for feedback.
Unless there's something special about diesels that makes them inherently troublesome on some non-test cycles, though, 2x or more seems too high to be honest fallout, and should prompt a detailed search for explicit cheat code.
Much of my early career was consulting to the auto industry (in particular, Ford and GM) during the early periods of electronic engine controls and their interaction with the emissions test regime in question. I did some work with engine controls, but most of it was emissions testing automation and data reduction.
We all (executives, engine designers, test equipment designers, and regulators) knew:
- The test conditions were arbitrary but standard.
- Detecting them and switching modes would be trivial to implement and look good at first, but also illegal, immoral, and financially disastrous for the company when they were eventually detected.
- Because engineering was done to meet the regulations - which met score well on the tests - even with honest efforts and no cheating it would eventually evolve the vehicles to do well on the tests but probably not so well on other operational cycles. (You see this with "your mileage may vary".)
- Tests and design processes were VERY expensive and the companies highly competitive. They couldn't afford to engineer for BOTH the regulations and to be good all the time out of niceness: The "nice guys" would "finish last", be driven out of the market, and you'd STILL only get cars that only met the regulations. A level playing field was needed.
- So it was the responsibility of the regulators to write test specifications that modelled the driving cycle well enough that engines tuned to them would also perform adequately in general, despite the "design to the test" evolutionary pressure, and the engineers to meet the law on the tests that were imposed, not do so by explicit detect-the-tests cheats.
The executives and early-stage engineering departments were aware of the temptation for engineers to write cheats, and (at least at one I worked for) put some draconian controls in on software changes to the engine control, to prevent them. (The official explanation given to the inconvenienced engineers was "insuring regulatory compliance".)
I was told that the regulators came up with the standard test by
- instrumenting a car (with a bicycle wheel speed recorder on the bumper and some event-recording switches),
- parking behind various cars (in Denver?) and, when their owners started up, surreptitiously tailing them to their destination and recording their warm-up idle time, speeds, acceleration, braking, standing waiting for lights, etc. (but not the upslope/downslope and wind).
- picking one of these trips, which contained both city and highway driving and looked pretty typical, and adding a "cold soak" to the start (engine is not run for several hours) to standardize the starting conditions and model an initial start, and a guesstimate of a final idling period before shutdown. (To meet the cold-soak requirement, cars were pushed into the test cell by hand or things like electric pallet jacks.)
The test measures exhaust airflow volume and concentration of CO2, CO, and unburned hydrocarbons. So gasoline consumption can be easily computed by "carbon balance" - you know how much carbon is in a gallon, you measure all of it as it comes out, none is lost and only a tiny bit of burned lube oil adds any. So you get mileage for free by postprocessing the data. The regulators got the bright idea of putting this computed mileage on the stickers for customers to make objective comparisons when shopping.
It's easy to measure the average mileage of cars in the field: Just divide the odometer mileage by the gallons pumped to refill the tank, and average over several fillups to smooth out variation in how the tank was topped off. It quickly became apparent that:
- Mileage in normal service varied substantially.
- The trip defined as the standard one got substantially better mileage than was typical. Thus was born the caveat "your mileage may vary" and a regulation change to partition the sticker mileage into separate pieces for the stop-and-go city por
The secret sauce seems to be ultra-dense deuterium, "D(0)" whatever that means. Looking through the author's other papers, it looks like he's claiming to have made metallic hydrogen, which would be a Nobel Prize right there.
If he can demonstrate this, then fine... he's a super genius.
Perhaps he's making flakes of Rydberg matter, floating in a near-vacuum.
(If I understand it correctly) this is matter where the individual atoms have been NEARLY ionized, by pumping an electron up to ALMOST, but not quite, the energy needed to free it from the atom, leaving an ion. (You can do this with a laser tuned to the energy difference between the ground state, or the state the electron WAS originally in, and the state you want it in.) If you get the electron into one of the high, flat, circular orbitals, it looks almost like a classic Bohr atom (earth/moon style orbit), and the state lasts for several hours.
Atoms in such a state associate into dense hexagonal clusters. (19-atom clusters are easy and heavily studied, and clusters of up to 91 atoms are reported.) The electrons bond the atoms by delocalizing, forming a metallic, hexagonal grid, similar to a tiny flake of graphite sheet. You can't make them very big. (There's some issue with the speed of light screwing up the bonding stability when the flakes get too big.) But you can make a lot of them, creating a "dusty plasma".
So hitting gas with the right laser pulse could end up with lots of flakes of this stuff, with deuterons held in tight (dense!) and well-defined flat hexagonal arrays by a chicken-wire of delocalized electrons, with zero (or tiny) net charge, floating around in a near vacuum and suitable for all sorts of manipulation. (Like slamming them into each other, for instance.)
Now how this interacts with substituting muons for electrons (something analogous to an impurity in a semiconductor crystal?), missing or extra electrons (ditto?), occasional oddball nuclei (again ditto?), or perhaps how it might generate muons when tickled by appropriate laser pulses, all look like good open questions for active research.
The point is that it's pretty easy to get these long-lived, self-organized, high-density, stable regular geometry, crystal flakes of graphite-like deuterium floating in a near vacuum, where you can poke at them, without any pesky condensed matter to get in the way.
Easy as in maybe you can do it on a desktop with diode lasers, producing "maker" level nuclear physics experiments. B-)
Some recently approved cancer treatments (particularly: for inoperaable brain cancer) are basedt on a recent discovery:
- The electric fields from changing magnetic fields interfere with chromosome segregation during mitosis.
- The affected cells generalluy do one of two things:
- Complete the division with missorted chromosomes - then both offspring cells commit suicide.
- Give up on cell division - then the new diploid cell commits suicide. Cells not undergoing mitosis keep perking along just fine. (Perhaps this is why large-range electric fields aren't present in cells except during division: Electrical effects occur across membranes or in very close range between molecules - because the use of the fields in the chromosome segregation mechanism means any newly-evolving "feature" that involved long-range E-fields would kill the cell partway to evolving it.
This is great for brain cancer treatment: Essentially nothing is splitting except the cancer cells. Maybe you lose some nerve stem cells and have slightly lower brain plasticity over the coming decades - but that's a heck of a lot better than dying in agony and gradually-increasing dimentia over 6 months to a year.
But start poking at brains with this in the long term - especially brains of people under 21 or so, when the brains are still doing substantial interconnection and cell division - and you might start seeing some nasty damage.
They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance.
H2 (D-D, D-T) molecule.
The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. [...] The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays.
Actually the muon lasts a couple microseconds which is a LONG time at molecular and nuclear speeds. But in addition to decaying it has maybe a 1/2% to 1% chance of sticking to the helium and getting lost until it times out. So it only catalyzes maybe 100 to 200 reactions. You need somewhat more than 300 to break even for the energy used to create it in an accelerator (maybe times a factor of about 2.5 to make up for the accelerator efficiency).
I followed the link to the original paper. It's a bit sketchy. But on a skim I don't get quite as much of a "what did he do" as the author of that piece did.
What it looks to me like he did is:
- Made some "ultra dense" duterium - apparently by the same method as F&P: Using electricity to force it into palladium by electrolysis, with the solid palladium holding it at high density and in particular orientations.
- Hit it with a laser.
- Got muons out - with energies above those that could be explained by the laser excitation, and apparently with energy totalling substantially more than spent on the laser and the electrolysis drive power.
Now if this is real, and can be repeated and engineered:
1) High-energy charged particles, at well-defined energies, emerging from a well-defined location, and with adequate lifetimes to last through a few microseconds of the process, can easily have most of their kinetic energy collected as electricity by pretty trivial equipment.
2) Muons catalyze fusion - at room temperature (or even liquid hydrogen temperature). They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance. The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. This has been known for decades: Just point a muon beam at some hydrogen and watch the fun.
The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays. So muon-catalyzed fusion (using accelerators to make muons) would never approach breakeven. If this guy has figured out how to make muons in a simple cell, with the energy to make the muon coming from a fusion reaction, it could change the game big-time.
Also: If muons manufactured by such a process were a step in the very sporadic, looked-like-fusion, effects seen by the people trying to do cold fusion, it could explain why the effects were sporadic - and understanding the process might lead to being able to produce it reliably and consistently.
So maybe this is just another will-o-the-wisp. Or maybe it's something that could lead to substantial repeatable interesting physics. Or maybe it could lead to real energy-producing reactors on a less-than-tokamak scale.
And just maybe it's a missing piece of a real room-temperature fusion process that led to the cold-fusion flap and might become practical. Wouldn't that be nice?
Regardless, this just got published within the last month or so. If it's real it should be pretty easy to reproduce, and from there not too hard to figure out. So let's see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe little, just the off chance of another roller-coaster ride. B-)
I didn't realize the show was supposed to be about geeks. I thought it was ironically portraying the disconnect between the academic pursuit of science and things that happen in the real world.
I've never seen it.
I take it they intended to do "Dilbert in hard-science academia" but were about as effective as liberal artists usually are when they try to portray anything on the physics or engineering side of the fence?
The reason for keeping weapons such as knives out of schools (or anywhere else) is to reduce the chance of fights escalating and becoming deadly.
What has been shown to reduce the chance of "fights escalating and becoming deadly" is training in the use of knives and guns, not bans on their possession. Children and young adults who have had such training have about the same rate of "delinquency" - but the "crimes" they commit are almost never violent. (They also know what they're dealing with and what to do about it if someone DOES start misusing a knife or gun.) Kids who learn about guns and knives only from entertainment media (where blood and agony are not shown) and other kids are the ones who commit the violence.
On the other side of the world, I did not need any sign or rule to know that if I sneaked my dad's shotgun into school, I'd be facing certain suspension.
On this side of the world young adults used to bring guns to school when they were going to the range or hunting after school (or had been hunting at dawn before school) with no perceptible problems - up to the latter half of the 20th century. Interestingly, that's when the child-rearing fads started "protecting them" from information about weapons.
The rest of us keep being treated routinely like criminals without the media getting interested, because we aren't the mayor of Stockton. Why should this guy get special treatment (by [...] the press) just because he's a minor elected politico?
Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is news.
They slipped up and used the tactics they usually use on civilians on a civilian official. They don't usually do that, so the event was newsworthy.
Whether it leads to action against the TSA, just a little more care on their part to identify VIPs, or squat is yet to be seen.
Until someone decides... That being evil is the right thing to do. You know, ends justify the means and all that jazz...
(At the risk of precipitating a storm of posts misapplying Godwin's law...)
One of the big problems with tyrannical systems and the tyrants who end up running them is that they're attractive. The rhetoric sounds nice. The people setting then up and running them are sweet, reasonable-sounding, and persuasive (at least at first and/or to those they need to support them to obtain and keep power), and so on.
Then, after they've driven their "nice" ideas into their horrible, but inevitable, ramifications, and (if they) are eventually stopped, the historical record ends up showing you just their opponents' propaganda, painting them as obviously hateful. So people get the idea that bad uses of power LOOK repulsive. Then they don't recognize similar stuff when it develops in the future (or even the SAME stuff if it reappears - as one high-school history teacher showed by using Hitler Youth techniques on his class for a week, with just enough deltas to make their origin not recognizable until after the great reveal.
IMHO the change in motto from "Don't Be Evil" to "Do the Right Thing" is a (probably accidental, but nonetheless actual) giant leap down "The Road Paved with Good Intentions".
You can open it, yes. But unlike for any book that is indexed, such as the books on an e-ink Kindle, it loses your place in a manually opened book from the SD card as soon as you close it.
So you CAN read the book. But it FORGETS WHERE YOU WERE LOOKING when you close it, because it doesn't run an "index feature".
That sounds like the "index feature" consists of the tablet remembering:
- What books you read.
- Where you were reading them. even after you delete the books themselves - or remove the read-only media containing them.
How convenient for government security agencies looking for readers of banned books, police looking at whether you read something about a technique that happened to be used in a crime near you, and so on.
Seems to me that having your book reader NOT keep a record of what titles you've read is a feature, not a bug.
Sounds like you are regurgitating some hate-talk-radio host's flawed hateful email.
Nope.
My wife researched this some time before that article came out. She noticed that news media would spend days to weeks claiming various mass-murderers were right-wing, then have to retract it. So she dug into online data - from sources such as media even lefties would trust, or public records, and was amazed at the high percentage of Democrats and non-party-affiliated progressives, and the near total dearth of conservatives.
She welcomes you to do your own research, but assumes you will agree with her that signing out with "Peace out!" is not exactly a Republican or conservative trait.
Chris Harper Mercer is no exception. His facebook page was still up as of 5PM pacific time and was full of rants for the Cascadia independence movement, a west-coast, left-wing, eco-freak, secession movement (though some authors are now trying to tie him to a similarly-named neo-NAZI operation far to the east of where he lived). (The conservative secession movement in the area is the "State of Jefferson" proposal - floated intermittently since a few years before WW II.)
Sounds like you are regurgitating some hate-talk-radio host's flawed hateful email.Cascadia independence movement, a west-coast, left-wing, eco-freak, secession movement (though some authors are now trying to tie him to a similarly-named neo-NAZI operation far to the east of where he lived). (The conservative secession movement in the area is the "State of Jefferson" proposal - floated intermittently since a few years before WW II.)
The Q was: Should the children of illegal aliens get government funded emergency treatment at hospitals.
As I hear it, Ron got tongue-tied because he was trying to provide a multi-part answer under pressure.
The answer (as I heard it) was:
- Government shouldn't force hospitals to give emergency care to ANYone, legal, illegal, kids of illegals, etc.
- Government should ALSO not put roadblocks in front of those (such as the Catholic Church) who do want to operate emergency rooms and give care to all comers, and historically have done so (but have to a large extent been driven out by these government interventions).
- We should get government out regulating (screwing up) and (under) funding emergency room and other medicine, go back to what we had before they meddled, which did a much better job providing emergency care, and move on from there.
The answer was pretty clear to me, but I can easily see how it would be misheard as "the kids of illegals should not get medical care".
I note that the anti-Ron Paul propagandists tried really hard to paint him as an anti-black racist, too. That ground to a halt after the husband of a patient came forward and started campaigning for him.
Seems his wife was at a hospital E-room, bleeding out from pregnancy complications, and on infinite wait, getting no service. He tried to bring her condition to the attention of the medical staff and they had called security, which was about to take them away. Then Ron (a gynecologist on duty) walked in, saw what was happening, and intervened, getting the wife the immediate emergency care needed to save her and the baby's lives, and getting the security off the husband's case.
The Australian anti gun laws said hi and proved you are fucking full of shit.
You mean the one that reversed the previous downward trend of crime in Australia, while producing scholarly quotes such as this one?
In 2006, the lack of a measurable effect from the 1996 firearms legislation was reported in the British Journal of Criminology. Using ARIMA analysis, Dr Jeanine Baker and Dr Samara McPhedran found no evidence for an impact of the laws on homicide.
You left out WHITE... Most of these idiots are white.
You also left out Registered Democrat. Most of these idiots, it turns out, are either registered Democrats or left-wingers who didn't register, didn't register a party affiliation, registered with some left-wing minor party, or weren't old enough to register yet.
There are a few exceptions, such as Timothy McVeigh.
You left out WHITE... Most of these idiots are white.
Actually, not. It turns out non-white, non-Asian, people are (currently in the US) more prone to mass murder, both offenders as a percentage of their population and as a victim-count per-capita of offender's group's population.
But their victims are more often also non-white, non-Asian, and the attacks generally "aren't news". (When was the last time you heard the national media do a big news event on a drive-by or other mass shooting in the poorer residential areas of Chicago, Springfield, New York City, Philadelphia, or DC?) It's another example of how black (or Chicano, etc.) lives DON'T matter - to the news media.
It means the news media is trying to stretch the "gun-free is safer" anti-gun propaganda in the face of the public becoming aware that gun-free zones are an invitation to mass murder and virtually all mass murders (and much other victimization) now happen in them.
"Gun-free zones" disarm the law-abiding people in them (so they can't shoot back and limit the carnage - and deter it from starting in the first place, turning them into helpless victims, but don't stop the attackers. Legislation (or private decision) to make an area into such a zone makes it a magnet for both nacent mass-murders and other victimizers.
A better term for such zones might be "free-fire zone" or "victim-rich zone".
By prepending "technically a", to "gun-free zone", they can make it sound different from the "gun-free zone" of the legislation. They pay lip service to the laws' unenforceability on bad guys. They recast the zones' danger into an enforcement problem, rather than a fundamental flaw in the concept. This helps to slow the propagation of the understanding that such zones are inherently more dangerous than unrestricted areas, that "The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.".
That helps the anti-gunners in their efforts to pass MORE restrictions, making MORE areas dangerous, and to give the police more power to search and otherwise oppress people in the name of solving the problem they created.
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20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.
A large part of that is that the government went on a spending spree that hasn't abated. The extra work is to provide the value that's sucked out to pay off the creditors and for the latest spending schemes. That value has to come from somewhere, whether it's devaluation of the currency (from more dollars chasing the goods) or the double-whammy of government borrowing sucking out the investment market, which means that money isn't making more consumer stuff AND it has to eventually be paid back, at interest, out of taxes.
There was some government debt for a long time. But the big fall-off-the-cliff turning point, IMHO, was when LBJ ran, first the Vietnam (undeclared) war, then also the Great Society welfare entitlement programs, on credit (meaning looting future generations). Then Nixon tried to fix things by unhooking the dollar from gold, and it's been unchecked government spending, explosive inflation, and accumulating debt and interest ever since.
I have yet to see an "anti-tax" conservative who advocated policies whose most prominent beneficiary wasnt the very wealthy.
I have seen plenty.
Have you looked at Rand Paul's flat tax proposal, just for starters?
No I disagree, as the data involved in matching is the result of a highly filtered process. There are many many data point's that don't support a match, as evidenced by the inability to replicate a match via any other method.
Simply using the matching data allows the filtering assumptions to go unchallenged.
If what's at issue is whether the tool selected the matches and hid the mismatches, and this can't be determined by comparing the defendant's genome against the tracable raw data that went into building the database, then the defendant's team gets to examine the software or the evidence is out. Agreed.
Defendant have the right to a thorough cross-examination. The database used, the filtering process are all relevant to the actrual likelihood of a match.
Here's where we're differing. I am claiming that, once a match is found, the quality of the match can be checked by comparing the raw data of the defendant's sample against the raw data that went into the database that was searched. Even if the data was reduced and encoded in some proprietary way to assist rapid searching and probability estimation by the proprietary tool, the match can be proven - as can the assertion that no exculpatory evidence was withheld - by providing the base data and ANY algorithm that performs the equivalent probability computation in a transparent way. If it gets the same numbers, that part of the issue is proven.
If there is some question of whether the tool used improperly obtained evidence in deciding to look at this guy's data, that would make its internals relevant. If there is some question that it may have identified other, equally good, matches and these were withheld from the defence, that might make the OPERATION of the tool relevant, without putting the workings of its innards into that category.
But IANAL. If the court says you're right on this it won't surprise me. (But their reasoning would be interesting.) Also: I won't complain if they kill database-fishing for "a wrong reason". B-)
Defendants have the right to compel testimony and other evidence to be produced if they can show it is relevant. Trade secret, patent, or copyright has no power to override constitution guarantees to due process.
Total agreement there.
Prosecutors should not be allowed pseudo-science or selective disclosure of data. In fact, knowing use of either constitute prosecutorial misconduct, [an offense] that can result in financial sanctions and or disbarment.
Total agreement there, too. (Also, IMHO: Such sanctions and/or disbarment should be invoked far more often than they are. B-) )
Our Right just keeps advocating policy that will heep even more money onto a wealthy class of citizens who are wealthier then they have ever been in American history.
Please don't confuse 'The Republican Party" with The Right". For at least the last three presidential election cycles the Republican Party has been solidly under the thumbs of one of its four major factions - the Neocons. (And this cycle that faction is finally being bumped by a new challenger which I'll call "The Plutocrats", in the form of the self-financed campaigns of Trump and Fiorina.)
The Classic/Paleo conservatives, religious right, and liberty wing (libertarians and other anti-tax, government-off-our-backs types) are more of the party but lately have negligible power.
From the perspective of the burden of proof placed on the Prosecution, they have to disclose how they arrived at this derived 'evidence' of a match via TrueAllele.
IMHO: Unless there is an issue with whether the database TrueAllele searched was obtained illegally (making any results of searching it for suspects "fruit of the poisoned tree"), they DON'T have to show how the match was found.
They just have to show that the match IS a match. This can be done with the data involved in the match standing on its own,
If he refuses to show his code to an expert witness and explain it, then the evidence can't be used.
Not true...
As I understand it, he should be able to get his program (or a modification of it) to produce as an output:
- The computation of the probabilities
- The data used to compute them, with annotation giving a trace back to its source.
- The assumptions behind the computation.
The issue of HOW IT IDENTIFIED this individual is separate from WHAT IT IDENTIFIED ABOUT HIM. The former is the "secret sauce" and would not be revealed. The latter is the evidence and can stand on its own. Further, it MUST be able to stand on its own - because if it can't, it's inadequate.
Now if part of his "expert testimony" is that his program did NOT find any other people who 'matched' and this is somehow relevant, THEN how it goes about doing the matching also becomes relevant and he's hosed.
Of course the defence is going to do their darndest to monkeywrench the prosecution, and threatening the tool builder with disclosure of his trade secrets is a good move tactically. It's up to the judge (and possibly the appeals judge) to call them on it if it's just an irrelevant thrash.
(I say this all as someone who personally believes that DNA evidence should only be used for defence, not prosecution, in criminal trials, because non-match is definitive while "match" is a difficult probability estimate based on assumptions about genetics, gene distribution, gene correlation, and on some very difficult to grasp probability computations. Hunting for matches in databases is, IMHO, subject to false positives and overestimation of the improbability of the match being false, based on underestimation of correlation and the genetic and familial mechanisms that might promote it.)
So with ... selection pressure ... Engineers, with the best intentions, would tend to design engines that pollute a bit more when off the test.
By "a bit", after 30+ years of selection pressure I wouldn't be surprised by as much as 25 to 50% extra NOx on "off the test" readings from just optimizing with only the test and field mileage for feedback.
Unless there's something special about diesels that makes them inherently troublesome on some non-test cycles, though, 2x or more seems too high to be honest fallout, and should prompt a detailed search for explicit cheat code.
Much of my early career was consulting to the auto industry (in particular, Ford and GM) during the early periods of electronic engine controls and their interaction with the emissions test regime in question. I did some work with engine controls, but most of it was emissions testing automation and data reduction.
We all (executives, engine designers, test equipment designers, and regulators) knew:
- The test conditions were arbitrary but standard.
- Detecting them and switching modes would be trivial to implement and look good at first, but also illegal, immoral, and financially disastrous for the company when they were eventually detected.
- Because engineering was done to meet the regulations - which met score well on the tests - even with honest efforts and no cheating it would eventually evolve the vehicles to do well on the tests but probably not so well on other operational cycles. (You see this with "your mileage may vary".)
- Tests and design processes were VERY expensive and the companies highly competitive. They couldn't afford to engineer for BOTH the regulations and to be good all the time out of niceness: The "nice guys" would "finish last", be driven out of the market, and you'd STILL only get cars that only met the regulations. A level playing field was needed.
- So it was the responsibility of the regulators to write test specifications that modelled the driving cycle well enough that engines tuned to them would also perform adequately in general, despite the "design to the test" evolutionary pressure, and the engineers to meet the law on the tests that were imposed, not do so by explicit detect-the-tests cheats.
The executives and early-stage engineering departments were aware of the temptation for engineers to write cheats, and (at least at one I worked for) put some draconian controls in on software changes to the engine control, to prevent them. (The official explanation given to the inconvenienced engineers was "insuring regulatory compliance".)
I was told that the regulators came up with the standard test by
- instrumenting a car (with a bicycle wheel speed recorder on the bumper and some event-recording switches),
- parking behind various cars (in Denver?) and, when their owners started up, surreptitiously tailing them to their destination and recording their warm-up idle time, speeds, acceleration, braking, standing waiting for lights, etc. (but not the upslope/downslope and wind).
- picking one of these trips, which contained both city and highway driving and looked pretty typical, and adding a "cold soak" to the start (engine is not run for several hours) to standardize the starting conditions and model an initial start, and a guesstimate of a final idling period before shutdown. (To meet the cold-soak requirement, cars were pushed into the test cell by hand or things like electric pallet jacks.)
The test measures exhaust airflow volume and concentration of CO2, CO, and unburned hydrocarbons. So gasoline consumption can be easily computed by "carbon balance" - you know how much carbon is in a gallon, you measure all of it as it comes out, none is lost and only a tiny bit of burned lube oil adds any. So you get mileage for free by postprocessing the data. The regulators got the bright idea of putting this computed mileage on the stickers for customers to make objective comparisons when shopping.
It's easy to measure the average mileage of cars in the field: Just divide the odometer mileage by the gallons pumped to refill the tank, and average over several fillups to smooth out variation in how the tank was topped off. It quickly became apparent that:
- Mileage in normal service varied substantially.
- The trip defined as the standard one got substantially better mileage than was typical.
Thus was born the caveat "your mileage may vary" and a regulation change to partition the sticker mileage into separate pieces for the stop-and-go city por
Perhaps he's making flakes of Rydberg matter, floating in a near-vacuum.
(If I understand it correctly) this is matter where the individual atoms have been NEARLY ionized, by pumping an electron up to ALMOST, but not quite, the energy needed to free it from the atom, leaving an ion. (You can do this with a laser tuned to the energy difference between the ground state, or the state the electron WAS originally in, and the state you want it in.) If you get the electron into one of the high, flat, circular orbitals, it looks almost like a classic Bohr atom (earth/moon style orbit), and the state lasts for several hours.
Atoms in such a state associate into dense hexagonal clusters. (19-atom clusters are easy and heavily studied, and clusters of up to 91 atoms are reported.) The electrons bond the atoms by delocalizing, forming a metallic, hexagonal grid, similar to a tiny flake of graphite sheet. You can't make them very big. (There's some issue with the speed of light screwing up the bonding stability when the flakes get too big.) But you can make a lot of them, creating a "dusty plasma".
So hitting gas with the right laser pulse could end up with lots of flakes of this stuff, with deuterons held in tight (dense!) and well-defined flat hexagonal arrays by a chicken-wire of delocalized electrons, with zero (or tiny) net charge, floating around in a near vacuum and suitable for all sorts of manipulation. (Like slamming them into each other, for instance.)
Now how this interacts with substituting muons for electrons (something analogous to an impurity in a semiconductor crystal?), missing or extra electrons (ditto?), occasional oddball nuclei (again ditto?), or perhaps how it might generate muons when tickled by appropriate laser pulses, all look like good open questions for active research.
The point is that it's pretty easy to get these long-lived, self-organized, high-density, stable regular geometry, crystal flakes of graphite-like deuterium floating in a near vacuum, where you can poke at them, without any pesky condensed matter to get in the way.
Easy as in maybe you can do it on a desktop with diode lasers, producing "maker" level nuclear physics experiments. B-)
Some recently approved cancer treatments (particularly: for inoperaable brain cancer) are basedt on a recent discovery:
- The electric fields from changing magnetic fields interfere with chromosome segregation during mitosis.
- The affected cells generalluy do one of two things:
- Complete the division with missorted chromosomes - then both offspring cells commit suicide.
- Give up on cell division - then the new diploid cell commits suicide.
Cells not undergoing mitosis keep perking along just fine. (Perhaps this is why large-range electric fields aren't present in cells except during division: Electrical effects occur across membranes or in very close range between molecules - because the use of the fields in the chromosome segregation mechanism means any newly-evolving "feature" that involved long-range E-fields would kill the cell partway to evolving it.
This is great for brain cancer treatment: Essentially nothing is splitting except the cancer cells. Maybe you lose some nerve stem cells and have slightly lower brain plasticity over the coming decades - but that's a heck of a lot better than dying in agony and gradually-increasing dimentia over 6 months to a year.
But start poking at brains with this in the long term - especially brains of people under 21 or so, when the brains are still doing substantial interconnection and cell division - and you might start seeing some nasty damage.
Looked it up:
They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance.
H2 (D-D, D-T) molecule.
The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. [...] The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays.
Actually the muon lasts a couple microseconds which is a LONG time at molecular and nuclear speeds. But in addition to decaying it has maybe a 1/2% to 1% chance of sticking to the helium and getting lost until it times out. So it only catalyzes maybe 100 to 200 reactions. You need somewhat more than 300 to break even for the energy used to create it in an accelerator (maybe times a factor of about 2.5 to make up for the accelerator efficiency).
I followed the link to the original paper. It's a bit sketchy. But on a skim I don't get quite as much of a "what did he do" as the author of that piece did.
What it looks to me like he did is:
- Made some "ultra dense" duterium - apparently by the same method as F&P: Using electricity to force it into palladium by electrolysis, with the solid palladium holding it at high density and in particular orientations.
- Hit it with a laser.
- Got muons out - with energies above those that could be explained by the laser excitation, and apparently with energy totalling substantially more than spent on the laser and the electrolysis drive power.
Now if this is real, and can be repeated and engineered:
1) High-energy charged particles, at well-defined energies, emerging from a well-defined location, and with adequate lifetimes to last through a few microseconds of the process, can easily have most of their kinetic energy collected as electricity by pretty trivial equipment.
2) Muons catalyze fusion - at room temperature (or even liquid hydrogen temperature). They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance. The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. This has been known for decades: Just point a muon beam at some hydrogen and watch the fun.
The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays. So muon-catalyzed fusion (using accelerators to make muons) would never approach breakeven. If this guy has figured out how to make muons in a simple cell, with the energy to make the muon coming from a fusion reaction, it could change the game big-time.
Also: If muons manufactured by such a process were a step in the very sporadic, looked-like-fusion, effects seen by the people trying to do cold fusion, it could explain why the effects were sporadic - and understanding the process might lead to being able to produce it reliably and consistently.
So maybe this is just another will-o-the-wisp. Or maybe it's something that could lead to substantial repeatable interesting physics. Or maybe it could lead to real energy-producing reactors on a less-than-tokamak scale.
And just maybe it's a missing piece of a real room-temperature fusion process that led to the cold-fusion flap and might become practical. Wouldn't that be nice?
Regardless, this just got published within the last month or so. If it's real it should be pretty easy to reproduce, and from there not too hard to figure out. So let's see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe little, just the off chance of another roller-coaster ride. B-)
I didn't realize the show was supposed to be about geeks. I thought it was ironically portraying the disconnect between the academic pursuit of science and things that happen in the real world.
I've never seen it.
I take it they intended to do "Dilbert in hard-science academia" but were about as effective as liberal artists usually are when they try to portray anything on the physics or engineering side of the fence?
The reason for keeping weapons such as knives out of schools (or anywhere else) is to reduce the chance of fights escalating and becoming deadly.
What has been shown to reduce the chance of "fights escalating and becoming deadly" is training in the use of knives and guns, not bans on their possession. Children and young adults who have had such training have about the same rate of "delinquency" - but the "crimes" they commit are almost never violent. (They also know what they're dealing with and what to do about it if someone DOES start misusing a knife or gun.) Kids who learn about guns and knives only from entertainment media (where blood and agony are not shown) and other kids are the ones who commit the violence.
On the other side of the world, I did not need any sign or rule to know that if I sneaked my dad's shotgun into school, I'd be facing certain suspension.
On this side of the world young adults used to bring guns to school when they were going to the range or hunting after school (or had been hunting at dawn before school) with no perceptible problems - up to the latter half of the 20th century. Interestingly, that's when the child-rearing fads started "protecting them" from information about weapons.
The rest of us keep being treated routinely like criminals without the media getting interested, because we aren't the mayor of Stockton. Why should this guy get special treatment (by [...] the press) just because he's a minor elected politico?
Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is news.
They slipped up and used the tactics they usually use on civilians on a civilian official. They don't usually do that, so the event was newsworthy.
Whether it leads to action against the TSA, just a little more care on their part to identify VIPs, or squat is yet to be seen.
Until someone decides ... That being evil is the right thing to do. You know, ends justify the means and all that jazz...
(At the risk of precipitating a storm of posts misapplying Godwin's law...)
One of the big problems with tyrannical systems and the tyrants who end up running them is that they're attractive. The rhetoric sounds nice. The people setting then up and running them are sweet, reasonable-sounding, and persuasive (at least at first and/or to those they need to support them to obtain and keep power), and so on.
Then, after they've driven their "nice" ideas into their horrible, but inevitable, ramifications, and (if they) are eventually stopped, the historical record ends up showing you just their opponents' propaganda, painting them as obviously hateful. So people get the idea that bad uses of power LOOK repulsive. Then they don't recognize similar stuff when it develops in the future (or even the SAME stuff if it reappears - as one high-school history teacher showed by using Hitler Youth techniques on his class for a week, with just enough deltas to make their origin not recognizable until after the great reveal.
IMHO the change in motto from "Don't Be Evil" to "Do the Right Thing" is a (probably accidental, but nonetheless actual) giant leap down "The Road Paved with Good Intentions".
You can open it, yes. But unlike for any book that is indexed, such as the books on an e-ink Kindle, it loses your place in a manually opened book from the SD card as soon as you close it.
So you CAN read the book. But it FORGETS WHERE YOU WERE LOOKING when you close it, because it doesn't run an "index feature".
That sounds like the "index feature" consists of the tablet remembering:
- What books you read.
- Where you were reading them.
even after you delete the books themselves - or remove the read-only media containing them.
How convenient for government security agencies looking for readers of banned books, police looking at whether you read something about a technique that happened to be used in a crime near you, and so on.
Seems to me that having your book reader NOT keep a record of what titles you've read is a feature, not a bug.
Use it and never be able to sell your product. Or use it and get fired for being an idiot. Hurrah!
Almost 30 years ago a colleague of mine used a phrase, referring to the pre-L GPL licensing terms, that succinctly described this kine of "free":
"More expensive than money."
Sounds like you are regurgitating some hate-talk-radio host's flawed hateful email.
Nope.
My wife researched this some time before that article came out. She noticed that news media would spend days to weeks claiming various mass-murderers were right-wing, then have to retract it. So she dug into online data - from sources such as media even lefties would trust, or public records, and was amazed at the high percentage of Democrats and non-party-affiliated progressives, and the near total dearth of conservatives.
She welcomes you to do your own research, but assumes you will agree with her that signing out with "Peace out!" is not exactly a Republican or conservative trait.
Chris Harper Mercer is no exception. His facebook page was still up as of 5PM pacific time and was full of rants for the Cascadia independence movement, a west-coast, left-wing, eco-freak, secession movement (though some authors are now trying to tie him to a similarly-named neo-NAZI operation far to the east of where he lived). (The conservative secession movement in the area is the "State of Jefferson" proposal - floated intermittently since a few years before WW II.)
Sounds like you are regurgitating some hate-talk-radio host's flawed hateful email.Cascadia independence movement, a west-coast, left-wing, eco-freak, secession movement (though some authors are now trying to tie him to a similarly-named neo-NAZI operation far to the east of where he lived). (The conservative secession movement in the area is the "State of Jefferson" proposal - floated intermittently since a few years before WW II.)
The Q was: Should the children of illegal aliens get government funded emergency treatment at hospitals.
As I hear it, Ron got tongue-tied because he was trying to provide a multi-part answer under pressure.
The answer (as I heard it) was:
- Government shouldn't force hospitals to give emergency care to ANYone, legal, illegal, kids of illegals, etc.
- Government should ALSO not put roadblocks in front of those (such as the Catholic Church) who do want to operate emergency rooms and give care to all comers, and historically have done so (but have to a large extent been driven out by these government interventions).
- We should get government out regulating (screwing up) and (under) funding emergency room and other medicine, go back to what we had before they meddled, which did a much better job providing emergency care, and move on from there.
The answer was pretty clear to me, but I can easily see how it would be misheard as "the kids of illegals should not get medical care".
I note that the anti-Ron Paul propagandists tried really hard to paint him as an anti-black racist, too. That ground to a halt after the husband of a patient came forward and started campaigning for him.
Seems his wife was at a hospital E-room, bleeding out from pregnancy complications, and on infinite wait, getting no service. He tried to bring her condition to the attention of the medical staff and they had called security, which was about to take them away. Then Ron (a gynecologist on duty) walked in, saw what was happening, and intervened, getting the wife the immediate emergency care needed to save her and the baby's lives, and getting the security off the husband's case.
The Australian anti gun laws said hi and proved you are fucking full of shit.
You mean the one that reversed the previous downward trend of crime in Australia, while producing scholarly quotes such as this one?
You left out WHITE... Most of these idiots are white.
You also left out Registered Democrat. Most of these idiots, it turns out, are either registered Democrats or left-wingers who didn't register, didn't register a party affiliation, registered with some left-wing minor party, or weren't old enough to register yet.
There are a few exceptions, such as Timothy McVeigh.
You left out WHITE... Most of these idiots are white.
Actually, not. It turns out non-white, non-Asian, people are (currently in the US) more prone to mass murder, both offenders as a percentage of their population and as a victim-count per-capita of offender's group's population.
But their victims are more often also non-white, non-Asian, and the attacks generally "aren't news". (When was the last time you heard the national media do a big news event on a drive-by or other mass shooting in the poorer residential areas of Chicago, Springfield, New York City, Philadelphia, or DC?) It's another example of how black (or Chicano, etc.) lives DON'T matter - to the news media.
What does "technically a gun-free zone" mean?
It means the news media is trying to stretch the "gun-free is safer" anti-gun propaganda in the face of the public becoming aware that gun-free zones are an invitation to mass murder and virtually all mass murders (and much other victimization) now happen in them.
"Gun-free zones" disarm the law-abiding people in them (so they can't shoot back and limit the carnage - and deter it from starting in the first place, turning them into helpless victims, but don't stop the attackers. Legislation (or private decision) to make an area into such a zone makes it a magnet for both nacent mass-murders and other victimizers.
A better term for such zones might be "free-fire zone" or "victim-rich zone".
By prepending "technically a", to "gun-free zone", they can make it sound different from the "gun-free zone" of the legislation. They pay lip service to the laws' unenforceability on bad guys. They recast the zones' danger into an enforcement problem, rather than a fundamental flaw in the concept. This helps to slow the propagation of the understanding that such zones are inherently more dangerous than unrestricted areas, that "The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.".
That helps the anti-gunners in their efforts to pass MORE restrictions, making MORE areas dangerous, and to give the police more power to search and otherwise oppress people in the name of solving the problem they created.