Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995.
Now it finally comes out: the real reason Turing bit the poisoned apple. Only he would have said 1945.
If anything, I'm amazed at how little computers have changed in the past 18 years.
That's because you've never tried to debug a bathtub full of DNA or a DWave Prospectus.
For perspective, look at the pyramids. Way overbuilt. All they really needed was a hot fire and a couple of tiny Mason jars. Khufu was a man of progress. Eighteen years in, he commented "I'm amazed at how this pile of slabs now approaches a point." Then he spotted the goldsmith. "Oh, look, you've fashioned a perfect likeness as a tiny brooch pin. Let me try one on. Ouch! Oh well, fresh metal, touch wood. Hey, anyone got any wood?"
World's tallest mason jut for 3800 years. Don't let the door hit you on the way in.
since it consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks, completing the building in 20 years would involve moving an average of more than 12 of the blocks into place each hour, day and night
You'd have to work a lot faster than that to build it out of Lego bricks. But it would basically be the same thing. Just counting for area reduction since the 4004 reduces a Giza block to roughly a Lego brick:
I take a more extreme view of faith as a form of solipsism. If you fully separate faith from science, faith becomes an entirely personal matter: you can only gain faith by some kind of mysterious internal light inaccessible to the methods of science. OK, fine. From this view there's no reason not to believe that God created the universe five minutes ago, exactly as we recall it to have been five minutes ago, replete with another 13.7 billion years of back story (which can be boiled down rather succinctly to the big bang, QED, and self-organizing primordial goo--for which the exact mechanism in the last case remain a trifle mysterious). For some reason, God loves the evolutionary back story. No creation is complete without one. Either way, evolution is the minimum description length account of what we observe as the history of the universe in rocks and oceans and nebulae. This is true whether or not evolution actually happened. Even if God created the earth and human kind a mere 10,000 years ago evolution is still the minimum description of what we observe in the fossil record and the genetic heritage of life (an exploding data set which poses a looming and insurmountable challenge to 10,000 year literalism).
If you feel the illumination of faith from within, you can show it by how you choose to live. If you inner glow so moves you, you can reflect honour on the divine creator by living your life to a high moral standard however you perceive this.
Where I tend to draw the line is when two people get together who each feel an inner glow, who then compare notes and decide that they believe in the same divine spirit. This consensus is not achieved through a scientific process. Faith is not amenable to science. How do you really know you believe in the same deity as anyone else?
Here's how the slight of hand works in organized religion. You posit a sacred text, and then attribute authorship of the sacred text to a unique and singular deity. Yesterday's TED talk on the Cyrus Cylinder shows the Book of Isaiah attributing to Jehovah what had previously been attributed to the Babylonian god Marduk. One story, multiple originating deities. Fancy that.
I have a lot of problems when a group of 100 million people go around absolutely secure in the belief that they feel within themselves a sliver of the same divine flame, when most of them can't even agree on the right way to tie your shoe.
Santorum, to his credit, is not so secure: he views the Democrats as hewing to the wrong Christian god. Now let's repeat this bisection step until every believer is a faith until himself or herself. Faith as a personal matter. Wonderful.
I have no real problem with faith, but I have a deep problem with the aggregation of faith. Let's suppose Obama believes that he and Santorum both believe in the same god, but Santorum disputes this. How is such a discrepancy resolved? Remember, you can't use science. Faith is not amenable to science (or it wouldn't be faith). I guess you need a prophet of especially reliable connection to the Big One. Shades of Russell's type theory. And we agree on the nature of this prophet exactly how? Are we back to the aggregation of unique inner glows? I thought so.
There's no conflict between science and faith as such, but there is a conflict between science and the aggregation of faith (for some reason, faith tends to aggregate along racial lines, and never takes the last critical step to one world religion).
Message to Santorum: if you want to dis-aggregate the Christian granfalloon, by all means fill your boots.
Shortly after pressing submit, I realized that I made light of the difference between adjectives and adverbs when I first commented on the adenoidal Fermions. Like the difference between ovaries and testicles, people tend to insist upon the distinction even when it isn't terribly germane. Either type leads to adenoidal behaviour patterns.
"Recently a conversation with Prof. Huffman here indicated that he has recently been working on a machine with similar objectives."
A more thoughtful presentation might replace the second "recently" with "lately" or similar.
Beyond English department embroidery, there's little to fault with Nash's composition. His argument develops logically, his sentences parse correctly, he sticks to the primary points, and he's clear both about the potential significance and the nature of the mechanics involved.
This particular English department suggestion made me laugh out loud. How is it that adjectives became spin one-half particles? There are two distinct recent events in his sentence (the work and the discussion about the work). You suggest his presentation is weak because the cognitive Boson (recentness) wasn't recast as Fermionic when appending the -ly affix. When writing to the NSA, which is notorious for using seven levels of Fraktur script to distinguish algebraic levels, one presumes they can't keep two verb instances straight in a simple English sentence.
In high school I was given a composition exercise to write a paragraph on camera assembly. We were given the steps as a mishmash. It was an exercise in achieved logical order.
My solution: The A goes into the B. The B goes into the C. The C goes into the D.... QED.
I varied the "goes into" part appropriately. In fact, I wrote very nice sentences. What I did not vary was beginning every sentence with "The". My English teacher was so annoyed with my stylistic uniformity he docked me severely. I could only raise my eyebrows and file his feedback in my Twilight Zone folder. We weren't given any objective function on the benefits of faux variation of form upon correct assembly, yet we were expected to engage in the art of embroidery nevertheless.
Nash made a pretty good start there. If he had received a one sentence answer (with or without confounding word repetitions) explaining that the class of LFSR ciphers (or whatever refined class is most suitable) are known to have a weak of the following nature, expressed perhaps with a supplemental equation or three, it would have been very interesting to read Nash's next response.
The next NSA response (if they were willing to engage in such a dialog) would likely have been "you're still on the right track, but the bar is higher yet".
One needs to realize that Nash is precisely the person the NSA doesn't wish to encourage to clear any bars for which they do not yet know the solution, as he was not of the right temperament to nurture in house, and not in any way predictable out-of-house.
Pedantic interjection: Oh look, I did something terrible and inconsistent with my compound adverbial prepositions in my previous sentence. Here I'm using my hyphens as instruction prefetch markers to the front-end sentence parser ("in house" hardly needs a hint as situated).
If I were in the NSA, however, I would use a regular hyphen where it appears as a prefetch hint, and a Fractur hyphen when used in a capacity that maps into the semantic parse tree. That place is packed with pedants. If you don't keep your levels straight, conversation degenerates and no ciphers are broken.
The summary text did a great job of explaining the history I already know far too well, while doing nothing to convey the pretext for the zombie resurrection. Isn't this the kind of teaser you see on the cover of celebrity magazines (stacked as high as carried children can't grab candy) at the grocery store checkout counter?
Originally I came here because the real world pisses me off when I walk into a convenience store and marked prices are MIA, while quantities and ingredients are obfuscated by maximal signage, and loyalty card prices displayed for pallet quantities in 96 point Helvetica (I'm exactly as loyal to my local gas station as their price/quality/service mix is competitive against convenient alternatives).
I could never figure out why all the websites sprouted "share" buttons. At first I could only vaguely guess what that meant. Promote? Draw attention to? Provide testimonial? Spam your nearest and dearest?
Finally I figured out that the root system for the word "share" is the soil of quasi-victimless theft. We don't really care when we lend a book to a friend that the author gains no recompense in tangible currency, since the author is almost certainly being screwed by the publisher anyway, and who wants to support that? And peer-to-peer is giving it to the man in general (which I say not entirely facetiously).
A better word than "share" might have been "perkolate". African dictators also like to distribute the goodies within their close circles of cronies. We are all alike, at heart. Now the sharing generation has no idea what an asset actually looks like and can't figure out how to draw the knife. My confusion about the word "share" was thinking it made some kind of deeper logical sense to anyone else. No, it was just a term to fudge matters all along.
So what is the problem here? There are possessions that can be either cloned (photographs) or partitioned (the $300 bottle of balsamic vinegar). For everything else, you negotiate, then sign a settlement contract. Or is the question about how to navigate these dark waters without disturbing your fudgy new-age embrace of neo-communism? If your needs go way beyond what is codified by law, you could always hire The Adjuster.
The fire scene is where her husband, Noah (Elias Koteas), the insurance adjuster of the title, comforts a new client in a manner that is not entirely reassuring. As Noah is fond of saying, "You may not feel it, but you're in a state of shock." [Noah is] "just sorting things out, deciding what has value and what doesn't." Hera [his wife, the censor] replies: "I know what you mean. It's the same thing I do."
The movie seems to turn (if one can hazard a guess) on the notion that material division tends to be far from the central matter.
It is called build up your damn infrastructure. Stop taking our money and using it to give the excutives bonuses, and start investing in infrastructure.... Fuck them in the skull.
Nothing is more aggravating than the alpha dog that sits around licking its balls.
John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T's network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years
Wow. That's the ball-lick hall of fame.
Normally I presume that "skullfuck" precludes <invisible tag="sarcasm/">whoosh</invisible> so I had a good ROTFL moment.
Complaining that the new reactors are also water cooled is a lot like saying a car's engine can't possibly be effective or safe because it's based on the century-plus old principle of a piston-driven combustion cycle.
Suppose the Hindenburg accident had never happened and the hydrogen blimp survived its perilous infancy, only to have several spectacular Hindenburg incidents decades later, on much safer designs replete with the benefit of experience and refinement, but also against a much larger operational fleet.
Then a voice pops up saying "Let's finally stop calling the hydrogen blimp a modern design". Part of what this conveys is the notion of "knowing what we know now, we would never have gone down that design road in the first place". Maybe there's no amount of prudent refinement that makes hydrogen blimps a completely safe venture.
A common use of the word "modern" is to encapsulate that our designs consider the full system (environmental, political, social) far more than they once did. Once upon a time, Captain Rickover and the Cold War completely obliterated less dramatic manifestations of the public good. "OK, we're up against the Ruskies, and this looks good. Any objections?"
PWR and BWR reactors are the main operating principle of the reactor - in both cases, obligate water cooling for a full week after you slam on the brakes.
You say that "you like being alive", but given that you are trying to circumvent dying I'd argue that you are not happy with being alive.
The word "job" is often used to mean just the responsibilities and the primary compensation. Language as metaphor, you know. Implicit counterfactuals abound.
I've had a ScanSnap for several years, and I second that it has never jammed once. On average, the OCR also works pretty good, but I had many small complaints and with a little polish it could be great. Not holding my breath, however.
I'm not presently up to date with the OCR software bundle right now. After an initial push, I've let the paper stack up again. Another push coming soon.
One thing that really bugged me as a hardcore nerd is that in duplex scan mode it doesn't auto-cancel bleed-through. If the paper is too thin or transparent, your OCR on both sides is crap.
Seriously, if you've scanned both sides of the page, cancelling out bleed-through has to be a heck of a lot easier than echo cancellation in telephony systems.
Probably no one expected that the criminals behind vast malware trojans would adopt open source methods to make their malware more dangerous, but they have.
That's just idiotic and the whole article reads as an advertisement for Seculert
It's beyond idiotic. This kind of language might have been appropriate in OMNI in 1978 to describe an outburst of creative thinking by Robert Trivers in the early 1970s.
It would also have been appropriate in the same issue of OMNI to run an article about a race of beings—not nearly so clear thinking as Robert Trivers—who survive by drinking the fear of others.
True, but public opinion isn't changed by the fact that 0.2% of the vote went to Generic Third Party #17. Not even a little bit.
You can't back that up, I don't believe it to begin with, and the argument from continuity suggests it's not even logically possible, not to mention the problem with induction.
There exists threshold j below which your vote matters not at all in the minds of dullards who believe this. At some point you have to cross the dullard threshhold. Only a non-dullard can move the dullards. But even the non-dullard concedes that there exists k much less than j below which his inductive impetus is wasted. Only a double non-dullard can move the non-dullards. But even a double non-dullard concedes that there exists m much less than k...
On a more practical basis, there was a time in the nineties in a Canadian election where the dismal third option failed to clear a threshold I didn't even know about: percentage of popular vote which granted them official party status and the resources which flow from that. All the idiots were saying "don't waste your vote" over votes this party desperately needed to clear this bar.
The big one in America, of course, is excluding Ralph Nadar (or anyone like him) from the presidential debate. I think that's the worst possible outcome of all, because it grants the asylum complete control over the speaking points. All you have left are two candidates promising the same small opposites. We're left arguing over the colour of the paint rather than whether to adopt a gasoline or diesel engine.
These throw-away votes don't decide between the donkey and the elephant, but they have a big impact on whether good candidates, or at least strong voices for a different future, bother to show up at all.
I believe America should outlaw two party debate in presidential elections. There should always be at least a third voice who gets equal time, selected by whatever mechanism proves workable. (This is probably a long term arms race where the incumbents constantly work to scupper whatever worked the time before.)
In fact, I wouldn't mind having an entire panel of third party voices who collectively get 1/3 of the total debate time. They can have a bidding system among themselves for who gets to cut in on which issues.
Your rule of thumb is a good one for people who don't wish to think. Not even a little bit.
This is the perfect crime for an early season of the Sopranos, which featured several episodes where "degenerate" businessmen engaged in acts of crime they couldn't refuse. One involved an executive at an HMO, another involved a sporting gear franchise. Difference is that the screenwriters probably weren't bold enough to make this one up.
And, for those wanting his head, it wasn't a horrible crime. It's stealing, since it's not his money, but the victim is hard to identify...
[W]hat is required to live that way, doesn't require twenty hours of schooling. It requires many years of continuous reinforcement in order to build the character to produce the moral conviction behind a belief, but the beliefs themselves are pretty simple. Don't do stuff, don't do negative moral actions. Just don't do them; and just because nobody gets hurt, that doesn't mean you can do it, either. Because it's not about the person who is getting hurt or not hurt; it's about you. If you steal, even though nobody gets hurt, you are still a thief. So don't do it. Period. Don't even consider it. Don't even run it up the flagpole. That's not that complicated. And then secondly, if somebody says to you that you should do something that you know is wrong but it's okay to do it because there's this other good thing over here that you can make happen if you do otherwise, you need to realize that that is the language of a charlatan, that that is inappropriate, that you are being sucked in.
By the time you start rationalizing about the diffuse nature of the victim, moral laxity is already half-way up the flag pole.
David Rose knows your type:
The amount of cheating has never been zero, of course, but it has gone up dramatically in the last 25 years. Moreover, in the past when you asked students why they cheated and they explained why they cheated, they almost never excused the cheating; they never downplayed the moral import of it. They would say it was wrong but they had to do it. Today, though, increasingly--I don't remember the proportion but it's a shockingly high proportion--most of them report cheating at least once; and a shockingly high proportion of those who report cheating at least once say: What's the big deal? In other words, they make an argument that is very consistent with the absence of principled moral restraint. Because their argument is: I cheated; so what? Nobody got hurt. I didn't take anything from anybody. Nobody's worse off. Teacher's not worse off; I'm certainly not worse off; nobody in the class is worse off; what difference did it make? And the answer of course is, at that margin it makes no difference at all. But my point is that it's indicative of a shift in moral beliefs themselves, the way we organize our thoughts, and it's very frightening.
My first university roommate played APP endlessly. Could have been worse (future roommate liked to drop the Minnelli New York, New York bombshell at 7 a.m.). This was before the Wakeman turned into a Walkman. I was already overclocking. We were not a good match.
I'm sure I have known every so often of AP's involvement with Dark Side, but I couldn't have brought it to mind unprompted.
Fleeing from my own roommate, I used to hang out with a dormmate down the hall of Germanic heritage who played Dark Side (rather softly) on speakers that stood nearly up to my armpits, while we sipped Rusty Nails with Teutonic civility. I regard this as one of my first cultural experiences. When I hung out at the student pub it never surprised me that the tables were sticky. Molson/Labatts macrobrew was better off poured just about anywhere else than across your tongue.
APP featured prominently in my crash course in Le Gout Des Autres as one of the high notes.
wealth justification Stockholm syndrome
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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It just amazes me when ideologues resort to the capital flight argument. One minute you're arguing what's right and wrong, the next minute you're capitulating to petulant two-year-olds who run off with their toys to a more lenient parent.
"It's right, and furthermore, if that doesn't convince you, they hold us hostage."
You do know that capital flight is a race to the bottom, don't you? Jared Diamond wrote a fat book about where this kind of thinking leads.
Finally, whales can't talk, so asking them what they think probably won't result in any useful answers.
Yet. What they say 100 years from now will burn your ears off. Their epic ballads used to make the elves cry, but ever since the rise of the throbbing container ship, they dish more scat than Mozart.
"Mommy, I'm going to get a tattoo!"
"You stay away from licorice pasta (*). You hear me! Have you never heard old Missus Sturm (**) sing that horrible coda? She crooned and crooned for half an hour. It was the worst thing ever (***). "
Every breath you take Every move you make Every bond you break Every suck you take I'll be watching you
"How did it come to this? Calves these days all want to emulate Marimba Moby. Let me tell you, they didn't call your pop the Big Maraka for nothing. Anything to stand apart. Honestly." (****)
Giant squid and some other large squid species maintain neutral buoyancy in seawater through an ammonium chloride solution which flows throughout their body and is lighter than seawater. This differs from the method of flotation used by fish, which involves a gas-filled swim bladder. The solution tastes somewhat like salmiakki and makes giant squid unattractive for general human consumption.
For an hour and a half the monster clung to the whale trying to drown it as the whale's mother watched helplessly. "The little whale could stay down for 10 to 12 minutes, then come up. It would just have enough time to spout - only two or three seconds - and then down again." The squid finally won and the baby whale was never seen again.
These talks come with very loose transcripts. Here's the key passage at length as I shamelessly promote Taleb's upcoming book Antifragility, through I'm already certain I only agree with two-thirds of what he is putting forth (emphasis mine):
It's because of convexity effects, because small probability is very convex to error. [] Take the Gaussian distribution. And actually in a separate paper I finally proved something that has taken me three years. Take a very thin-tailed distribution such as the Gaussian. Thin-tailed, the normal distribution. You have two inputs, one of which is standard deviation. Standard deviation is very much your error. Now, if you take a remote event, say, 6, 7, 8 sigmas, you increase the standard deviation away from the mean; you increase the sigma by 10%, the probability of that is multiplied by several thousand, several million, several billion, several trillions. So, what you have, you have nonlinearity of remote events to sigma, to the standard deviation of the distribution. And that, in fact if you have uncertainty, the smallest uncertainty you have in the estimation of the standard deviation, the higher the small probability becomes and at the same time, the bigger the mistake you are going to have about the small probability. So, in other words, most of the uncertainty in parameterizing the model, most of the tails. So, you take an event like Fukushima, you see, where they said it should happen every million years; you perturbate probabilities a little bit and one in a million becomes one in thirty. Or the financial crisis. Or anything.
Some of those sigmas are model guards, not actual certainty.
Perhaps Unity is the perfect fit for 'B' Ark inhabitants. Doesn't seem like a complete community on some level, though. Shuttleworth should bone up on his Hitchhiker's Guide.
I coped with the music-drenched video by tapping along with a little box of paper clips that was near to hand.
GoLoG Park: sounds like some kind of tense, lightly-fictionalized Russian tragedy. I want to believe, but first impressions are lasting impressions.
Never was so much owed by so many to so few
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Here's an adequate apology if the British are having trouble coming up with one of their own:
Never again will so much owed by so many to so few be repaid with chemical castration.
Turing's criminal tendencies were well known to authorities when he was still useful. Apparently, a crime is not a crime when Hitler comes knocking.
jeebus the British are stupid about some things
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No Pardon For Turing
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It's not the conviction that needs to be repealed here, it's the sentence itself. Had he been sentenced with half the character reference he deserved, he could easily have been sentenced to a smack on his limp wrist rather than chemical castration. I find it hard to imagine an ace pilot from the Battle of Britain being sentenced to chemical castration had he raped a member of the royal family (good grief, you idiot, why didn't you ask? Well, now you've gone and done it, we're going to have to send you to Ireland until this cools off.)
What Roman Polansky did was illegal too, and unlike Turing, continues to be illegal in most of the free world. Yet half of Hollywood attests to his character and accomplishments. Certainly Polansky had a rough go during the war. In a completely different way, so did Turing. What amazes me about Bletchley is how they broke so many codes suffering from sleep deprivation and double-vision. The stress must have been unbelievable.
In the event you ever accidentally download child pornography, the FBI advises you to immediately notify it. The Bureau admits that there is a chance your computer would be confiscated, but when your other option is facing 20 years in prison, that seems like a small price to pay.
Somehow you have to make a discrimination of what is child porn and what isn't. If this human discrimination could be coded into an algorithm, this algorithm could [ignoring run time] be used to manufacture child porn from a dead pixel stew (just keep changing random pixels until the klaxon sounds) without ever involving a child or a camera or human genitals. If the discriminator returns a continuous hot-cold signal, you can iterate to illegality through efficient steepest descent. Is it illegal to harbour this algorithm? Stay tuned, someday we'll find out.
With this in hand you could break a nearly-illegal image into three chunks which must be combined and then iterated by the algorithm into the fully illegal state. We're well on our way to a distributed Trojan horse by which you can summon the FBI to perform a DOS attack on any old chump you don't like (not without risk, since it does involve hacking and wire fraud, but fortunately for your purpose the FBI considers this extremely incidental to their suburban assault).
Aside from the stupidity of volunteering your computer for confiscation because some image on the internet wasn't what you expected, this also nicely illustrates that apart from conviction, the sentencing process can independently be riddled with horrific bugs.
"I asked them, 'Where did you get that? I don't remember that.' I asked them, 'Could I access that if I wanted to?' They said no."
In this case the image was so deeply buried within his file system, the FBI doubted this particular Girls Gone Wild aficionado had the technical ability to even find the file for which he was convicted.
But let's return to the British. They have a long history of treating secrecy as a curse for anyone who enters into it. The Peter Wright story was not to their credit, either. As far as I can tell, all he really wanted was a decent retirement pension. Yet for the same reason Turing received no character support, Mr Wright had no avenue to appeal his pension claim to the Ministry of Brazil. So he wrote a book instead. How did that work out for MI5 and MI6? Just wondering. I wonder if Mr Wright considered the Turing story when deciding how to wear his fate? Had Turing merely broken his security restriction, the British would have had to hang him (try playing that down fifty years later) or send him off into exile, where he would have done just fine in the court of public opinion, as his heroism came into proper focus.
Your post reminds me why I'm a happy Canadian, unlike yourself. Why are you trying to protect Canada by importing American-style rhetoric? Almost every sentence you wrote includes the word "could" and the eventuality is never a good one.
Not that we're immune by any measure from sliding down the slippery slope, but we still have a public debate worth entering into, and the possibility exists that from time to time, Sisyphus will begrudge himself to push the heavy object back up the slope some small distance.
But in America, Sisyphus was hacked down to size, dragged into the bathroom, and drowned in the bathtub. Now it's all downhill in all equations; government just can't win.
I'm more afraid of Canada catching this disease of American-style political discourse than I am of this police surveillance system in its infancy. That the can of worms was spilling on slashdot means the system isn't completely broken after all. Democracy has always had a reactive component.
I'm tall; due to having most of my height in my lower back, my sitting height is about the norm for 6'7". No matter what vehicle I'm driving, I generally have to do a head dip to read the traffic lights. If the car has tint at the top of the windscreen, by the time I recline the seat far enough to see properly, I can barely reach the steering wheel, so I crank the seat forward until my knees contact the dashboard. This approximates comfort, all things considered.
For air travel, if I sit erect in an airplane seat and tip my head back it doesn't touch down until my nostrils are tangent to the engine intakes. The 90 degree head incline is not conducive to sleeping. If I slide far enough forward to prop my head up--adding some trunk torsion I'll viciously regret after the flight--I get the glower of death from the passenger in front of me. The only thing that works at all well on a long flight is to surreptitiously tear the floatation cushion off it's velcro straps and tuck it under the seat, then sit with my ass on the hard aluminum frame until I have more spinal damage than Glenn Gould from his ratty chair, but at least I can sleep.
In the modern world of air transportation, I don't have the balls to do that any more. Besides, you can no longer request a free blanket to conceal and squelch the surreptitious fumbling between your legs. "No, ma'am, I'm not doing anything funny, I just wanted to found the mile-high self-administered bikini-wax club."
Yeah, it's dangerous to have the engineering gene these days.
Every interaction with an LEO is potentially fatal for the "civilian"
This is a mode of argument I rarely accept. You can't police without pulling people over. The real problem here is the "I thought he had a gun" part. It's your job as a cop not to shoot until you know he has a gun. Of course, there are cops who are fine to shoot first and ask questions later if society lets them get away with it. So don't let them get away with it. See also bankers and politicians.
You seem to be arguing that the twitchy police force is such a dangerous thing that they shouldn't pull anyone over until he's so likely to be guilty of something it's his own fault if he gets plugged on the least pretense.
No, no matter how you refine the coefficient-of-pulling-over the core problem concerning accidental enforcement fatalities is totally unacceptable.
Even in the savage jungle, when a Xingu tribesman bumps into Tarzan, they probably both have the wits to keep their hands where the other party can see them so long as civilities last.
Wikipedia documents are supposed to be word processor documents.
Huh, I never got that memo. I thought it was a system for collaborative editing and mass distribution. In my own experience, I've always found WYSIWYG turns far too quickly into WYGIWYSW (what you get is what you're stuck with). And besides, the collaboration system depends on a diff tool with a human-accessible interpretation. It's not as if authoring is the only mission-critical task.
I started writing some WordPress posts recently in the visual editor, and man does that suck. A simple paste carries all kinds of format from the source document I usually don't want. When I press "undo" to use the clunky "text paste only" widget, the undo scrambles my window scroll position, and sometimes takes out a piece of my previous edit as well. It's a PITA to add text to a paragraph that ends with link text. CR SPACE BACK-ARROW BS FORWARD-ARROW seems to work to get me out of the link text format zone. This is better than raw markup? How, exactly?
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
I've been following LuaTeX for some while. It's a lot of things, but compared to base LaTeX being a speed daemon is not one of these. Should be plenty fast enough for Wikipedia, though.
One thing that turned me off Wikipedia was the asymmetry of the quantification system: there's no way to add the statement "it has never been said that..." to a valid article. Of course, this is not a problem if someone notable has bothered to make a trivial observation in that mode on the record, but surprise... it turns out that notable sources often have better things to do than state the obvious. Kind of like Godel's theorem: in any attestational system, there is something blindingly obvious no-one has ever bothered to note for the record because it's too trivial to bother with. The same thing bugs me with peer review: positive results circulate, negative results vanish without a trace. I find it a burden to create balance working in a half a predicate logic, but I'm weird that way, let me be the first to admit it. In a way, a person of my temperament never really belonged there in the first place. I graciously retired when I discovered the fault was on my side, though I do still fix howlers whenever they cross my path.
I was also frustrated with how Wikipedia lost traction on leverage. (I don't want to belabour that just now.) Hopefully this is the beginning of reversing the tide.
A peculiar arms race: the more we spend on oil to develop such weapons, the more the Iranians can spend to dig deeper facilities. For a hell of a lot less money, we could have handed Monsanto a nuclear tip and had the FDA write a blanket decree: "entirely worth doing". Monsanto would of course protest at first blush, "but only if we can sue surrounding nations for harbouring unauthorized radionuclides". If only our reticence to fight fire with fire had been matched by a similar reticence concerning the safety of shotgun gene splicing. For a long time I was under the illusion that Monsanto had grafted these genes into a fixed chromosomal position so that you actually had a stable organism to assess for safety, rather than the biological equivalent to Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans.
Slashdot Mirror
Now it finally comes out: the real reason Turing bit the poisoned apple. Only he would have said 1945.
That's because you've never tried to debug a bathtub full of DNA or a DWave Prospectus.
For perspective, look at the pyramids. Way overbuilt. All they really needed was a hot fire and a couple of tiny Mason jars. Khufu was a man of progress. Eighteen years in, he commented "I'm amazed at how this pile of slabs now approaches a point." Then he spotted the goldsmith. "Oh, look, you've fashioned a perfect likeness as a tiny brooch pin. Let me try one on. Ouch! Oh well, fresh metal, touch wood. Hey, anyone got any wood?"
World's tallest mason jut for 3800 years. Don't let the door hit you on the way in.
You'd have to work a lot faster than that to build it out of Lego bricks. But it would basically be the same thing. Just counting for area reduction since the 4004 reduces a Giza block to roughly a Lego brick:
(2000 kg) / (((10 micrometers) / (22 nm))^2) = 9.68 grams
Every transistor on the 4004 would have made a Pharaoh proud.
I take a more extreme view of faith as a form of solipsism. If you fully separate faith from science, faith becomes an entirely personal matter: you can only gain faith by some kind of mysterious internal light inaccessible to the methods of science. OK, fine. From this view there's no reason not to believe that God created the universe five minutes ago, exactly as we recall it to have been five minutes ago, replete with another 13.7 billion years of back story (which can be boiled down rather succinctly to the big bang, QED, and self-organizing primordial goo--for which the exact mechanism in the last case remain a trifle mysterious). For some reason, God loves the evolutionary back story. No creation is complete without one. Either way, evolution is the minimum description length account of what we observe as the history of the universe in rocks and oceans and nebulae. This is true whether or not evolution actually happened. Even if God created the earth and human kind a mere 10,000 years ago evolution is still the minimum description of what we observe in the fossil record and the genetic heritage of life (an exploding data set which poses a looming and insurmountable challenge to 10,000 year literalism).
If you feel the illumination of faith from within, you can show it by how you choose to live. If you inner glow so moves you, you can reflect honour on the divine creator by living your life to a high moral standard however you perceive this.
Where I tend to draw the line is when two people get together who each feel an inner glow, who then compare notes and decide that they believe in the same divine spirit. This consensus is not achieved through a scientific process. Faith is not amenable to science. How do you really know you believe in the same deity as anyone else?
Here's how the slight of hand works in organized religion. You posit a sacred text, and then attribute authorship of the sacred text to a unique and singular deity. Yesterday's TED talk on the Cyrus Cylinder shows the Book of Isaiah attributing to Jehovah what had previously been attributed to the Babylonian god Marduk. One story, multiple originating deities. Fancy that.
I have a lot of problems when a group of 100 million people go around absolutely secure in the belief that they feel within themselves a sliver of the same divine flame, when most of them can't even agree on the right way to tie your shoe.
Santorum, to his credit, is not so secure: he views the Democrats as hewing to the wrong Christian god. Now let's repeat this bisection step until every believer is a faith until himself or herself. Faith as a personal matter. Wonderful.
I have no real problem with faith, but I have a deep problem with the aggregation of faith. Let's suppose Obama believes that he and Santorum both believe in the same god, but Santorum disputes this. How is such a discrepancy resolved? Remember, you can't use science. Faith is not amenable to science (or it wouldn't be faith). I guess you need a prophet of especially reliable connection to the Big One. Shades of Russell's type theory. And we agree on the nature of this prophet exactly how? Are we back to the aggregation of unique inner glows? I thought so.
There's no conflict between science and faith as such, but there is a conflict between science and the aggregation of faith (for some reason, faith tends to aggregate along racial lines, and never takes the last critical step to one world religion).
Message to Santorum: if you want to dis-aggregate the Christian granfalloon, by all means fill your boots.
Shortly after pressing submit, I realized that I made light of the difference between adjectives and adverbs when I first commented on the adenoidal Fermions. Like the difference between ovaries and testicles, people tend to insist upon the distinction even when it isn't terribly germane. Either type leads to adenoidal behaviour patterns.
Beyond English department embroidery, there's little to fault with Nash's composition. His argument develops logically, his sentences parse correctly, he sticks to the primary points, and he's clear both about the potential significance and the nature of the mechanics involved.
This particular English department suggestion made me laugh out loud. How is it that adjectives became spin one-half particles? There are two distinct recent events in his sentence (the work and the discussion about the work). You suggest his presentation is weak because the cognitive Boson (recentness) wasn't recast as Fermionic when appending the -ly affix. When writing to the NSA, which is notorious for using seven levels of Fraktur script to distinguish algebraic levels, one presumes they can't keep two verb instances straight in a simple English sentence.
In high school I was given a composition exercise to write a paragraph on camera assembly. We were given the steps as a mishmash. It was an exercise in achieved logical order.
My solution: ...
The A goes into the B.
The B goes into the C.
The C goes into the D.
QED.
I varied the "goes into" part appropriately. In fact, I wrote very nice sentences. What I did not vary was beginning every sentence with "The". My English teacher was so annoyed with my stylistic uniformity he docked me severely. I could only raise my eyebrows and file his feedback in my Twilight Zone folder. We weren't given any objective function on the benefits of faux variation of form upon correct assembly, yet we were expected to engage in the art of embroidery nevertheless.
Nash made a pretty good start there. If he had received a one sentence answer (with or without confounding word repetitions) explaining that the class of LFSR ciphers (or whatever refined class is most suitable) are known to have a weak of the following nature, expressed perhaps with a supplemental equation or three, it would have been very interesting to read Nash's next response.
The next NSA response (if they were willing to engage in such a dialog) would likely have been "you're still on the right track, but the bar is higher yet".
One needs to realize that Nash is precisely the person the NSA doesn't wish to encourage to clear any bars for which they do not yet know the solution, as he was not of the right temperament to nurture in house, and not in any way predictable out-of-house.
Pedantic interjection: Oh look, I did something terrible and inconsistent with my compound adverbial prepositions in my previous sentence. Here I'm using my hyphens as instruction prefetch markers to the front-end sentence parser ("in house" hardly needs a hint as situated).
If I were in the NSA, however, I would use a regular hyphen where it appears as a prefetch hint, and a Fractur hyphen when used in a capacity that maps into the semantic parse tree. That place is packed with pedants. If you don't keep your levels straight, conversation degenerates and no ciphers are broken.
The summary text did a great job of explaining the history I already know far too well, while doing nothing to convey the pretext for the zombie resurrection. Isn't this the kind of teaser you see on the cover of celebrity magazines (stacked as high as carried children can't grab candy) at the grocery store checkout counter?
Originally I came here because the real world pisses me off when I walk into a convenience store and marked prices are MIA, while quantities and ingredients are obfuscated by maximal signage, and loyalty card prices displayed for pallet quantities in 96 point Helvetica (I'm exactly as loyal to my local gas station as their price/quality/service mix is competitive against convenient alternatives).
Bad, Slashdot, bad.
I could never figure out why all the websites sprouted "share" buttons. At first I could only vaguely guess what that meant. Promote? Draw attention to? Provide testimonial? Spam your nearest and dearest?
Finally I figured out that the root system for the word "share" is the soil of quasi-victimless theft. We don't really care when we lend a book to a friend that the author gains no recompense in tangible currency, since the author is almost certainly being screwed by the publisher anyway, and who wants to support that? And peer-to-peer is giving it to the man in general (which I say not entirely facetiously).
A better word than "share" might have been "perkolate". African dictators also like to distribute the goodies within their close circles of cronies. We are all alike, at heart. Now the sharing generation has no idea what an asset actually looks like and can't figure out how to draw the knife. My confusion about the word "share" was thinking it made some kind of deeper logical sense to anyone else. No, it was just a term to fudge matters all along.
So what is the problem here? There are possessions that can be either cloned (photographs) or partitioned (the $300 bottle of balsamic vinegar). For everything else, you negotiate, then sign a settlement contract. Or is the question about how to navigate these dark waters without disturbing your fudgy new-age embrace of neo-communism? If your needs go way beyond what is codified by law, you could always hire The Adjuster.
The movie seems to turn (if one can hazard a guess) on the notion that material division tends to be far from the central matter.
Nothing is more aggravating than the alpha dog that sits around licking its balls.
Wow. That's the ball-lick hall of fame.
Normally I presume that "skullfuck" precludes
<invisible tag="sarcasm/">whoosh</invisible>
so I had a good ROTFL moment.
Suppose the Hindenburg accident had never happened and the hydrogen blimp survived its perilous infancy, only to have several spectacular Hindenburg incidents decades later, on much safer designs replete with the benefit of experience and refinement, but also against a much larger operational fleet.
Then a voice pops up saying "Let's finally stop calling the hydrogen blimp a modern design". Part of what this conveys is the notion of "knowing what we know now, we would never have gone down that design road in the first place". Maybe there's no amount of prudent refinement that makes hydrogen blimps a completely safe venture.
A common use of the word "modern" is to encapsulate that our designs consider the full system (environmental, political, social) far more than they once did. Once upon a time, Captain Rickover and the Cold War completely obliterated less dramatic manifestations of the public good. "OK, we're up against the Ruskies, and this looks good. Any objections?"
Why doesn't that sound "modern" to my jaded ear?
The word "job" is often used to mean just the responsibilities and the primary compensation. Language as metaphor, you know. Implicit counterfactuals abound.
I've had a ScanSnap for several years, and I second that it has never jammed once. On average, the OCR also works pretty good, but I had many small complaints and with a little polish it could be great. Not holding my breath, however.
I'm not presently up to date with the OCR software bundle right now. After an initial push, I've let the paper stack up again. Another push coming soon.
One thing that really bugged me as a hardcore nerd is that in duplex scan mode it doesn't auto-cancel bleed-through. If the paper is too thin or transparent, your OCR on both sides is crap.
Seriously, if you've scanned both sides of the page, cancelling out bleed-through has to be a heck of a lot easier than echo cancellation in telephony systems.
It's beyond idiotic. This kind of language might have been appropriate in OMNI in 1978 to describe an outburst of creative thinking by Robert Trivers in the early 1970s.
It would also have been appropriate in the same issue of OMNI to run an article about a race of beings—not nearly so clear thinking as Robert Trivers—who survive by drinking the fear of others.
You can't back that up, I don't believe it to begin with, and the argument from continuity suggests it's not even logically possible, not to mention the problem with induction.
There exists threshold j below which your vote matters not at all in the minds of dullards who believe this. At some point you have to cross the dullard threshhold. Only a non-dullard can move the dullards. But even the non-dullard concedes that there exists k much less than j below which his inductive impetus is wasted. Only a double non-dullard can move the non-dullards. But even a double non-dullard concedes that there exists m much less than k ...
On a more practical basis, there was a time in the nineties in a Canadian election where the dismal third option failed to clear a threshold I didn't even know about: percentage of popular vote which granted them official party status and the resources which flow from that. All the idiots were saying "don't waste your vote" over votes this party desperately needed to clear this bar.
The big one in America, of course, is excluding Ralph Nadar (or anyone like him) from the presidential debate. I think that's the worst possible outcome of all, because it grants the asylum complete control over the speaking points. All you have left are two candidates promising the same small opposites. We're left arguing over the colour of the paint rather than whether to adopt a gasoline or diesel engine.
These throw-away votes don't decide between the donkey and the elephant, but they have a big impact on whether good candidates, or at least strong voices for a different future, bother to show up at all.
I believe America should outlaw two party debate in presidential elections. There should always be at least a third voice who gets equal time, selected by whatever mechanism proves workable. (This is probably a long term arms race where the incumbents constantly work to scupper whatever worked the time before.)
In fact, I wouldn't mind having an entire panel of third party voices who collectively get 1/3 of the total debate time. They can have a bidding system among themselves for who gets to cut in on which issues.
Your rule of thumb is a good one for people who don't wish to think. Not even a little bit.
This is the perfect crime for an early season of the Sopranos, which featured several episodes where "degenerate" businessmen engaged in acts of crime they couldn't refuse. One involved an executive at an HMO, another involved a sporting gear franchise. Difference is that the screenwriters probably weren't bold enough to make this one up.
David Rose on the Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior in which he discusses his new book by that title.
From the very loose transcript (my emph.):
By the time you start rationalizing about the diffuse nature of the victim, moral laxity is already half-way up the flag pole.
David Rose knows your type:
My first university roommate played APP endlessly. Could have been worse (future roommate liked to drop the Minnelli New York, New York bombshell at 7 a.m.). This was before the Wakeman turned into a Walkman. I was already overclocking. We were not a good match.
I'm sure I have known every so often of AP's involvement with Dark Side, but I couldn't have brought it to mind unprompted.
Fleeing from my own roommate, I used to hang out with a dormmate down the hall of Germanic heritage who played Dark Side (rather softly) on speakers that stood nearly up to my armpits, while we sipped Rusty Nails with Teutonic civility. I regard this as one of my first cultural experiences. When I hung out at the student pub it never surprised me that the tables were sticky. Molson/Labatts macrobrew was better off poured just about anywhere else than across your tongue.
APP featured prominently in my crash course in Le Gout Des Autres as one of the high notes.
It just amazes me when ideologues resort to the capital flight argument. One minute you're arguing what's right and wrong, the next minute you're capitulating to petulant two-year-olds who run off with their toys to a more lenient parent.
"It's right, and furthermore, if that doesn't convince you, they hold us hostage."
You do know that capital flight is a race to the bottom, don't you? Jared Diamond wrote a fat book about where this kind of thinking leads.
Yet. What they say 100 years from now will burn your ears off. Their epic ballads used to make the elves cry, but ever since the rise of the throbbing container ship, they dish more scat than Mozart.
"Mommy, I'm going to get a tattoo!"
"You stay away from licorice pasta (*). You hear me! Have you never heard old Missus Sturm (**) sing that horrible coda? She crooned and crooned for half an hour. It was the worst thing ever (***). "
"How did it come to this? Calves these days all want to emulate Marimba Moby. Let me tell you, they didn't call your pop the Big Maraka for nothing. Anything to stand apart. Honestly." (****)
(*) From Giant squid
(**) Sperm Whales May Have Names
(***) From The Giant Squid:
(****) From Sperm Whales Dominica
This dialog is a bit of a mess, but makes some good points: Taleb on Antifragility
These talks come with very loose transcripts. Here's the key passage at length as I shamelessly promote Taleb's upcoming book Antifragility , through I'm already certain I only agree with two-thirds of what he is putting forth (emphasis mine):
Some of those sigmas are model guards, not actual certainty.
Perhaps Unity is the perfect fit for 'B' Ark inhabitants. Doesn't seem like a complete community on some level, though. Shuttleworth should bone up on his Hitchhiker's Guide.
Bubuntu: Bathtub Ubuntu.
I coped with the music-drenched video by tapping along with a little box of paper clips that was near to hand.
GoLoG Park: sounds like some kind of tense, lightly-fictionalized Russian tragedy. I want to believe, but first impressions are lasting impressions.
Here's an adequate apology if the British are having trouble coming up with one of their own:
Turing's criminal tendencies were well known to authorities when he was still useful. Apparently, a crime is not a crime when Hitler comes knocking.
It's not the conviction that needs to be repealed here, it's the sentence itself. Had he been sentenced with half the character reference he deserved, he could easily have been sentenced to a smack on his limp wrist rather than chemical castration. I find it hard to imagine an ace pilot from the Battle of Britain being sentenced to chemical castration had he raped a member of the royal family (good grief, you idiot, why didn't you ask? Well, now you've gone and done it, we're going to have to send you to Ireland until this cools off.)
What Roman Polansky did was illegal too, and unlike Turing, continues to be illegal in most of the free world. Yet half of Hollywood attests to his character and accomplishments. Certainly Polansky had a rough go during the war. In a completely different way, so did Turing. What amazes me about Bletchley is how they broke so many codes suffering from sleep deprivation and double-vision. The stress must have been unbelievable.
OK, let's not leave out the Americans, either.
Limewire Cruft Leads to Jail Time for Matthew White
Somehow you have to make a discrimination of what is child porn and what isn't. If this human discrimination could be coded into an algorithm, this algorithm could [ignoring run time] be used to manufacture child porn from a dead pixel stew (just keep changing random pixels until the klaxon sounds) without ever involving a child or a camera or human genitals. If the discriminator returns a continuous hot-cold signal, you can iterate to illegality through efficient steepest descent. Is it illegal to harbour this algorithm? Stay tuned, someday we'll find out.
With this in hand you could break a nearly-illegal image into three chunks which must be combined and then iterated by the algorithm into the fully illegal state. We're well on our way to a distributed Trojan horse by which you can summon the FBI to perform a DOS attack on any old chump you don't like (not without risk, since it does involve hacking and wire fraud, but fortunately for your purpose the FBI considers this extremely incidental to their suburban assault).
Aside from the stupidity of volunteering your computer for confiscation because some image on the internet wasn't what you expected, this also nicely illustrates that apart from conviction, the sentencing process can independently be riddled with horrific bugs.
In this case the image was so deeply buried within his file system, the FBI doubted this particular Girls Gone Wild aficionado had the technical ability to even find the file for which he was convicted.
But let's return to the British. They have a long history of treating secrecy as a curse for anyone who enters into it. The Peter Wright story was not to their credit, either. As far as I can tell, all he really wanted was a decent retirement pension. Yet for the same reason Turing received no character support, Mr Wright had no avenue to appeal his pension claim to the Ministry of Brazil. So he wrote a book instead. How did that work out for MI5 and MI6? Just wondering. I wonder if Mr Wright considered the Turing story when deciding how to wear his fate? Had Turing merely broken his security restriction, the British would have had to hang him (try playing that down fifty years later) or send him off into exile, where he would have done just fine in the court of public opinion, as his heroism came into proper focus.
Maybe
Your post reminds me why I'm a happy Canadian, unlike yourself. Why are you trying to protect Canada by importing American-style rhetoric? Almost every sentence you wrote includes the word "could" and the eventuality is never a good one.
Not that we're immune by any measure from sliding down the slippery slope, but we still have a public debate worth entering into, and the possibility exists that from time to time, Sisyphus will begrudge himself to push the heavy object back up the slope some small distance.
But in America, Sisyphus was hacked down to size, dragged into the bathroom, and drowned in the bathtub. Now it's all downhill in all equations; government just can't win.
I'm more afraid of Canada catching this disease of American-style political discourse than I am of this police surveillance system in its infancy. That the can of worms was spilling on slashdot means the system isn't completely broken after all. Democracy has always had a reactive component.
I'm tall; due to having most of my height in my lower back, my sitting height is about the norm for 6'7". No matter what vehicle I'm driving, I generally have to do a head dip to read the traffic lights. If the car has tint at the top of the windscreen, by the time I recline the seat far enough to see properly, I can barely reach the steering wheel, so I crank the seat forward until my knees contact the dashboard. This approximates comfort, all things considered.
For air travel, if I sit erect in an airplane seat and tip my head back it doesn't touch down until my nostrils are tangent to the engine intakes. The 90 degree head incline is not conducive to sleeping. If I slide far enough forward to prop my head up--adding some trunk torsion I'll viciously regret after the flight--I get the glower of death from the passenger in front of me. The only thing that works at all well on a long flight is to surreptitiously tear the floatation cushion off it's velcro straps and tuck it under the seat, then sit with my ass on the hard aluminum frame until I have more spinal damage than Glenn Gould from his ratty chair, but at least I can sleep.
In the modern world of air transportation, I don't have the balls to do that any more. Besides, you can no longer request a free blanket to conceal and squelch the surreptitious fumbling between your legs. "No, ma'am, I'm not doing anything funny, I just wanted to found the mile-high self-administered bikini-wax club."
Yeah, it's dangerous to have the engineering gene these days.
This is a mode of argument I rarely accept. You can't police without pulling people over. The real problem here is the "I thought he had a gun" part. It's your job as a cop not to shoot until you know he has a gun. Of course, there are cops who are fine to shoot first and ask questions later if society lets them get away with it. So don't let them get away with it. See also bankers and politicians.
You seem to be arguing that the twitchy police force is such a dangerous thing that they shouldn't pull anyone over until he's so likely to be guilty of something it's his own fault if he gets plugged on the least pretense.
No, no matter how you refine the coefficient-of-pulling-over the core problem concerning accidental enforcement fatalities is totally unacceptable.
Even in the savage jungle, when a Xingu tribesman bumps into Tarzan, they probably both have the wits to keep their hands where the other party can see them so long as civilities last.
Huh, I never got that memo. I thought it was a system for collaborative editing and mass distribution. In my own experience, I've always found WYSIWYG turns far too quickly into WYGIWYSW (what you get is what you're stuck with). And besides, the collaboration system depends on a diff tool with a human-accessible interpretation. It's not as if authoring is the only mission-critical task.
I started writing some WordPress posts recently in the visual editor, and man does that suck. A simple paste carries all kinds of format from the source document I usually don't want. When I press "undo" to use the clunky "text paste only" widget, the undo scrambles my window scroll position, and sometimes takes out a piece of my previous edit as well. It's a PITA to add text to a paragraph that ends with link text. CR SPACE BACK-ARROW BS FORWARD-ARROW seems to work to get me out of the link text format zone. This is better than raw markup? How, exactly?
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
I've been following LuaTeX for some while. It's a lot of things, but compared to base LaTeX being a speed daemon is not one of these. Should be plenty fast enough for Wikipedia, though.
One thing that turned me off Wikipedia was the asymmetry of the quantification system: there's no way to add the statement "it has never been said that ..." to a valid article. Of course, this is not a problem if someone notable has bothered to make a trivial observation in that mode on the record, but surprise ... it turns out that notable sources often have better things to do than state the obvious. Kind of like Godel's theorem: in any attestational system, there is something blindingly obvious no-one has ever bothered to note for the record because it's too trivial to bother with. The same thing bugs me with peer review: positive results circulate, negative results vanish without a trace. I find it a burden to create balance working in a half a predicate logic, but I'm weird that way, let me be the first to admit it. In a way, a person of my temperament never really belonged there in the first place. I graciously retired when I discovered the fault was on my side, though I do still fix howlers whenever they cross my path.
I was also frustrated with how Wikipedia lost traction on leverage. (I don't want to belabour that just now.) Hopefully this is the beginning of reversing the tide.
A peculiar arms race: the more we spend on oil to develop such weapons, the more the Iranians can spend to dig deeper facilities. For a hell of a lot less money, we could have handed Monsanto a nuclear tip and had the FDA write a blanket decree: "entirely worth doing". Monsanto would of course protest at first blush, "but only if we can sue surrounding nations for harbouring unauthorized radionuclides". If only our reticence to fight fire with fire had been matched by a similar reticence concerning the safety of shotgun gene splicing. For a long time I was under the illusion that Monsanto had grafted these genes into a fixed chromosomal position so that you actually had a stable organism to assess for safety, rather than the biological equivalent to Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans.