On 1. it's not about choosing to use a certain language. Yes there are plenty of valid reasons for choosing a scripting language for certain tasks. I tend to disagree that anyone who has only learned scripting languages is all that likely to have learned enough about the progression from machine language to whatever interprets their script. I don't think it happens enough to use that word 'often' the way you are using it. I don't even think that the people programming in classical compiled languages such as C tend to be exposed to hardware and machine language concepts enough to use 'often' analogously. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking the problem gets worse with people who don't know a compiled language, but even if someone who only works in Javascript is equally likely to know what an assembler does as is someone coding C#, well, not enough people coding C# or C++ or good ole C know enough about assemblers either.
On 2. I'm not clear just how you mean that. Are you arguing that the application code itself can be written to block the most likely lower level attacks, or that it's normal for scripts written up to standard to actually succeed at blocking them, or that the various interpreters themselves are written to block at least the most likely lower level attacks? I'm also unsure if you're including some of the dynamic languages that frequently extend beyond just scripting modes to get your "well written scripting languages". Are we talking TCL, Perl, and Ruby here, or Javascript, PHP, and Microsoft ASP? How much does a Python writer need to know about the interpreter or the OS his or her script or executable will run on? Is being able to use Python as a scripting language, but not properly create executables, imbed Python in C or C++, or write new modules for Python in C, C++ or Cython enough to get good protection? It looks to me like protection from even the most common forms of attack depends largely on the language having dynamic elements that go beyond scripting, and it's the people who know those elements, and so simply have to know something of compiled languages and assembly, that make that good protection possible.
I won't go as far as to claim that the more a language is 'purely' for scripting, the more it's been prone to security flaws. I don't think we have 100% correlation there - but I do think we have some.
I'm not saying its a good idea to develop an elitist attitude towards the people that use them, but this explains why there's some rational basis for looking down on scripting languages. It's not that they are inherently bad or that the people who use them lack the ability to do 'real programming'. But, they are basically all about not having to know anything at all about how the other layers of abstraction work, and a consequence is they also don't give the programmer any real connection to how the hardware layer works and how you get from it to what they know.
For example, if you know how an OS is generally compiled in a language such as C or C++, then the next step is understanding that the compiler is itself running 'on a level above' assembly language. Understand that, and its a straightforward conclusion that a program can always be written in assembly that bypasses ANY controls the OS has about accessing different parts of memory, doing file copying, assigning user and admin permissions, and similar things. That program may be much less portable than something written in Perl, but it's inherently very powerful at what it does. It's not that people who program in assembly are necessarily any smarter or better at it than people who write Python. That's certainly debatable. The thing that isn't debatable is that the closer a programmer gets to machine language, the more they can do that nothing higher in the heirarchy can stop, position itself against, or even detect. At some point, that means trying to secure scripted code, or compiled code, or anything above assembly is like trying to defend a point with what may be a perfectly good machine gun, but the other side is the only one with stealthed, antimatter pumped, orbital X-ray laser arrays. They can have sloppy aim, lack elegance and inspiration, and still win.
Nowdays, there are plenty of people working with a modern OS, even one that is still all compiled at just one level above assembly (if there are any real systems that you want to count as modern that still fit that, what with silverlight, dotnet, flash and so on on just about every machine out there), who don't understand the heirarchial nature of coding worth a damn. It seems to get worse as you get to people writng applications for the various OSes. Some of these people are very good coders (or scripters, or whatever), but they really just can't write secure apps, because they don't really understand what the difference between a script kiddee attacker and a threat whole governments wish they could get on their side really is.
That's just one of the things this course and others like it are supposed to fix. A lot of us need this. Hell, I've known this stuff for 35-40 years, and this reminds me I should get out the old books and do a little refresher. If you've read things about coding becoming as professional as aero-space engineering or similar, and found yourself agreeing with any of them, this is where it starts.
Modern physics proceeds from at least four assumptions that all the hard sciences accept.
1. The Universe is governed by consistent laws. (OK, you've got that one). 2. To be science, a prediction must be falsifiable (and that one too). 3. The correct explanation for any phenomenon lies within nature. 4. The researcher is at least potentially smart enough to find the answers while staying strictly within the first three assumptions. (yes, it's hard to see how anyone can do anything without first assuming the possiblity of success, but it's often just tacitly assumed, so lets make it explicit).
It also very frequently accepts some other constraints, such as:
5. Occam's razor is useful and can be unambiguously applied. 6. The 'rules' or 'laws' sought are expressions of math, and in a given domain of discourse, one mathematical system is the correct one. 7. The laws tend to have something called elegance, symmetry or beauty which helps in deciding which lines of enquiry to persue.
If it's genuinely correct, which most physicists think it is, then you might ask yourself, what were Emily Noether's assumptions? (Since it's proven in the math sense, that question is really what were her axioms?) Whatever they were, each and every one of them is a basic assumption of modern physics. Just from the Wiki, it looks like at first she assumed all conservation laws were expressible as ordinary differential equations and that the principle of least action applied. People have since generalised this theorem beyond that first assumption to partial differential equations (Basically applying the theorem to force field models), but the principle of least action still seems fundamental,
Given this, I would genuinely be surprised if physics rests on less than about 12 to 16 assumptions of these sorts, although that's simply my intuitive assessment of the bare minimum, and as I've indicated, some of them are simply very, very frequently assumed but not technically invariably so.
True, but who above 12 years old was really surprised when Virgin unicorns all ended up on the endangered species list? Wait, I'm asking that on Slashdot, where it was probably totally unexpected and a lot of you still don't get it.
Glad to see somebody trying to set the record straight. Corporations are not required to take any steps that, in their management's judgement, might be contrary to law. There are several areas of law where the exact opposite is the case. (Just try to claim in a U.S. court, that your corporation was compelled to bribe local officials in a non U.S. locale because "it's the way that culture works" and you would have been remiss to not use bribery to maximise shareholder value. You'll find out that there are international treaties supporting the U.S. penalizing your corp for something it did off of US soil.). In addition, it's usually possible for a board to 'beat the rap' by simply claiming they were avoiding negative publicity for such actions, i..e. by claiming they feared triggering a boycott movement.
The problem starts when somebody finds out that shareholders have sued because a board of directors 'failed to maximise value'. The correct way to look at that is that somebody has sued NASA because a kid on a playground broke their window with a baseball. Just because somebody files a lawsuit doesn't mean it is at all reasonable nor that they have any chance of winning. Somebody might sue you for breathing their air, now do you go through life using that to justify your every action? There have been a few reasonable claims that a board was failing in its duties, but many more unreasonable ones, and the chance anyone will win a suit against a board of directors over shareholder value is pretty slim overall.
Here's the sort of situation where a shareholder value claim can win: The board appears to be taking steps that are generally devaluing the company, or at least making it perform at far under anticipated projections. Judicial review shows these steps may have helped another company profit, and part of the board consists of members who have some sort of 'less than arms length' relation with that company.
Longer answer is, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity don't really fit together. One way to get around this is to impose a minimum amount of various quantities in relativity. If you set the minimum quantum of velocity all the way up to c, that's an admittedly extreme example of such reconciliation. The point is, to get a unified theory, either you take just about all the quantization out of quantum mechanics, or you add quite a bit of quantization to relativity.
Minkowski was the guy who showed Einstein that special relativity implied that the geometry of the universe was 4 dimensional. At first, Einstein though that Minkowski was just doing an interesting math trick, but he soon decided that the real shape of space was a 4 dimensional inseperable space-time. Einstein credited Minkowski's work with showing him the first steps to bridge the gap from Special to General Relativity. Unfortunately, Minkowski died in 1909, just three years after he started corresponding with Einstein on Spec. R. . The Minkowski model really is 'static' and 'blocklike' and nothing can really said to be happening, and that's the first place Popper got the idea from. Einstein himself later (1940's-50's) spent lots of time talking to Godel about just that, and if Popper was just a 'philosopher with superficial knowledge of physics', Godel was just the mathematician who Einstein went to when the math got really tough, and who had ready access to the then greatest living physicist in turn. Some of what Godel developed from General Relativity gives abstract geometric models of the whole universe which aren't "Static Block-like", but they also allow for the existence of time travel via 'closed time-like curves'. Godel's interpretation came just shortly before he published mathematical proofs of the existence of God and the Afterlife, and he later died basically from refusing to eat for fear he was being poisoned. Personally, I agree more with Godel's interpretation of the geometry of the whole universe than with Minkowski's, but given all the facts, I'm not going to dismiss Popper (and certainly not Minkowski) as easily as some people here are.
Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment, which was first performed in 1887 before Special Relativity was even a gleam in Einstein's eye. The M-M experiment was refined repeatedly during the period that Special Relativity was first discussed (1905-06) to focus on testing one of SR's basic predictions, so a test of at least one of special relativity's predictions existed by publication date.
General relativity was immediately testable by measuring the Perhelion precession of Mercury. It was also possible to test it by observing solar bending of starlight any time there was a total solar eclipse. Yeah, you couldn't do that on the day of first publication because there wasn't a solar eclipse that day, but the researchers knew there would be total solar eclipses in the future and could set up to test the theory as soon as one happened. But, suppose they had had to wait until the next eclipse after that, or something? Do you really want to advance the claim that a theory isn't scientifically testable if a human event such as a war keeps the observers from getting to the location where it could be tested? Or if cloudy weather blocked observing? That nearly happened.
Normally, the rule that it isn't science if it doesn't make testable predictions doesn't mean that something becomes unscientific if there are budget cuts or other such events that aren't themselves part of the scientific method.
What part of "which fail to inflate properly or don't inflate at all. from the summary sounds like it isn't saying they are defective or dangerous? You didn't read the article. You didn't read the summary. Your post did nothing but waste space.
Must be nice. Since I upgraded, I have to first remember that the meta key with that silly flag symbol that doesn't look particularly meta can substitute for a dedicated windows key. Then its all those steps you have to jump through, as well.
I still have a Me box running (although the user interface has been hacked just a teeny-tiny bit), (and it dual boots with Archbang), (and it runs Defraggler, Foxit, something or other that's subbing for Explorer and does dual pane directory views, etc.), (and since I couldn't upgrade IE past 6.0 or Firefox past 3.52 or so, the whole thing's air-gapped from the internet, of course)... But still, I like it just fine.
If you're using the word as it was originally defined, and as a lot of people actually fought and died over it in Pythagorean times, "rationality" implies that those fixed rules give rise to numerical, quantifiable ratios. That's why we have other words, such as reason or logic - because 'rational' , 'scientific', 'logical' and 'reasonable' are not really all just synonyms. Rational and Irrational, as used by common people and not modern mathematicians, are words which mean the ability to take a mathematical ratio determines what is a correct mental operation. Lewis is being careful to stick to this correct definition, in the part where he points out the results have to be in measurable units.
Like it or not, if someone claims their ethical system is rational, and they don't have a unit of ethicalness and can't put a number on every ethical act, they are not being rational at all. They may be being reasonable (in the most literal sense), they may even be logical (in that they have used formal methods of doing that reasoning), they may well be correct, if that's even possible at all, but they need to figure out what words really apply to what they are doing.
On the other hand, Jesus was being entirely rational when he said "Greater love hath no man than he who gives up his life for his brother". That's literally a ratio being established, by setting the peak value, so that all other acts of loving kindness can be expressed as fractions of that value if anyone wanted to. There's no indication Jesus wanted that quantification to be limited to numbers expressible as ratios - he'd probably be just fine about if if your feeding a stray kitten was expressed as an infinite non-repeating decimal instead, but by itself, that particular statement supports the establishment of a literally rational ethical system - which is exactly what so many self-professed rationalists claim religion doesn't do.
This is more like your neighbor called and got your car towed from the front of your house (or driveway). Why they are doing it is because they don't bother to check that the car is yours, and belongs there. And since it's not against the law to call up and get someone else car towed, they are doing it to every car they see. OK, if the DMCA situation is more like your analogy than the parent poster's, then it doesn't count as theft - but where do you come up with the claim that it's not against the law to call up and get someone else's car towed under false pretenses? To do this, somebody would have to represent themselves to the police as the owner of property they did not own, by claiming they had standing to bring the complaint. Do you really think anyone could just do that repeatedly to every car they see and the police dealing with it wouldn't be able to find anything to charge them with? About the fourth or fifth time your hypothetical merry prankster left the cops dealing with another irate car owner, they'd bust him for felony false utterance to an investigating officer, impersonating a victim and probably theft of that victim's identity, and various other crimes, and possibly anything else they could stretch a little to make sure the perp's fines covered the lawsuits that city was about to face. So, maybe the DMCA abuses are NOT like your analogy, even though it had cars in in and everything slashdot requires. Or maybe your analogy is reasonable, in which case, there's something that can be done to rein in abuses.
99% of Dyson sphere builders build a normal model and within a few aeons get eaten by the uberborg/guardians of the inorganic/hounds of tindalos. 1% of dyson sphere builders are paranoids from the beginning and devot trememdous extra resources to hiding their emissions, and so live. And then, since they are paranoids fron the beginning, invent their own species of world harvesters to wipe out the potential threat of new dyson sphere level cultures. Space constantly gets more dangerous with wave after wave of new harvesters being released, for anyone will tell you, paranoids lash out at their perceived threats.
Novelty isn't particvularly inherently draining, but it also isn't automatically invigorating. Introverts are less likely to buy something while its trendy. "Get it while its hot" sounds like it has a downside - that someone is already planning just when to declare it cold so they can start the next "hot" trend. Introverts tend not to respond to advertising that urges them to be part of the trend at the peak, but advertisers have learned that using words such as timeless or classic can penetrate introvert sales resistance. The problem is, reassuring introverts that the item won't be considered tacky or dated five years down the road is very different from reassuring them they can cling to the past forever - most introverts don't have any particular desire to do that, and they often are people who are the first to embrace the genuinely new.
Many trends can capture introvert attention by adding actual hard data to the claims of newness, or by claiming something is both novel and better, or how it's different for some other reason than just being different. Apple's two word "Think Different" motto doesn't particularly appeal to introverts, by itself, until Apple adds something else, but Apple as a whole has figured out how to add those somethings to draw a fair share of introvert business. Extroverts tend to think a motto such as "Think Different" is all they need and not follow through enough to get the actual introvert client sales. Probably millions of introverts noticed the unusual color choice when Microsoft came out with a brown Zune, but all that made them do was look at it a little further, and then they didn't see anything particularly exciting, so they bought Zunes like the brown model didn't really even draw their attention.
If an object the mass of a cat and composed of normal matter can exist as a quantum superposition, then mass and particle complexity are not fundamental limits. If the cat is possible, the Planet Jupiter can also exist in a Schrodinger's Cat like state.
Then there's the question of what constitutes an observer. Mystical models assume something that is itself aware. The extreme antropomrphic end of observer definitions is "a being capable of understanding the implcations of Quantum Mechanics with regard to the given wave function". That interpretation means lots of humans don't qualify as observers. From there, the definitions tend to stay mystical, with debate over whether a being that can notice a light change from off to on, but has no idea what it implies, counts as an observer. One potential definition goes into whether the cat itself is aware, and whether that includes the cat having a related but possibly different thing we call "self awareness", and so on. The less mystical models treat any instrumentation capable of providing data as an observer, or even anything that can be toggled to a different logic state by interacting with the collapse of a particular state vector. By that sort of definition, an 'observer' is therefore any 'material' thing that is outside the array of matter that is part of your initial state vector, but only at the moment that outside object recieves data on the state vector.
So, if the initial superposed object is the planet Jupiter as it exists at time T, then a liberal definition of observer means that state vector collapses a tiny fraction of a jiffy later when it reacts with the first particle we are not defining as part of Jupiter. On the other hand, limiting observers to beings with human-like awareness means that we can say only that Jupiter was a planet an hour or so ago, when the light we just recieved left it, but Jupiter is an 1 hour duration (approximately) state vector. That's one of the things that tends to make a mystical interpretation of "Observer" seem nonsensical when it's baldly stated like that.
However, consider General Relativity. Relativity tells us using "is" and "was" to describe something at the other end of a beam of light isn't really meaningful, particularly across increasing distances. Simultanity is what the word 'is' implies, and that concept's really breaking down even if we don't go into Jupiter as a quantum state vector but stick with good old Einstein and say Jupiter is a planet at the other end of a one hour light cone from us but it becomes absurd to say "That was an hour ago, what is Jupiter doing simultaniously with now here on Earth?".
Should we reject the mystical definition of an observer then? Even if it sounds weird or like some sort of religious philosophy contaminating the purely scientific explanation, in some ways it's really just forcing us to a similar position as Relativity does anyway.
They tore down the old Atomic Energy Museum (wood framed, with white siding and a dark gray asphalt shingle roof), and built a more modern, concrete one, which they call the American Museum of Science and Energy. http://amse.org/ They don't do the dimes anymore. As it originally worked, you actually dropped your own dime into a slot and watched it get irradiated and then put in a thin metal case about the size of a quarter, with a plastic front cover that the rest of the case was crimped around to hold it in place. At some points, the system used an operator/lecturer, but eventually, the whole thing ran hands free, the dime automatically passed under a Geiger detector probe on a little conveyor belt as it came out, and I think I remember them going to an all plastic case at some point or other. That was the sixties for you. I might have had a dozen of those things, total. I was about 11 or 12 when the newer facility was built. On a "triple dog dare", I jumped off the just finished poured main stairs into a five foot pile of sand one weekend and twisted my ankle a little screwing around on the unguarded construction site. Hey, I missed the rebar by a good six inches. Eventually, the cops ran us off the site, and looking back, I wonder what took them so long since the site is literally right next to the police station.
Here's the really odd thing: I was back in Oak Ridge recently, and where the old atomic energy museum was is a vacant parking lot - except there are these concrete anti-vehicle barriers put up after 9-11 to guard the old museum that was already long vacant and about to be torn down, and those are still there.
I thought it was an aimbot when he got off that perfect thousand yard railgun shot during the triple backflip, and then I heard his victory trashtalk - "Affffflllaaaccckkk!"
The minimum method used is for handling machining wastes. There, supposedly, enriched materials capable of even moderate reaction are normally stored in containers no larger than 1 gallon paint cans, which are filled to very low capacities measured by weight (typically meaning they are each less than 5% full by volume), and then placed on a marked grid on a reinforced concrete floor, in such a way that there is a reliable safe minimum distance between them. People will supposedly be fired for letting cans get too close, as measured at ranges that are still way above actual risk. Materials that can oxidize spontaniously may be stored under oil or in inert atmospheres or both, as seems most prudent. Various barriers then further subdivide the marked grid, etc. All that's from public documentaries and similar sources.
For actual nuclear reactions, we're generally talking about densities where you couldn't even pour all the material in all the cans in a single building together to get a reaction that could even just possibly generate enough neutron flux to generate enough heat that the materials could even just possibly melt and become concentrated enough to produce a level of neutron emission that would actually be dangerous to the immediate area adjacent to the building, or tighter standards.
Chemical reactions, alas, are another story. Opening a single can of some of these substances, particularly if you could get it into an area with moist air or bring it into contact with something such as burning gasoline at the time, might be very lethal to the person opening it - there'd be a flash (chemical rapid oxidation, not nuclear) and the person would likely breathe in a lethal dose of a radioactive heavy metal oxide vapor - even there, persons who approached a few moments after the can was opened, say to render assistance to the idiot, would be in only moderate danger of a radiation dose health risk and if they suited up properly before cleaning up would be at very low risk. Again, that's theory - the basic procedues were worked out soon after the Daghlian and Slotin criticality accidents at Los Alamos in the 40's, they were refined after two non-lethal and mostly not even very injurious accidents in the 1958-59 period at Y-12, and they've been followed enough that there haven't been any more like those.
In 2003, Y-12 had an accident involving depleted Uranium buring chemically in a hotbox experiment after Calcium reacted with water triggering enough heat to touch off the DU. That resulted in three employees getting heavy metal exposures considered unsafe, but not likely to cause serious long term health consequences. (That's a mixed reliability claim - there's some argument about just how much of a health hazard breathing or ingesting Depleted uranium is, and it's quite possible the safety guidelines for it will be toughened up further) This was the only nuclear related accident at Y-12 reported under the current management. Note that it's not technically a radiation accident, as DU just basically is emitting less than naturally occuring Uranium, and bringing more of it together, heating it, and so on doesn't cause it to emit more. If it makes a difference, it happened as part of an experimental lab setup, not the process plant.
For Plutonium wastes, the amounts are supposed to be kept low enough that the potential heat can't trigger any sort of phase change, not just melting to an actually more ductile or semi-liquid state. It's the stuff actually 'stored' inside an H-bomb being refurbished that has real potential (although supposedly, the rest of the bomb and the Plutonium pit don't EVER enter the continental US still assembled - so if that's true, we are talking about parts of bombs, not complete bombs). So the question is just what was in the buildings the nun and her chums approached? Was it trimmed off milling wast
This is not a matter of a nuclear power plant, it is a matter of an industrial plant that makes, refurbishes and dismantles H-bombs, including not just US but former Soviet weapons systems. The only power reactor even nearby is a historic swimming pool design from the 1950s. Nobody at Y-12 is monitoring rods, with or without nuns. However, you might check out Dr. William Pollard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Pollard Who was an Episcopal priest and PHD Physicist and who did have connections to the Y-12 plant at times.
If we add enough pirates, and they are temporarily successful enough at stopping international trade, rading coastal settlements, and general rape and pillage, wouldn't putting civilization back before the industrial revolution, except in isolated pockets far inland, be a distinct possibility?
The short form answer is "The Civil War", Lincoln can be considered justified by that view if you accept the argument that "The Constitution is not a suicide pact.", or his actions can be seen as going beyond what was actually necessary to prosecute the war. I've read good arguments either way.
The long answer won't fit here, and I'm not sure it exists. I've taught Root Causes of the Civil War in military OCS classes. I tend to favor an argument that Lincolns actions had more necessity behind them than is generally recognized, but I'd have to base this claim on an analogy with US use of nuclear weapons at the end of WW2, an area subject to similar debate. Reading what some highly placed persons in the Confederate government and the Imperial Japanese government of their respective times wrote makes me of the opinion that both situations were at least partially justified from a purely mathematical analysis of the stated goals, intentions and claims of these government officials, and if anything, Lincoln pushed it less far that Truman. I could also make the same point by comparing non-governmental writers who held positions we might call political pundits, journalists, and such in the two eras. No analogy is perfect, one derived like this is doubly suspect, and a detailed study of just how a single Confederate cabinet post in 1862 matches to Hirohito's closest equivalent advisor in 1942, for example, would probably be a year's research.
I doubt Lincoln's example is that relevant to the current actions of the US. The issue of a declared war with mostly clearly defined goals vrs. a situation where no one seems to have clear victory conditions in mind is one reason not to rely too much on any claim that the US government today is following Lincoln's example.
1. They won't sell 16 oz. drinks - Either they will gouge for tiny 8 oz. drinks or they will go standard American and sell small 24 oz. - medium 36 oz. - large 55 gallon drum (and they will be named Medium-Large-Supersized - you won't see the word 'small' on the menu). 2. However many you were going to get, get one less. Your bladder will thank you, or perhaps the people in the cars below will. (Yeah, I went there - Eeewwwww!).
Slashdot Mirror
On 1. it's not about choosing to use a certain language. Yes there are plenty of valid reasons for choosing a scripting language for certain tasks. I tend to disagree that anyone who has only learned scripting languages is all that likely to have learned enough about the progression from machine language to whatever interprets their script. I don't think it happens enough to use that word 'often' the way you are using it. I don't even think that the people programming in classical compiled languages such as C tend to be exposed to hardware and machine language concepts enough to use 'often' analogously. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking the problem gets worse with people who don't know a compiled language, but even if someone who only works in Javascript is equally likely to know what an assembler does as is someone coding C#, well, not enough people coding C# or C++ or good ole C know enough about assemblers either.
On 2. I'm not clear just how you mean that. Are you arguing that the application code itself can be written to block the most likely lower level attacks, or that it's normal for scripts written up to standard to actually succeed at blocking them, or that the various interpreters themselves are written to block at least the most likely lower level attacks?
I'm also unsure if you're including some of the dynamic languages that frequently extend beyond just scripting modes to get your "well written scripting languages". Are we talking TCL, Perl, and Ruby here, or Javascript, PHP, and Microsoft ASP? How much does a Python writer need to know about the interpreter or the OS his or her script or executable will run on? Is being able to use Python as a scripting language, but not properly create executables, imbed Python in C or C++, or write new modules for Python in C, C++ or Cython enough to get good protection? It looks to me like protection from even the most common forms of attack depends largely on the language having dynamic elements that go beyond scripting, and it's the people who know those elements, and so simply have to know something of compiled languages and assembly, that make that good protection possible.
I won't go as far as to claim that the more a language is 'purely' for scripting, the more it's been prone to security flaws. I don't think we have 100% correlation there - but I do think we have some.
I'm not saying its a good idea to develop an elitist attitude towards the people that use them, but this explains why there's some rational basis for looking down on scripting languages. It's not that they are inherently bad or that the people who use them lack the ability to do 'real programming'. But, they are basically all about not having to know anything at all about how the other layers of abstraction work, and a consequence is they also don't give the programmer any real connection to how the hardware layer works and how you get from it to what they know.
For example, if you know how an OS is generally compiled in a language such as C or C++, then the next step is understanding that the compiler is itself running 'on a level above' assembly language. Understand that, and its a straightforward conclusion that a program can always be written in assembly that bypasses ANY controls the OS has about accessing different parts of memory, doing file copying, assigning user and admin permissions, and similar things. That program may be much less portable than something written in Perl, but it's inherently very powerful at what it does. It's not that people who program in assembly are necessarily any smarter or better at it than people who write Python. That's certainly debatable. The thing that isn't debatable is that the closer a programmer gets to machine language, the more they can do that nothing higher in the heirarchy can stop, position itself against, or even detect. At some point, that means trying to secure scripted code, or compiled code, or anything above assembly is like trying to defend a point with what may be a perfectly good machine gun, but the other side is the only one with stealthed, antimatter pumped, orbital X-ray laser arrays. They can have sloppy aim, lack elegance and inspiration, and still win.
Nowdays, there are plenty of people working with a modern OS, even one that is still all compiled at just one level above assembly (if there are any real systems that you want to count as modern that still fit that, what with silverlight, dotnet, flash and so on on just about every machine out there), who don't understand the heirarchial nature of coding worth a damn. It seems to get worse as you get to people writng applications for the various OSes. Some of these people are very good coders (or scripters, or whatever), but they really just can't write secure apps, because they don't really understand what the difference between a script kiddee attacker and a threat whole governments wish they could get on their side really is.
That's just one of the things this course and others like it are supposed to fix. A lot of us need this. Hell, I've known this stuff for 35-40 years, and this reminds me I should get out the old books and do a little refresher. If you've read things about coding becoming as professional as aero-space engineering or similar, and found yourself agreeing with any of them, this is where it starts.
So we put the relay gear near the north pole and the radio telescopes near the south pole.
Modern physics proceeds from at least four assumptions that all the hard sciences accept.
1. The Universe is governed by consistent laws. (OK, you've got that one).
2. To be science, a prediction must be falsifiable (and that one too).
3. The correct explanation for any phenomenon lies within nature.
4. The researcher is at least potentially smart enough to find the answers while staying strictly within the first three assumptions. (yes, it's hard to see how anyone can do anything without first assuming the possiblity of success, but it's often just tacitly assumed, so lets make it explicit).
It also very frequently accepts some other constraints, such as:
5. Occam's razor is useful and can be unambiguously applied.
6. The 'rules' or 'laws' sought are expressions of math, and in a given domain of discourse, one mathematical system is the correct one.
7. The laws tend to have something called elegance, symmetry or beauty which helps in deciding which lines of enquiry to persue.
Here's something that has been proven in the mathematical sense, so it's not just an assumption in itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
If it's genuinely correct, which most physicists think it is, then you might ask yourself, what were Emily Noether's assumptions?
(Since it's proven in the math sense, that question is really what were her axioms?)
Whatever they were, each and every one of them is a basic assumption of modern physics. Just from the Wiki, it looks like at first she assumed all conservation laws were expressible as ordinary differential equations and that the principle of least action applied. People have since generalised this theorem beyond that first assumption to partial differential equations (Basically applying the theorem to force field models), but the principle of least action still seems fundamental,
Given this, I would genuinely be surprised if physics rests on less than about 12 to 16 assumptions of these sorts, although that's simply my intuitive assessment of the bare minimum, and as I've indicated, some of them are simply very, very frequently assumed but not technically invariably so.
True, but who above 12 years old was really surprised when Virgin unicorns all ended up on the endangered species list?
Wait, I'm asking that on Slashdot, where it was probably totally unexpected and a lot of you still don't get it.
Glad to see somebody trying to set the record straight. Corporations are not required to take any steps that, in their management's judgement, might be contrary to law. There are several areas of law where the exact opposite is the case. (Just try to claim in a U.S. court, that your corporation was compelled to bribe local officials in a non U.S. locale because "it's the way that culture works" and you would have been remiss to not use bribery to maximise shareholder value. You'll find out that there are international treaties supporting the U.S. penalizing your corp for something it did off of US soil.). In addition, it's usually possible for a board to 'beat the rap' by simply claiming they were avoiding negative publicity for such actions, i..e. by claiming they feared triggering a boycott movement.
The problem starts when somebody finds out that shareholders have sued because a board of directors 'failed to maximise value'. The correct way to look at that is that somebody has sued NASA because a kid on a playground broke their window with a baseball. Just because somebody files a lawsuit doesn't mean it is at all reasonable nor that they have any chance of winning. Somebody might sue you for breathing their air, now do you go through life using that to justify your every action? There have been a few reasonable claims that a board was failing in its duties, but many more unreasonable ones, and the chance anyone will win a suit against a board of directors over shareholder value is pretty slim overall.
Here's the sort of situation where a shareholder value claim can win: The board appears to be taking steps that are generally devaluing the company, or at least making it perform at far under anticipated projections. Judicial review shows these steps may have helped another company profit, and part of the board consists of members who have some sort of 'less than arms length' relation with that company.
Longer answer is, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity don't really fit together. One way to get around this is to impose a minimum amount of various quantities in relativity. If you set the minimum quantum of velocity all the way up to c, that's an admittedly extreme example of such reconciliation. The point is, to get a unified theory, either you take just about all the quantization out of quantum mechanics, or you add quite a bit of quantization to relativity.
Minkowski was the guy who showed Einstein that special relativity implied that the geometry of the universe was 4 dimensional. At first, Einstein though that Minkowski was just doing an interesting math trick, but he soon decided that the real shape of space was a 4 dimensional inseperable space-time. Einstein credited Minkowski's work with showing him the first steps to bridge the gap from Special to General Relativity. Unfortunately, Minkowski died in 1909, just three years after he started corresponding with Einstein on Spec. R. . The Minkowski model really is 'static' and 'blocklike' and nothing can really said to be happening, and that's the first place Popper got the idea from. Einstein himself later (1940's-50's) spent lots of time talking to Godel about just that, and if Popper was just a 'philosopher with superficial knowledge of physics', Godel was just the mathematician who Einstein went to when the math got really tough, and who had ready access to the then greatest living physicist in turn. Some of what Godel developed from General Relativity gives abstract geometric models of the whole universe which aren't "Static Block-like", but they also allow for the existence of time travel via 'closed time-like curves'. Godel's interpretation came just shortly before he published mathematical proofs of the existence of God and the Afterlife, and he later died basically from refusing to eat for fear he was being poisoned. Personally, I agree more with Godel's interpretation of the geometry of the whole universe than with Minkowski's, but given all the facts, I'm not going to dismiss Popper (and certainly not Minkowski) as easily as some people here are.
Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment, which was first performed in 1887 before Special Relativity was even a gleam in Einstein's eye. The M-M experiment was refined repeatedly during the period that Special Relativity was first discussed (1905-06) to focus on testing one of SR's basic predictions, so a test of at least one of special relativity's predictions existed by publication date.
General relativity was immediately testable by measuring the Perhelion precession of Mercury. It was also possible to test it by observing solar bending of starlight any time there was a total solar eclipse. Yeah, you couldn't do that on the day of first publication because there wasn't a solar eclipse that day, but the researchers knew there would be total solar eclipses in the future and could set up to test the theory as soon as one happened. But, suppose they had had to wait until the next eclipse after that, or something? Do you really want to advance the claim that a theory isn't scientifically testable if a human event such as a war keeps the observers from getting to the location where it could be tested? Or if cloudy weather blocked observing? That nearly happened.
Normally, the rule that it isn't science if it doesn't make testable predictions doesn't mean that something becomes unscientific if there are budget cuts or other such events that aren't themselves part of the scientific method.
What part of "which fail to inflate properly or don't inflate at all. from the summary sounds like it isn't saying they are defective or dangerous?
You didn't read the article. You didn't read the summary. Your post did nothing but waste space.
Must be nice. Since I upgraded, I have to first remember that the meta key with that silly flag symbol that doesn't look particularly meta can substitute for a dedicated windows key. Then its all those steps you have to jump through, as well.
I still have a Me box running (although the user interface has been hacked just a teeny-tiny bit), (and it dual boots with Archbang), (and it runs Defraggler, Foxit, something or other that's subbing for Explorer and does dual pane directory views, etc.), (and since I couldn't upgrade IE past 6.0 or Firefox past 3.52 or so, the whole thing's air-gapped from the internet, of course) ...
But still, I like it just fine.
If you're using the word as it was originally defined, and as a lot of people actually fought and died over it in Pythagorean times, "rationality" implies that those fixed rules give rise to numerical, quantifiable ratios. That's why we have other words, such as reason or logic - because 'rational' , 'scientific', 'logical' and 'reasonable' are not really all just synonyms. Rational and Irrational, as used by common people and not modern mathematicians, are words which mean the ability to take a mathematical ratio determines what is a correct mental operation. Lewis is being careful to stick to this correct definition, in the part where he points out the results have to be in measurable units.
Like it or not, if someone claims their ethical system is rational, and they don't have a unit of ethicalness and can't put a number on every ethical act, they are not being rational at all. They may be being reasonable (in the most literal sense), they may even be logical (in that they have used formal methods of doing that reasoning), they may well be correct, if that's even possible at all, but they need to figure out what words really apply to what they are doing.
On the other hand, Jesus was being entirely rational when he said "Greater love hath no man than he who gives up his life for his brother". That's literally a ratio being established, by setting the peak value, so that all other acts of loving kindness can be expressed as fractions of that value if anyone wanted to. There's no indication Jesus wanted that quantification to be limited to numbers expressible as ratios - he'd probably be just fine about if if your feeding a stray kitten was expressed as an infinite non-repeating decimal instead, but by itself, that particular statement supports the establishment of a literally rational ethical system - which is exactly what so many self-professed rationalists claim religion doesn't do.
This is more like your neighbor called and got your car towed from the front of your house (or driveway). Why they are doing it is because they don't bother to check that the car is yours, and belongs there. And since it's not against the law to call up and get someone else car towed, they are doing it to every car they see.
OK, if the DMCA situation is more like your analogy than the parent poster's, then it doesn't count as theft - but where do you come up with the claim that it's not against the law to call up and get someone else's car towed under false pretenses? To do this, somebody would have to represent themselves to the police as the owner of property they did not own, by claiming they had standing to bring the complaint. Do you really think anyone could just do that repeatedly to every car they see and the police dealing with it wouldn't be able to find anything to charge them with? About the fourth or fifth time your hypothetical merry prankster left the cops dealing with another irate car owner, they'd bust him for felony false utterance to an investigating officer, impersonating a victim and probably theft of that victim's identity, and various other crimes, and possibly anything else they could stretch a little to make sure the perp's fines covered the lawsuits that city was about to face. So, maybe the DMCA abuses are NOT like your analogy, even though it had cars in in and everything slashdot requires. Or maybe your analogy is reasonable, in which case, there's something that can be done to rein in abuses.
What would you get from a massive amount of accidental engineering?
On a dyson sphere? Minecraft, with a 'shared creative' server and no anti-griefing mods emplaced.
99% of Dyson sphere builders build a normal model and within a few aeons get eaten by the uberborg/guardians of the inorganic/hounds of tindalos. 1% of dyson sphere builders are paranoids from the beginning and devot trememdous extra resources to hiding their emissions, and so live. And then, since they are paranoids fron the beginning, invent their own species of world harvesters to wipe out the potential threat of new dyson sphere level cultures. Space constantly gets more dangerous with wave after wave of new harvesters being released, for anyone will tell you, paranoids lash out at their perceived threats.
Novelty isn't particvularly inherently draining, but it also isn't automatically invigorating. Introverts are less likely to buy something while its trendy. "Get it while its hot" sounds like it has a downside - that someone is already planning just when to declare it cold so they can start the next "hot" trend. Introverts tend not to respond to advertising that urges them to be part of the trend at the peak, but advertisers have learned that using words such as timeless or classic can penetrate introvert sales resistance. The problem is, reassuring introverts that the item won't be considered tacky or dated five years down the road is very different from reassuring them they can cling to the past forever - most introverts don't have any particular desire to do that, and they often are people who are the first to embrace the genuinely new.
Many trends can capture introvert attention by adding actual hard data to the claims of newness, or by claiming something is both novel and better, or how it's different for some other reason than just being different. Apple's two word "Think Different" motto doesn't particularly appeal to introverts, by itself, until Apple adds something else, but Apple as a whole has figured out how to add those somethings to draw a fair share of introvert business. Extroverts tend to think a motto such as "Think Different" is all they need and not follow through enough to get the actual introvert client sales. Probably millions of introverts noticed the unusual color choice when Microsoft came out with a brown Zune, but all that made them do was look at it a little further, and then they didn't see anything particularly exciting, so they bought Zunes like the brown model didn't really even draw their attention.
If an object the mass of a cat and composed of normal matter can exist as a quantum superposition, then mass and particle complexity are not fundamental limits. If the cat is possible, the Planet Jupiter can also exist in a Schrodinger's Cat like state.
Then there's the question of what constitutes an observer. Mystical models assume something that is itself aware. The extreme antropomrphic end of observer definitions is "a being capable of understanding the implcations of Quantum Mechanics with regard to the given wave function". That interpretation means lots of humans don't qualify as observers. From there, the definitions tend to stay mystical, with debate over whether a being that can notice a light change from off to on, but has no idea what it implies, counts as an observer. One potential definition goes into whether the cat itself is aware, and whether that includes the cat having a related but possibly different thing we call "self awareness", and so on. The less mystical models treat any instrumentation capable of providing data as an observer, or even anything that can be toggled to a different logic state by interacting with the collapse of a particular state vector. By that sort of definition, an 'observer' is therefore any 'material' thing that is outside the array of matter that is part of your initial state vector, but only at the moment that outside object recieves data on the state vector.
So, if the initial superposed object is the planet Jupiter as it exists at time T, then a liberal definition of observer means that state vector collapses a tiny fraction of a jiffy later when it reacts with the first particle we are not defining as part of Jupiter. On the other hand, limiting observers to beings with human-like awareness means that we can say only that Jupiter was a planet an hour or so ago, when the light we just recieved left it, but Jupiter is an 1 hour duration (approximately) state vector. That's one of the things that tends to make a mystical interpretation of "Observer" seem nonsensical when it's baldly stated like that.
However, consider General Relativity. Relativity tells us using "is" and "was" to describe something at the other end of a beam of light isn't really meaningful, particularly across increasing distances. Simultanity is what the word 'is' implies, and that concept's really breaking down even if we don't go into Jupiter as a quantum state vector but stick with good old Einstein and say Jupiter is a planet at the other end of a one hour light cone from us but it becomes absurd to say "That was an hour ago, what is Jupiter doing simultaniously with now here on Earth?".
Should we reject the mystical definition of an observer then? Even if it sounds weird or like some sort of religious philosophy contaminating the purely scientific explanation, in some ways it's really just forcing us to a similar position as Relativity does anyway.
They tore down the old Atomic Energy Museum (wood framed, with white siding and a dark gray asphalt shingle roof), and built a more modern, concrete one, which they call the American Museum of Science and Energy. http://amse.org/
They don't do the dimes anymore. As it originally worked, you actually dropped your own dime into a slot and watched it get irradiated and then put in a thin metal case about the size of a quarter, with a plastic front cover that the rest of the case was crimped around to hold it in place. At some points, the system used an operator/lecturer, but eventually, the whole thing ran hands free, the dime automatically passed under a Geiger detector probe on a little conveyor belt as it came out, and I think I remember them going to an all plastic case at some point or other. That was the sixties for you. I might have had a dozen of those things, total.
I was about 11 or 12 when the newer facility was built. On a "triple dog dare", I jumped off the just finished poured main stairs into a five foot pile of sand one weekend and twisted my ankle a little screwing around on the unguarded construction site. Hey, I missed the rebar by a good six inches. Eventually, the cops ran us off the site, and looking back, I wonder what took them so long since the site is literally right next to the police station.
Here's the really odd thing: I was back in Oak Ridge recently, and where the old atomic energy museum was is a vacant parking lot - except there are these concrete anti-vehicle barriers put up after 9-11 to guard the old museum that was already long vacant and about to be torn down, and those are still there.
I thought it was an aimbot when he got off that perfect thousand yard railgun shot during the triple backflip, and then I heard his victory trashtalk - "Affffflllaaaccckkk!"
Ender's game is one of the movies NOT directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
(And if anyone actually mods this informative, I hope somebody else mods me back to base score, please).
The minimum method used is for handling machining wastes. There, supposedly, enriched materials capable of even moderate reaction are normally stored in containers no larger than 1 gallon paint cans, which are filled to very low capacities measured by weight (typically meaning they are each less than 5% full by volume), and then placed on a marked grid on a reinforced concrete floor, in such a way that there is a reliable safe minimum distance between them. People will supposedly be fired for letting cans get too close, as measured at ranges that are still way above actual risk. Materials that can oxidize spontaniously may be stored under oil or in inert atmospheres or both, as seems most prudent. Various barriers then further subdivide the marked grid, etc. All that's from public documentaries and similar sources.
For actual nuclear reactions, we're generally talking about densities where you couldn't even pour all the material in all the cans in a single building together to get a reaction that could even just possibly generate enough neutron flux to generate enough heat that the materials could even just possibly melt and become concentrated enough to produce a level of neutron emission that would actually be dangerous to the immediate area adjacent to the building, or tighter standards.
Chemical reactions, alas, are another story. Opening a single can of some of these substances, particularly if you could get it into an area with moist air or bring it into contact with something such as burning gasoline at the time, might be very lethal to the person opening it - there'd be a flash (chemical rapid oxidation, not nuclear) and the person would likely breathe in a lethal dose of a radioactive heavy metal oxide vapor - even there, persons who approached a few moments after the can was opened, say to render assistance to the idiot, would be in only moderate danger of a radiation dose health risk and if they suited up properly before cleaning up would be at very low risk. Again, that's theory - the basic procedues were worked out soon after the Daghlian and Slotin criticality accidents at Los Alamos in the 40's, they were refined after two non-lethal and mostly not even very injurious accidents in the 1958-59 period at Y-12, and they've been followed enough that there haven't been any more like those.
In 2003, Y-12 had an accident involving depleted Uranium buring chemically in a hotbox experiment after Calcium reacted with water triggering enough heat to touch off the DU. That resulted in three employees getting heavy metal exposures considered unsafe, but not likely to cause serious long term health consequences. (That's a mixed reliability claim - there's some argument about just how much of a health hazard breathing or ingesting Depleted uranium is, and it's quite possible the safety guidelines for it will be toughened up further) This was the only nuclear related accident at Y-12 reported under the current management. Note that it's not technically a radiation accident, as DU just basically is emitting less than naturally occuring Uranium, and bringing more of it together, heating it, and so on doesn't cause it to emit more. If it makes a difference, it happened as part of an experimental lab setup, not the process plant.
For Plutonium wastes, the amounts are supposed to be kept low enough that the potential heat can't trigger any sort of phase change, not just melting to an actually more ductile or semi-liquid state. It's the stuff actually 'stored' inside an H-bomb being refurbished that has real potential (although supposedly, the rest of the bomb and the Plutonium pit don't EVER enter the continental US still assembled - so if that's true, we are talking about parts of bombs, not complete bombs). So the question is just what was in the buildings the nun and her chums approached? Was it trimmed off milling wast
This is not a matter of a nuclear power plant, it is a matter of an industrial plant that makes, refurbishes and dismantles H-bombs, including not just US but former Soviet weapons systems. The only power reactor even nearby is a historic swimming pool design from the 1950s. Nobody at Y-12 is monitoring rods, with or without nuns. However, you might check out Dr. William Pollard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Pollard
Who was an Episcopal priest and PHD Physicist and who did have connections to the Y-12 plant at times.
If we add enough pirates, and they are temporarily successful enough at stopping international trade, rading coastal settlements, and general rape and pillage, wouldn't putting civilization back before the industrial revolution, except in isolated pockets far inland, be a distinct possibility?
The short form answer is "The Civil War", Lincoln can be considered justified by that view if you accept the argument that "The Constitution is not a suicide pact.", or his actions can be seen as going beyond what was actually necessary to prosecute the war. I've read good arguments either way.
The long answer won't fit here, and I'm not sure it exists. I've taught Root Causes of the Civil War in military OCS classes. I tend to favor an argument that Lincolns actions had more necessity behind them than is generally recognized, but I'd have to base this claim on an analogy with US use of nuclear weapons at the end of WW2, an area subject to similar debate. Reading what some highly placed persons in the Confederate government and the Imperial Japanese government of their respective times wrote makes me of the opinion that both situations were at least partially justified from a purely mathematical analysis of the stated goals, intentions and claims of these government officials, and if anything, Lincoln pushed it less far that Truman. I could also make the same point by comparing non-governmental writers who held positions we might call political pundits, journalists, and such in the two eras. No analogy is perfect, one derived like this is doubly suspect, and a detailed study of just how a single Confederate cabinet post in 1862 matches to Hirohito's closest equivalent advisor in 1942, for example, would probably be a year's research.
I doubt Lincoln's example is that relevant to the current actions of the US. The issue of a declared war with mostly clearly defined goals vrs. a situation where no one seems to have clear victory conditions in mind is one reason not to rely too much on any claim that the US government today is following Lincoln's example.
1. They won't sell 16 oz. drinks - Either they will gouge for tiny 8 oz. drinks or they will go standard American and sell small 24 oz. - medium 36 oz. - large 55 gallon drum (and they will be named Medium-Large-Supersized - you won't see the word 'small' on the menu).
2. However many you were going to get, get one less. Your bladder will thank you, or perhaps the people in the cars below will. (Yeah, I went there - Eeewwwww!).