The principle is just an extension of criminal negligence, malpractice, and other such laws. If a real person or legal person (corporation) doesn't meet certain minimal standards in how they do things, the law is stuck with a paradox it has to resolve. Either the entity is so non-functional it endangers others by its extreme incompetence, or the entity just didn't give a damn about the consequences and doesn't want to play by the social compact's rules while still reaping the benefits. We seldom restrain individuals as insane just because they can't use the pointy scissors without poking other people yet, and have no way to restrain a company for behaving that way - So we have to assume the company is competent - So it meant to behave as an outlaw does. Now what do we do? Laws such as these, where intent doesn't matter, are the outcome. The court doesn't have to go into intent because if the entity was actually innocent of any ill intent then they are by definition certifiably insane and a danger to others, or else uneducatably retarded. We can't (and shouldn't) punish people for those two conditions, but we sure as hell can control their ability to cause further damage.
And the sun orbits a cluster of supermassive black holes 8.0 Kiloparsecs away in the direction of Sagittarius. And the galaxy orbits the gravitational center of the local cluster, which orbits the Virgo supercluster, which orbits the Great Attractor, which just may orbit a really massive superstring. How far should we go with this?
The commission that threw out counting Pluto as a planet also invoked its high inclination to the plane of the solar system as one of the reasons. Now here, the ring is inclined at 27 degrees (presumably to Saturn's equatorial plane). There's a moon associated with the ring. So, apparently the definition of planet now makes inclination a factor, but the definition of moon doesn't. This lack of consistency is one of the reasons people are bothered by the 'Pluto is a Minor Planet' decision.
If you care about normal language rules, you don't like the weird neologism that says "Minor Planets aren't Planets" - that's not good linguistics. 'Minor' is a modifier that does not negate the noun modified.
If you care about consistency, you don't like the complex definition about factors such as 'hydrostatic equilibrium' and 'clearing its orbit', when there's nothing analogous in defining other objects such as moons or asteroids. When an object reaches hydrostatic equilibrium depends on how rigid the stuff its made of is, and how accurately you choose to measure surface irregularities - the committee has defined a scientific subject in terms of things which cannot be precisely measured.
If you care about utility, you have to wonder, what happens if they find another spherical body in the Kuiper belt, and it's bigger than Eris, Sedna, Pluto, or whatever object is the largest known? What if its bigger than Mercury, do we take Mercury off the planetary list? There's a very good chance this definition will ahve to be changed within a few years. Plus, the definition cannot be applied to other solar systems - and right now, we are rapidly closing in on detecting Earth sized and smaller planets in some of them, so the question will come up.
Good explanation overall, but for the record, it seems highly unlikely that either a chicken or a pistachio has ever been consumed by a black hole, although it seems much more probable that some distant analogues of those two things somewhere have.
But so many Atheists don't really care about science any more than the Creationists do. Yes, I'm about to draw a -1 Troll, but here's the facts. Back in the 1940s - 50s, when the Big Bang/Steady State controversy was at its peak, a sizeable number of organised Atheists came down squarely on the side of the Steady State. Scientists and Philosophers, people with the international reputation of Sir Bertrand Russell (for just one example), all insisted that science would prove the Steady State. They made public statements that the Steady State proved there was no need for any God, and that the Big Bang wasn't science, it was religion trying to sneak God in by the back door.
At least a dozen people who were as significant to the Atheist movement of their time as Richard Dawkins is today or Carl Sagan was before his death, picked one side in a scientific debate over the other for philosophical reasons, and turned out to be wrong. Even twenty years after the Big Bang won out in most circles, almost none of them could bring themselves to admit it had.* Many of them acted with obvious bad character, for example making promises that if it turned out the universe did have a definite time of origin, they would resign from being local chairman of an Atheist society and embrace religion, and then denying they ever said such things once the Big bang won in general scientific circles (and several of these made the statements on radio or in their own books, so the record is actually pretty easy to check).
*Fred Hoyle comes to mind as a partial exception. He actually coined the phrase "Big Bang" as an insult to the 'other side's' position, and has tended to support odd theories that might do away with the Big Bang standard model ever since, but at least he has admitted that he had created a straw man attack with the name.
Completely invalid analogy. You're the one not using logic. If you let someone use your car, and you don't tell them not to use the cigarette lighter, they you have no right to complain if the cigarette lighter is used.
This person didn't steal an unsecured computer. He was given access to it. He used it to do something computers normally do - run programs. The program he picked actually let him make more use of the machine for the very purpose it was being provided.
So, by your analogy: You give a person the keys to your car and say have it back Monday morning. You find out he drove to where he told you he would, but he took the car on the interstate. You demand a policeman charge him with stealing, because you didn't specifically give him permission to use a high speed route to get where he was going.
If you're going to use a stupid car analogy, at least think it through a bit.
Aliases seem to be widely misunderstood by all to many people, and I would not be surprised if even the pros (such as the FBI), have people who aren't clear on the concept. This may have been a case where the agent assigned just thinks there's something vaguely tainted about all aliases.
My Ex had a tendency to sign things using either the middle initial of her maiden name or the one that was originally for her last name interchangably. (Still does, as she never reverted to using her maiden name after the divorce). She also has a fairly sloppy signature, so when a bank first noticed the multiple initials they went back and found what looked like a possible second variant. She also has a first name that is common in spelling, but is pronounced in an uncommon way, and once somebody else at the bank made a note about this in some file. So, eventually, the bank made her sign a form stipulating she had a number of legal aliases and she had to provide no less than 12 variations on her signature to cover all the bases. She wasn't actually using anything like 12 aliases - the bank wanted her to give them a signature for each case where somebody thought a letter was sloppy enough to be misread - "Now write it like you would if that "B" looked more like a "P".
I had a fairly high security clearance for a time, and the FBI checked on why my wife used so many aliases. While the bank record only showed one, actual alias of record, getting all those signatures on the card meant, to the investigator, that every one implied a different alias, so discussing just this one area took about 15 minutes. It was all cordial enough, but somewhere in my file or hers there's probably multiple pages of blather about how she spells and pronounces her first name the way her grandmother did, and so on.
There's a quote from Cardinal Richlieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". That's what's vaguely spooky about all this - I can just see her getting into legal trouble and the FBI painting her as a brilliant, if twisted mastermind who had set up a huge batch of aliases many years in advance of her cunning scheme. If they knew about her secret lair under the volcano, it would probably be even worse...
Loenard Nimoy had a very early SF role as an alien in the Republic serial "Zombies of the Stratosphere", and multiple appearances on the Outer limits. For original Twilight Zone, he's on record for only one appearance: "A Quality of Mercy" (Season 3, Ep. 15 - 1961). He also played a young hood in Dragnet and several appearances on the Virginian in his earliest career.
One notable early appearance for Twilight Zone - Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson in "Two", where they are the only actors appearing in the whole episode.
The term fundamentalists isn't really the best either, but it's become so entrenched it would be effectively impossible to change. The Wahhabiist movement has really only developed over the last 260 years, and is in some ways a reform movement like Martin Luther's was for Christian sects. It just so happens that one of the 'reforms' is a claim that if enough people go back to the movement's particular interpretations of Islamic law, Islam as a whole will also get back the political and economic power and position of the Califate era. This makes it (at its worst), like some of the 'pray it and claim it' Christian sects, writ very large. That doesn't mean many Wahhabiists become fanatics, but rather that anyone who does become a fanatic will tend to think that Allah approves of any steps that look like they will restore the secular power of early Islam.
Pick some place that needs developed. One possibility is anywhere the 'perma'frost is melting - there's infrastructure needs in every part of that process. But, I wouldn't worry too much about how soft the down time would be for the criminals, one way or the other, I say worry more about getting important work done during their on duty time. A tropical island is no vacation if the criminal is working 10 hr/6 days a week building a longer and more durable airstrip or a hospital or any serious project.
How about oil rigs? Janitor at a Radome on the DEW? Or let 1 winter-over in Antarctica (with good job performance) count as 2 or 3 normal years good behavior. Right now, there are convicts in some of the western states who volunteer as smoke jumpers. Talk about paying your debt to society.
Only problem I see is, why offer such options to the violent criminals? The smoke jumper programs for Colorado and others all seem to be early out programs for the non-violent. They also give those convicts something that actually helps them get decent employment afterwards - making license plates won't get you much in the current industrial climate, not compared to widespread general heavy construction experience.
I've just realised that the biggest problem with implementing the singularity will be encouraging more people to stay out and stand mystified as it happens without them.
On Slashdot as it is now, if you expect many people to act, yes you would have to spell out in considerable detail both how to do it and how to cover your tracks. The days when most Slashdot posters routinely wrote code of that minimal sophistication, even in a scripting language, are long gone.
Which is exactly what you have no right to conclude from the available evidence. There's a branch event roughly 10 million years ago - one branch leads to modern (full sized) Chimps, and the other branch leads to modern humans. Humans have diferentiated from that branch point, and so have chimps. Bonobos, Orangs, Gorillas, and a bunch of other species which are now extinct, have branched at other times. So how does this justify saying that humans are apes?
Try it for other cases. 60 million years ago, Ambleocetus took to the rivers. Follow its line forward along one fairly well known track where we have good evidence and you eventually get the modern whales. Follow other branches from it or something a little farther back, and you may eventually get the Hippos. But we don't go around arguing that Hippos are Whales! 45 Million years ago, we have a Bear-Dog creature (Amphicyon), but we don't go around arguing that modern Dogs are Bears (or even that wolves are). 54 Million years ago, we had Propalaeotheri in the Eocene, but just because there's some connection to the line that led to modern horses, we don't call them all horses.
Whether to class humans as apes depends on just what other creatures we class as apes, and how common an ancestor we have. This particular fossil find pushes any common ancestry back farther - when we were working from Lucy, a common human/chimp ancestor looked to be possible as recently as 4 million years or so, now we're thinking more like 10 million. That's more room for all the other apes to lie on one side of the split with the chimps, and us and various ancestors all on the other side, which means we might need to reshuffle the taxonomy a bit.
Not that there would be anything wrong if the human/chimp common ancestor 'point' lay 3 million years this side of the chimp/gorilla split or 1 million past the gorilla orangutan split, or wherever - it's just that this find suggests maybe it doesn't, maybe it's quite a bit farther back instead.
I don't think most of the people who have a problem aren't interested in using one of the card's primary functions. I don't think its about hundreds of dollars for all of them either. It comes up where people have two or more cards, or maybe for an NVidia chip-set built into their motherboard, and a non-NVidia card. Some reasons people would want this are pretty likely, and/or rational. For example, what would you normally want to do if you had bought a replacement motherboard, with a 64 Mg NVidia chip-set on-board, and you already owned a high grade ATI card, say 512 Mg video ram, PCI-Express x8 or x16 connector, or whatever is ATI's state of the art now? You probably didn't make the decision to buy a particular Mobo based on the built in graphics - maybe ram slots or bus speeds made a bigger difference. But hey, now you have the board, and there's software that will coax some extra use out of the built in chipset, so might as well use... No wait, you'll have to take an expansion card out...
Does it really feel 'fair', if someone sells you something, and it shuts down a function if you buy a competitor's product and use it alongside the something? To use an analogy, suppose you bought a PC brand car. Either it comes with basic NVidia tires with only a 25,000 mile warranty, or maybe you buy a much nicer set of NVidias. Either way, you put in some related item, such as an ATI spare tire in the trunk. And the NVidia tires stop doing something, like they rule your car and have the deciding vote on whom they will associate with. It wouldn't matter to most people whether the tires were top of the line and costs hundreds, or were cheap basic versions - the does not play well with others factor would still be annoying either way, and I suspect that's how some people feel here.
Capitalism can't be bettered - the Giant Invisible Hand has spoken through its prophets and all we can do is try to grasp the perfection of the pre-existing system. Any deviation swiftly results in systemic breakdown - surely the way the Swiss went to stuffing 45 Million people into Gulags in Swisberia, not three weeks after they tried socialized mail service, proves this. And of course the lifeless wastelands that are all that is left of the Scandinavian countries after they adopted public health care plans should be proof enough for any sane human.
I ran Win 98 SE on one box until long after XP came out. I used a lot of 3rd party apps to get lots of desktop glitter, overlapping transparencies, non-rectangular windows and such. I eventually had both.Net 1.1 and 2.0 installed, and could make the desktop look pretty much like Aero, or like I wanted instead. Because I fell for the line that the non-Microsoft free-ware apps were why the system blue-screened so often, I eventually tracked down more 3rd party bits and automated some registry repair jobs, rewrote a few drivers and such to keep things more stable, and by about 2003 actually had a 98 box that would run constantly for weeks, sometimes months, before the inevitable BSOD.
It really did take about two support packs for me before XP caught up. I finally dumped 98 because every box I had had been upgraded to more than 512 Mb. RAM and grokking the work-arounds for 98 to recognise that looked more wasteful than learning the changes MS had implemented for the XP registry instead (and I wasn't sure it was even possible despite some people claiming it could be done, and still aren't sure). Now I'm running Kubuntu and BSD on various boxes. But yeah, weird though it sounds, I've seen 98 SE be seriously modern OS level stable.
It's OK if no one buys this though. Next time, I'll stick with something more believable, like the time when I was 17, and me and my buddies got really shit faced drunk, rode around in the dryers at the laundrymat at 2 a.m. and then we all saw a pair of Ghosts wearing 1940's style clothing coming out of the old movie theatre.
And the most significant questions for the real thing are probably all unit cost related. How much will individual devices cost? Will this get cheap enough that small town police forces will all have one? Will we see 3 dozen of them used simultaneously at the next G-20 protest? Will DHS provide grants so that every county sheriff's office in the nation has one, and what will that cost the taxpayers? We live in strange times that we know the financial situation for the cheap dance party knock off, but have little clue about the original weapon.
If engineers and scientists really were like 'Big Corporations", patents would last for 150 years plus the life of the longest lived member of the originating team. That patents have a nice, reasonable 20 year limit is a great refutation of all your sarcasm.
Let's see. Your second paragraph is an invalid assertion. Your first paragraph makes another one by implication - patents aren't a means of seeing researchers get paid, only possibly for compensating a percentage of successful ones. I don't think anyone has actually proposed that people doing research shouldn't draw salaries.
Then you create a straw-man, and descend to personal attacks.
My conclusion: You need to do more than just temporarily censor your Sig.
First, let's look at a fair attempt to explain why quantum indeterminacy is not just the same thing as classical indeterminacy (like your two particles, which by your question were presumably determinate in the classical model, at least until they became entangled). You seem to be reasoning much as the following note claims early quantum physicists tried to, when they first grappled with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the question of knowing the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously. I give you someone deliberately trying to put the concept in normal, natural language and not use any actual math:
One point is, the interpretation that we can't know both position and velocity at the same instant, therefore the electron doesn't have both at the same instant, doesn't explain that thing you refer to as "with no regard to distance". This is what sometimes gets called "Spooky action" and is related to non-locality in general. Starting from the interpretation that it's not our not knowing that causes the indeterminacy but the indeterminacy which causes our not knowing turns out to be putting the horse back in front of the cart. Once people started working from the idea that the indeterminacy is fundamental and not like your example of the balls (where there is a definite color for each, and the observer just doesn't know it yet), they started making progress on figuring out how entanglement could be faster than light.
This is about what non-locality really means: One consequence is that we can't assign a local cause (such as: a localized observer hasn't looked yet) to explain why something on the quantum level is determinate, or we lose the ability to explain how the faster than light part happens.
Just as the original QM problem was about determining position and velocity, talking about "non-localizable" (position), and instantanious/faster than light (velocity) is two ends of the same stick. The more you prove that the action happens much faster than the limitation of light-speed, the more you can't claim the action is caused by anything in a particular locale.
They have never been able to accurately predict what the weather will be tomorrow.
First, that's incorrect. We can usually be accurate to three or four days out, if you're willing to settle for just 95% accuracy. Now if you demand flat out 100%, you're right, but humans can't do anything with absolutely no mistakes, so your argument boils down to "Nobody should do anything about anything, because we can't know anything".
Second, this is about climate, not weather. People predict climate all the time. Every time a farmer plants the same crop as in prior years, he is predicting the climate won't change so much that crop won't grow. Hell, every time a tree drops seeds it's a sort of prediction that the climate won't change for the lifetime of that offspring. Climate prediction is why we talk about hurricane season starting on a certain date, or call certain parts of the U.S. tornado alley, and we get it right pretty damned often.
Finally, what Al Gore actually said about his role in creating the Internet is 100% truthful. You are putting words he never said into his mouth. That's not giving anyone who knows the facts much reason to think you have any.
Benford's law is sometimes called the First Digit law. It deals with cases where numbers are not equally probable, but rather lower integers are more common than higher ones. A good example of such a number is the first digit of street addresses. There are many short streets that only have a 100's block, and only a portion are long enough to also have a 200's block, fewer to have a 300's block, and so on, so the first digit is not equally likely to be, say, a 4 or a 7, rather there will be more fours than sevens. Some stock market numbers should fit Benford's law, and there are plenty of other cases with real world applications.
However, the law in extended form does work for second or higher digits, or cases where the most likely value for a digit is not 1. Take the IRS for example. Last year, the standard deduction for married filing jointly was an even $10,000. Many people didn't bother to itemize schedule A unless it got them at least a couple of hundred extra back. So there were many people who claimed $10,2XX on their itemized returns, a few less that claimed in the $10,3XX and so on. $10,0XX or $10,1XX values probably weren't the most common, because a lot of people probably didn't bother to gather all the records needed and do all the paperwork if they though it was only going to get them, say, an extra $27 or even $104.
The IRS could, and probably does use Benford's law to look for number patterns that may indicate fraud, but for some of those numbers, it's the second or latter digit that they should start at. (They won't publicly discuss whether they have any sorting/flagging software that is Benford's law based. I suspect they do as it would be foolish not to take advantage of the math here, but I have absolutely no proof other than that I use some of the same math in a private role, and it's been damned useful a couple of times in spotting a client trying to get me involved with something shady, so it should work equally well for the government.).
So, using Benford's law for second or other trailing digits is legitimate. I can't tell from the article whether Nate Silver is doing everything else correctly, but the extension to a particular trailing digit isn't itself a flaw, and I could come up with a good psychological argument whey humans might fudge the second digit by a point or two, but only when it isn't already an 8 or 9, so as not to make the 10's digit roll, so focusing on digit 2 could certainly be justified. (as could focusing on the second digit to the right of a decimal point for precision results, by much the same logic).
Slashdot Mirror
The principle is just an extension of criminal negligence, malpractice, and other such laws. If a real person or legal person (corporation) doesn't meet certain minimal standards in how they do things, the law is stuck with a paradox it has to resolve. Either the entity is so non-functional it endangers others by its extreme incompetence, or the entity just didn't give a damn about the consequences and doesn't want to play by the social compact's rules while still reaping the benefits. We seldom restrain individuals as insane just because they can't use the pointy scissors without poking other people yet, and have no way to restrain a company for behaving that way - So we have to assume the company is competent - So it meant to behave as an outlaw does. Now what do we do? Laws such as these, where intent doesn't matter, are the outcome. The court doesn't have to go into intent because if the entity was actually innocent of any ill intent then they are by definition certifiably insane and a danger to others, or else uneducatably retarded. We can't (and shouldn't) punish people for those two conditions, but we sure as hell can control their ability to cause further damage.
And the sun orbits a cluster of supermassive black holes 8.0 Kiloparsecs away in the direction of Sagittarius. And the galaxy orbits the gravitational center of the local cluster, which orbits the Virgo supercluster, which orbits the Great Attractor, which just may orbit a really massive superstring. How far should we go with this?
The commission that threw out counting Pluto as a planet also invoked its high inclination to the plane of the solar system as one of the reasons. Now here, the ring is inclined at 27 degrees (presumably to Saturn's equatorial plane). There's a moon associated with the ring. So, apparently the definition of planet now makes inclination a factor, but the definition of moon doesn't. This lack of consistency is one of the reasons people are bothered by the 'Pluto is a Minor Planet' decision.
If you care about normal language rules, you don't like the weird neologism that says "Minor Planets aren't Planets" - that's not good linguistics. 'Minor' is a modifier that does not negate the noun modified.
If you care about consistency, you don't like the complex definition about factors such as 'hydrostatic equilibrium' and 'clearing its orbit', when there's nothing analogous in defining other objects such as moons or asteroids. When an object reaches hydrostatic equilibrium depends on how rigid the stuff its made of is, and how accurately you choose to measure surface irregularities - the committee has defined a scientific subject in terms of things which cannot be precisely measured.
If you care about utility, you have to wonder, what happens if they find another spherical body in the Kuiper belt, and it's bigger than Eris, Sedna, Pluto, or whatever object is the largest known? What if its bigger than Mercury, do we take Mercury off the planetary list? There's a very good chance this definition will ahve to be changed within a few years. Plus, the definition cannot be applied to other solar systems - and right now, we are rapidly closing in on detecting Earth sized and smaller planets in some of them, so the question will come up.
You'd better hurry to get a patent on the push button chicken.
Good explanation overall, but for the record, it seems highly unlikely that either a chicken or a pistachio has ever been consumed by a black hole, although it seems much more probable that some distant analogues of those two things somewhere have.
But so many Atheists don't really care about science any more than the Creationists do. Yes, I'm about to draw a -1 Troll, but here's the facts.
Back in the 1940s - 50s, when the Big Bang/Steady State controversy was at its peak, a sizeable number of organised Atheists came down squarely on the side of the Steady State. Scientists and Philosophers, people with the international reputation of Sir Bertrand Russell (for just one example), all insisted that science would prove the Steady State. They made public statements that the Steady State proved there was no need for any God, and that the Big Bang wasn't science, it was religion trying to sneak God in by the back door.
At least a dozen people who were as significant to the Atheist movement of their time as Richard Dawkins is today or Carl Sagan was before his death, picked one side in a scientific debate over the other for philosophical reasons, and turned out to be wrong. Even twenty years after the Big Bang won out in most circles, almost none of them could bring themselves to admit it had.* Many of them acted with obvious bad character, for example making promises that if it turned out the universe did have a definite time of origin, they would resign from being local chairman of an Atheist society and embrace religion, and then denying they ever said such things once the Big bang won in general scientific circles (and several of these made the statements on radio or in their own books, so the record is actually pretty easy to check).
*Fred Hoyle comes to mind as a partial exception. He actually coined the phrase "Big Bang" as an insult to the 'other side's' position, and has tended to support odd theories that might do away with the Big Bang standard model ever since, but at least he has admitted that he had created a straw man attack with the name.
So you're saying the liberals aren't trying to get us out of Iraq or Afghanistan?
Completely invalid analogy. You're the one not using logic.
If you let someone use your car, and you don't tell them not to use the cigarette lighter, they you have no right to complain if the cigarette lighter is used.
This person didn't steal an unsecured computer. He was given access to it. He used it to do something computers normally do - run programs. The program he picked actually let him make more use of the machine for the very purpose it was being provided.
So, by your analogy: You give a person the keys to your car and say have it back Monday morning. You find out he drove to where he told you he would, but he took the car on the interstate. You demand a policeman charge him with stealing, because you didn't specifically give him permission to use a high speed route to get where he was going.
If you're going to use a stupid car analogy, at least think it through a bit.
Aliases seem to be widely misunderstood by all to many people, and I would not be surprised if even the pros (such as the FBI), have people who aren't clear on the concept. This may have been a case where the agent assigned just thinks there's something vaguely tainted about all aliases.
My Ex had a tendency to sign things using either the middle initial of her maiden name or the one that was originally for her last name interchangably. (Still does, as she never reverted to using her maiden name after the divorce). She also has a fairly sloppy signature, so when a bank first noticed the multiple initials they went back and found what looked like a possible second variant. She also has a first name that is common in spelling, but is pronounced in an uncommon way, and once somebody else at the bank made a note about this in some file. So, eventually, the bank made her sign a form stipulating she had a number of legal aliases and she had to provide no less than 12 variations on her signature to cover all the bases. She wasn't actually using anything like 12 aliases - the bank wanted her to give them a signature for each case where somebody thought a letter was sloppy enough to be misread - "Now write it like you would if that "B" looked more like a "P".
I had a fairly high security clearance for a time, and the FBI checked on why my wife used so many aliases. While the bank record only showed one, actual alias of record, getting all those signatures on the card meant, to the investigator, that every one implied a different alias, so discussing just this one area took about 15 minutes. It was all cordial enough, but somewhere in my file or hers there's probably multiple pages of blather about how she spells and pronounces her first name the way her grandmother did, and so on.
There's a quote from Cardinal Richlieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". That's what's vaguely spooky about all this - I can just see her getting into legal trouble and the FBI painting her as a brilliant, if twisted mastermind who had set up a huge batch of aliases many years in advance of her cunning scheme. If they knew about her secret lair under the volcano, it would probably be even worse...
You forgot to channel the inverse cognitons through the deflector dish!
Loenard Nimoy had a very early SF role as an alien in the Republic serial "Zombies of the Stratosphere", and multiple appearances on the Outer limits. For original Twilight Zone, he's on record for only one appearance: "A Quality of Mercy" (Season 3, Ep. 15 - 1961). He also played a young hood in Dragnet and several appearances on the Virginian in his earliest career.
One notable early appearance for Twilight Zone - Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson in "Two", where they are the only actors appearing in the whole episode.
The term fundamentalists isn't really the best either, but it's become so entrenched it would be effectively impossible to change. The Wahhabiist movement has really only developed over the last 260 years, and is in some ways a reform movement like Martin Luther's was for Christian sects. It just so happens that one of the 'reforms' is a claim that if enough people go back to the movement's particular interpretations of Islamic law, Islam as a whole will also get back the political and economic power and position of the Califate era. This makes it (at its worst), like some of the 'pray it and claim it' Christian sects, writ very large. That doesn't mean many Wahhabiists become fanatics, but rather that anyone who does become a fanatic will tend to think that Allah approves of any steps that look like they will restore the secular power of early Islam.
It's a terrorist's dream.
The Terrorists are gonna drive it into the pentagon?
Pick some place that needs developed. One possibility is anywhere the 'perma'frost is melting - there's infrastructure needs in every part of that process. But, I wouldn't worry too much about how soft the down time would be for the criminals, one way or the other, I say worry more about getting important work done during their on duty time. A tropical island is no vacation if the criminal is working 10 hr/6 days a week building a longer and more durable airstrip or a hospital or any serious project.
How about oil rigs? Janitor at a Radome on the DEW? Or let 1 winter-over in Antarctica (with good job performance) count as 2 or 3 normal years good behavior. Right now, there are convicts in some of the western states who volunteer as smoke jumpers. Talk about paying your debt to society.
Only problem I see is, why offer such options to the violent criminals? The smoke jumper programs for Colorado and others all seem to be early out programs for the non-violent. They also give those convicts something that actually helps them get decent employment afterwards - making license plates won't get you much in the current industrial climate, not compared to widespread general heavy construction experience.
I've just realised that the biggest problem with implementing the singularity will be encouraging more people to stay out and stand mystified as it happens without them.
On Slashdot as it is now, if you expect many people to act, yes you would have to spell out in considerable detail both how to do it and how to cover your tracks. The days when most Slashdot posters routinely wrote code of that minimal sophistication, even in a scripting language, are long gone.
Humans are apes.
Which is exactly what you have no right to conclude from the available evidence. There's a branch event roughly 10 million years ago - one branch leads to modern (full sized) Chimps, and the other branch leads to modern humans. Humans have diferentiated from that branch point, and so have chimps. Bonobos, Orangs, Gorillas, and a bunch of other species which are now extinct, have branched at other times. So how does this justify saying that humans are apes?
Try it for other cases. 60 million years ago, Ambleocetus took to the rivers. Follow its line forward along one fairly well known track where we have good evidence and you eventually get the modern whales. Follow other branches from it or something a little farther back, and you may eventually get the Hippos. But we don't go around arguing that Hippos are Whales! 45 Million years ago, we have a Bear-Dog creature (Amphicyon), but we don't go around arguing that modern Dogs are Bears (or even that wolves are). 54 Million years ago, we had Propalaeotheri in the Eocene, but just because there's some connection to the line that led to modern horses, we don't call them all horses.
Whether to class humans as apes depends on just what other creatures we class as apes, and how common an ancestor we have. This particular fossil find pushes any common ancestry back farther - when we were working from Lucy, a common human/chimp ancestor looked to be possible as recently as 4 million years or so, now we're thinking more like 10 million. That's more room for all the other apes to lie on one side of the split with the chimps, and us and various ancestors all on the other side, which means we might need to reshuffle the taxonomy a bit.
Not that there would be anything wrong if the human/chimp common ancestor 'point' lay 3 million years this side of the chimp/gorilla split or 1 million past the gorilla orangutan split, or wherever - it's just that this find suggests maybe it doesn't, maybe it's quite a bit farther back instead.
I don't think most of the people who have a problem aren't interested in using one of the card's primary functions. I don't think its about hundreds of dollars for all of them either. It comes up where people have two or more cards, or maybe for an NVidia chip-set built into their motherboard, and a non-NVidia card. Some reasons people would want this are pretty likely, and/or rational. For example, what would you normally want to do if you had bought a replacement motherboard, with a 64 Mg NVidia chip-set on-board, and you already owned a high grade ATI card, say 512 Mg video ram, PCI-Express x8 or x16 connector, or whatever is ATI's state of the art now? You probably didn't make the decision to buy a particular Mobo based on the built in graphics - maybe ram slots or bus speeds made a bigger difference. But hey, now you have the board, and there's software that will coax some extra use out of the built in chipset, so might as well use ... No wait, you'll have to take an expansion card out...
Does it really feel 'fair', if someone sells you something, and it shuts down a function if you buy a competitor's product and use it alongside the something? To use an analogy, suppose you bought a PC brand car. Either it comes with basic NVidia tires with only a 25,000 mile warranty, or maybe you buy a much nicer set of NVidias. Either way, you put in some related item, such as an ATI spare tire in the trunk. And the NVidia tires stop doing something, like they rule your car and have the deciding vote on whom they will associate with. It wouldn't matter to most people whether the tires were top of the line and costs hundreds, or were cheap basic versions - the does not play well with others factor would still be annoying either way, and I suspect that's how some people feel here.
Capitalism can't be bettered - the Giant Invisible Hand has spoken through its prophets and all we can do is try to grasp the perfection of the pre-existing system. Any deviation swiftly results in systemic breakdown - surely the way the Swiss went to stuffing 45 Million people into Gulags in Swisberia, not three weeks after they tried socialized mail service, proves this. And of course the lifeless wastelands that are all that is left of the Scandinavian countries after they adopted public health care plans should be proof enough for any sane human.
I ran Win 98 SE on one box until long after XP came out. I used a lot of 3rd party apps to get lots of desktop glitter, overlapping transparencies, non-rectangular windows and such. I eventually had both .Net 1.1 and 2.0 installed, and could make the desktop look pretty much like Aero, or like I wanted instead. Because I fell for the line that the non-Microsoft free-ware apps were why the system blue-screened so often, I eventually tracked down more 3rd party bits and automated some registry repair jobs, rewrote a few drivers and such to keep things more stable, and by about 2003 actually had a 98 box that would run constantly for weeks, sometimes months, before the inevitable BSOD.
It really did take about two support packs for me before XP caught up. I finally dumped 98 because every box I had had been upgraded to more than 512 Mb. RAM and grokking the work-arounds for 98 to recognise that looked more wasteful than learning the changes MS had implemented for the XP registry instead (and I wasn't sure it was even possible despite some people claiming it could be done, and still aren't sure). Now I'm running Kubuntu and BSD on various boxes. But yeah, weird though it sounds, I've seen 98 SE be seriously modern OS level stable.
It's OK if no one buys this though. Next time, I'll stick with something more believable, like the time when I was 17, and me and my buddies got really shit faced drunk, rode around in the dryers at the laundrymat at 2 a.m. and then we all saw a pair of Ghosts wearing 1940's style clothing coming out of the old movie theatre.
And the most significant questions for the real thing are probably all unit cost related. How much will individual devices cost? Will this get cheap enough that small town police forces will all have one? Will we see 3 dozen of them used simultaneously at the next G-20 protest? Will DHS provide grants so that every county sheriff's office in the nation has one, and what will that cost the taxpayers? We live in strange times that we know the financial situation for the cheap dance party knock off, but have little clue about the original weapon.
If engineers and scientists really were like 'Big Corporations", patents would last for 150 years plus the life of the longest lived member of the originating team. That patents have a nice, reasonable 20 year limit is a great refutation of all your sarcasm.
Let's see. Your second paragraph is an invalid assertion. Your first paragraph makes another one by implication - patents aren't a means of seeing researchers get paid, only possibly for compensating a percentage of successful ones. I don't think anyone has actually proposed that people doing research shouldn't draw salaries.
Then you create a straw-man, and descend to personal attacks.
My conclusion: You need to do more than just temporarily censor your Sig.
First, let's look at a fair attempt to explain why quantum indeterminacy is not just the same thing as classical indeterminacy (like your two particles, which by your question were presumably determinate in the classical model, at least until they became entangled). You seem to be reasoning much as the following note claims early quantum physicists tried to, when they first grappled with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the question of knowing the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously. I give you someone deliberately trying to put the concept in normal, natural language and not use any actual math:
http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/Quanta.htm
One point is, the interpretation that we can't know both position and velocity at the same instant, therefore the electron doesn't have both at the same instant, doesn't explain that thing you refer to as "with no regard to distance". This is what sometimes gets called "Spooky action" and is related to non-locality in general. Starting from the interpretation that it's not our not knowing that causes the indeterminacy but the indeterminacy which causes our not knowing turns out to be putting the horse back in front of the cart. Once people started working from the idea that the indeterminacy is fundamental and not like your example of the balls (where there is a definite color for each, and the observer just doesn't know it yet), they started making progress on figuring out how entanglement could be faster than light.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Quantum_indeterminacy
This is about what non-locality really means: One consequence is that we can't assign a local cause (such as: a localized observer hasn't looked yet) to explain why something on the quantum level is determinate, or we lose the ability to explain how the faster than light part happens.
Just as the original QM problem was about determining position and velocity, talking about "non-localizable" (position), and instantanious/faster than light (velocity) is two ends of the same stick. The more you prove that the action happens much faster than the limitation of light-speed, the more you can't claim the action is caused by anything in a particular locale.
They have never been able to accurately predict what the weather will be tomorrow.
First, that's incorrect. We can usually be accurate to three or four days out, if you're willing to settle for just 95% accuracy. Now if you demand flat out 100%, you're right, but humans can't do anything with absolutely no mistakes, so your argument boils down to "Nobody should do anything about anything, because we can't know anything".
Second, this is about climate, not weather. People predict climate all the time. Every time a farmer plants the same crop as in prior years, he is predicting the climate won't change so much that crop won't grow. Hell, every time a tree drops seeds it's a sort of prediction that the climate won't change for the lifetime of that offspring. Climate prediction is why we talk about hurricane season starting on a certain date, or call certain parts of the U.S. tornado alley, and we get it right pretty damned often.
Finally, what Al Gore actually said about his role in creating the Internet is 100% truthful. You are putting words he never said into his mouth. That's not giving anyone who knows the facts much reason to think you have any.
Benford's law is sometimes called the First Digit law. It deals with cases where numbers are not equally probable, but rather lower integers are more common than higher ones. A good example of such a number is the first digit of street addresses. There are many short streets that only have a 100's block, and only a portion are long enough to also have a 200's block, fewer to have a 300's block, and so on, so the first digit is not equally likely to be, say, a 4 or a 7, rather there will be more fours than sevens. Some stock market numbers should fit Benford's law, and there are plenty of other cases with real world applications.
However, the law in extended form does work for second or higher digits, or cases where the most likely value for a digit is not 1. Take the IRS for example. Last year, the standard deduction for married filing jointly was an even $10,000. Many people didn't bother to itemize schedule A unless it got them at least a couple of hundred extra back. So there were many people who claimed $10,2XX on their itemized returns, a few less that claimed in the $10,3XX and so on. $10,0XX or $10,1XX values probably weren't the most common, because a lot of people probably didn't bother to gather all the records needed and do all the paperwork if they though it was only going to get them, say, an extra $27 or even $104.
The IRS could, and probably does use Benford's law to look for number patterns that may indicate fraud, but for some of those numbers, it's the second or latter digit that they should start at. (They won't publicly discuss whether they have any sorting/flagging software that is Benford's law based. I suspect they do as it would be foolish not to take advantage of the math here, but I have absolutely no proof other than that I use some of the same math in a private role, and it's been damned useful a couple of times in spotting a client trying to get me involved with something shady, so it should work equally well for the government.).
So, using Benford's law for second or other trailing digits is legitimate. I can't tell from the article whether Nate Silver is doing everything else correctly, but the extension to a particular trailing digit isn't itself a flaw, and I could come up with a good psychological argument whey humans might fudge the second digit by a point or two, but only when it isn't already an 8 or 9, so as not to make the 10's digit roll, so focusing on digit 2 could certainly be justified. (as could focusing on the second digit to the right of a decimal point for precision results, by much the same logic).