Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.
Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.
Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.
It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.
(Crap, I just realized you might be talking about a different game; I responded as if you were replying to the GP about Arkham City, but now I suspect you were referring to GTA4. My bad if I misunderstood.)
Actually no, I'm gonna chime in here as another person who owns Arkham City and does not have a live account. Your statement is incorrect.
What happens instead is, you get prompted to log into GFWL, and can click "cancel" to just work offline. Save game still works, no features lost. You can't do online scores, but who cares, really? Dunno if it'll require a login for DLC, but I rarely bother with that anyway. And, just to be clear on this point, I'm currently a quarter way through the game, have never made a live account (I dislike Microsoft), have saved plenty of times and am playing a non-pirated, bought off of steam version of the game.
I don't know where you got your information, but it's either out of date, was never correct in the first place, or something got misunderstood along the way.
Don't be stupid, the whole point of a strategic nuclear weapon is deterrence and/or nationalistic posturing. Hiding your capabilities does not further either cause. Delivery systems may have some secrecy about them to prevent the development of countermeasures, but the actual bomb yields are no secret.
Plus, you don't know if a design works until you test it, and you can't test a nuke without essentially letting every other nation with an intelligence agency know the yield, since the math for determining TNT equivalence isn't hard, and the detonation isn't subtle.
Further to that, most of the really big designs are older and outdated, as miniaturization became the focus (smaller bombs equals more warheads per missile/bomber). Meaning the bombs from the end of the cold war are actually lower yield than the ones from the middle.
In short, you're letting knee jerk "the government is hiding secrets" paranoia get in the way of common sense, and you don't know nukes.
You're undermining your point by insisting on antagonizing the religious. Which is unfortunate, because your first sentence is entirely correct.
In the developed world, the average number of children per woman is 1-2 depending on where you are. The women with no kids and the ones with three or more tend to cancel out. Replacement level fertility (i.e. the fertility rate of a stable population with no immigration or emigration) is 2.1 children per woman, roughly. Meaning that if the entire world enjoyed a first world standard of living, the growth rate would fall below replacement level and the population would begin to shrink within a generation or three. In truth, the only reasons the population of the developed world is still growing are immigration and inertia.
Why only two kids at most? Because that's all it takes to satisfy most people's desire for children, because people no longer rely on their children to care for them when they get old, because most pregnancies these days are deliberate rather than accidental, and because if your kids aren't part of the labour force, there's no economic advantage to large families. Kids are a huge burden in the first world.
In point of fact, a long term population study carried out in 2006 suggested that the global population would likely stabilize at around nine billion by midcentury, with rising standards of living being the deciding factor. This is still a problem, in terms of supplying energy to those billions without wrecking the ecology or exhausting finite resources, but feeding nine billion shouldn't be a stretch.
Since I can't imagine the average life expectancy skyrocketing outside of first world nations, the talk of "if people live longer lives, we'd run out of food" is bunk. At best, enhanced longevity would counteract the decline in population; more likely it wouldn't even do that, since we're not talking complete immortality here.
Doesn't matter in context. You're bitching about the wrong problem for the article.
Most of the time when a web based email account gets cracked it isn't that you set your password to "password". Instead it's that you logged in from a compromised machine, and someone got ahold of your actual password, whether it's "fido" or "1xe34v3tsAad". There's a damn good reason I don't check my email anywhere other than devices I know are clean.
(Had something like what TFA describes happen to someone I know; it took her forever to realize that what had transpired was that she'd checked gmail on a coworker's computer and said coworker had been grossly lax in terms of safety. When a scan was run on the box for the first time ever it returned over a hundred bits of malware, some of it serious. The coworker, incidentally, was a private secretary to a lawyer, so this was a "holy shit" moment if ever there was one.)
Think about it for a moment and you'll see why the perpetrators use malware and/or social engineering rather than, say, a dictionary attack; there's nothing google, facebook or yahoo can do about it. They can easily limit the number of login attempts, encrypt usernames and passwords, reject really common passwords during account creation, etc, but if some third party gets the correct password from an infected PC, then when they log in it will appear legitimate.
That isn't to say you shouldn't bother with strong passwords, but if you think having a strong password protects you from everything, you're fooling yourself. The solution here also requires security software and education about admin privileges and trusted vs. untrusted sources for "free" software as it's the likeliest vector for infection (presupposing for a moment that the user needs a windows box, and frankly half the time the answer to that is "yes" for a number of reasons).
The idea of winning a war by way of killing so many of the opposition that the rest will surrender or retreat is viable some of the time, but horrific. And truth be told, it doesn't work nearly as well in real life as it does on paper; people are unpredictable creatures at the best of times, and there are plenty of cases of soldiers or entire armies fighting to the very last, horrific fate be damned, rather than surrender. In particular populations and politicians may fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy i.e. "We've already lost N soldier fighting this war, we can't give up now, else they died for nothing." You can't expect to win a war if you assume your opponents are rational actors who prioritize self preservation, because that isn't always going to be the case.
The right way to do it, and in fact the way that's had a better track record of making wars end, is to destroy the ability of the enemy to make war altogether. For a protracted conflict, you get more bang for your buck destroying logistic, communication and supply capability than you do killing enemy soldiers in a fair fight. Any modern national military is only as capable of making war as they are capable of supplying, commanding and reinforcing their armed forces. Obviously this doesn't work in a guerrilla engagement, where supply lines may be nonexistent, or against a foe who hides among civilians. Iraq is a good example of where this strategy does and doesn't work; the official conflict ended rapidly, with the army defeated in short order (and without massive casualties; many Iraqi soldiers never even saw action), but the same approach cannot be used to maintain an occupation.
For a hypothetical conflict between two nations armed with robots, this form of conflict is even more likely; infantry forces require less logistical support than drone forces. In order to win, you don't grind your enemy's robotic forces into dust in a fair fight and you don't try to terrorize their populace into surrendering; instead you destroy their communications so they can't send in the drones, you destroy their factories, airbases, munitions dumps and whatever else they need to build and maintain their robotic fleet and you prevent them from doing the same thing to you. You don't have much chance of occupying a country with a robotic army any more than you can occupy a country with tanks, aircraft or warships; occupation pretty much requires men on the ground. This does mean that a robot armed nation might win a conflict without casualties, but must be prepared to suffer losses if they plan on conquering rather than letting their foe surrender and retain their own government.
Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case, though it would not surprise me to learn there's an actual event obscured by the retelling.
Regardless, the GP has the right idea. I've heard of blind tests of "EM sensitivity" done in the past, with results that unambiguously showed a purely psychosomatic condition - that is to say, the subjects felt sick when they believed they were being exposed, regardless of their actual exposure, and felt fine when they believed they were "safe". But to the patient, this is always going to be met with denial. "Can you believe that doctor thought it was all in my head! Where the hell did he learn medicine? I don't like being called crazy, I'm going to go to my homeopath for advice from now on!"
Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy". Nobody wants to admit that there could be anything wrong with their head, ergo all psychosomatic illnesses are attributed to external causes, sensible or otherwise. The prevalence of quacks and snake oil salesmen ready to cash in on the latest hysterical bandwagon only makes the problem worse.
There's very little economic reason to trade in used games at Gamestop. The value you get from them is minimal; you'd have to get rid of a whole stack of games (games that are still recent enough and saleable titles for the store to want them, mind you) in order to get one in exchange. I'm quite sure the only reason the practice persists is because Gamestop has done such an excellent job of convincing people otherwise.
If you remove trade-ins from the equation, what does Gamestop really offer, or have a monopoly on? They're an upscale, specialized pawnshop that sells new games on the side.
I'm not saying it isn't an effective business model on their part mind you, just that their business model is a half and half mixture of good marketing and a target audience who's bad at arithmetic.
The basic unit of life isn't the organism, it's the gene. Genes proliferate if they confer reproductive success to the organism they're attached to. They, in a very real and literal way, exist to make more of themselves, because several billion years of evolution has selected in favour of reproductively successful genes.
Genes do not go extinct when the organism they are attached to dies; rather genes go extinct when there are no copies left in any organism. There are genes that have been lost forever, and genes that have been succeeded by their own mutant descendants (erroneous copies that happened to do better than the original), but at the same time there are genes kicking around today that existed in the time of the dinosaurs.
So yes, from a genetic evolutionary standpoint, it is entirely fair to say "life exists to procreate". Just don't mistake fact for philosophy or morality; trying to find moral meaning in evolution has proven to be a bad idea, historically.
Generalists in nature have a harder time of things than specialists. Else no organism would become specialized in the first place.
There's a good reason all that green goo is specialized; because if you took an non-specialized plant and dropped it in the soil of a specialist, it's going to get choked out by the native. There are successful invasive plant species, but even then what you've often got is an invasive specialist out competing the native specialists for the kind of environment they both thrive in.
So your non-discriminating grey goo has all the drawbacks of the non-discriminating green goo. Only it has the much larger handicap of not actually existing yet.
You misunderstand; if a "bad solution" as you call it, did arise, it would become the new normal.
Life exists to procreate. A life form that manages to cover the entire planet in it's own self-replicating mass is an evolutionary success. It won't die out; if its replication created an unfavourable environment for its own survival, it may die back, but it will persist.
I'm not talking hypotheticals here either. What I've just described is exactly what happened around three billion years ago.
Photosynthesis arose. Living things used sunlight to split CO2, and spewed toxic oxygen into the biosphere, killing the competition. This "green goo" was so successful, that it diversified, evolved into new niches and took over the world. We call them "plants".
This isn't a unique incident - there are whole eras of living organisms wiped out by competition from something better adapting at making more of itself. And it isn't a coincidence that what I've just described sounds an awful lot like "grey goo"; the people who proposed a grey goo scenario were familiar with the evolution of plant life.
I don't disagree with you that grey goo is possible; where I disagree is that you seem to think it's easy. Show me a self-replicating machine, and I'll be seriously impressed. Show me a self-replicating nanomachine, I'll be even more impressed. Nobody has that technology yet, and I'd be amazed to see it in my lifetime.
What I won't live to see, and neither will you, is a self-replicating nanomachine that can out-compete living things. Sorry, but your grey goo fears are a couple hundred years too early, and I'm not sure they'll ever be realized.
If a trivial sequence of proteins allowed for the kind of replication you're talking about, the world would already have ended. There's been living things fucking around with differing types of biochemistry for the past few billion years; if the self-replicating apocalypse could be achieved trivially, it would have. Some would say that's exactly what did happen.
What you and all the other "grey goo" crowd are overlooking is that it isn't enough to build a machine capable of self-replication. Living things do that already. The "grey goo" scenario already happened around three billion years ago when photosynthesis first arose and organisms began harvesting solar energy. You, the person reading this right now, are a form of naturally occurring self-replicating carbon based machinery. And you've had a few billenia of evolution to optimize the "self-replicating" part.
We could build self-replicating nanotechnology tomorrow, deliberately release it into the environment and it would do... nothing. If it were carbon based, it'd probably become something's dinner.
No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.
I'm going to bold this part for anyone skimming this (admittedly long) post: To end the world with nanotechnology requires self-replicating machines (which we don't have) that are better at reproducing themselves than existing organisms . I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I am going to say with absolute certainty that it won't happen in the twenty-first century. We'll be lucky to even have self-replicating machines in a hundred years. "Grey goo" today is about as likely as a renaissance inventor building a thermonuclear weapon.
The stupidity of it all is that MRSA is not necessary and can be prevented.
While I agree with you that overuse of antibiotics for trivial purposes has sped up the development of resistant strains, I think you're overstating it. The tone of your post suggests you blame MRSA entirely on factory farming and physician incompetence/laziness, which simply isn't the case.
To begin with, there are two more or less unavoidable problems that lead to the development of resistant strains. The first is that people prescribed antibiotics for actual bacterial infections often stop taking them when the symptoms abate, rather than taking the full course. The second is that hospitals are breeding grounds for resistant infections. Even a well managed hospital isn't completely safe.
Now, you can reduce those problems with public education and changes to hospital policies, but you can't eliminate the threat, which brings us to the larger issue; resistant strains are inevitable. In a perfect world, where no antibiotics were misused and all hospitals were entirely sterile, there would still arise antibiotic resistant bacteria over time. Basic evolution in action.
So no, MRSA and it's kin cannot be prevented, they can merely be reduced in prevalence.
Now, obviously new treatments can be devised to try and shift our antibacterial measures as the bacteria adapt; in particular if we retire treatments that have become ineffective, the strains resistant to those drugs might die out from competition, allowing us to revive "useless" antibiotics decades or more in the future.
Doing what you suggest - essentially banning antibiotic misuse - is still a good idea, but without the other solutions mentioned above, it's just a delaying tactic.
Ah, okay, I misunderstood. Or got too focused on the 20% figure.
Yeah, pretty much every corner of the internet has at least some crazy racists who frequent it. If you want an upside, they're fewer than they look; take the total number of racist remarks and filter out the obvious trolls, and then assume some of the rest are trolls being a little more subtle. Which doesn't mean the trolls aren't also racist (lots of people are at least a little racist and in denial about it), but it does mean that they aren't expressing their own true opinions, they're just going for shock value.
If you believe the internet, Hitler was whatever the opposite of the person posting is. In point of fact, I'm pretty sure he wasn't much of anything. Deeply narcissistic individuals don't do religion, except insofar as they wish others to worship them.
And he did have a cult of personality.
Something similar seems to hold true for most leaders of totalitarian states. If you're The Leader, then you honestly expect others to treat you as either an actual god (see: various historical tyrants), an agent of god (see: absolute monarchs) or an idol (see: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Kim Jong-il, too many others to list). Anything less is disloyalty, and disloyalty is tantamount to treason.
I think, in his warped mind, it's an "enemy of my enemy" thing. He has it in for muslims. Palestinians are muslims. Palestinians have a beef with Israel. Q.E.D he mentions Israel in positive terms in his manifesto. Doesn't make him any less bigoted.
I don't know where you got that 20% figure, but I can think of a few obvious flaws.
If a fifth of slashdot's regular posters were crazy racists, and even a fraction got mod points, you wouldn't have to read the "raw" comments, they'd get upmodded by their fellow crazy racists. Hell, I've seen more creationist drivel upmodded than racist drivel, which should tell you something right there. As it stands I've seen plenty of racist remarks coming from accounts posting at 0 or -1 or from ACs, but the fact that they're consistently modded down suggests they're significantly in the minority. Plus, many of them are obvious troll comments, meaning they may or may not be KKK types IRL, but they want you to think they are in order to get you angry.
Five percent I'd believe. And that's defining "racist" in the broad sense.
Being unable to perceive it doesn't make it not there.
For example, human beings cannot perceive most of the fundamental stuff in the universe ourselves. We need machines to do it for us, then output that mechanical perception into forms that we can understand. Strong nuclear force comes to mind as an example of something fundamental and invisible to our senses.
Also, when you talk of an "observer" in physics (i.e. X will appear to be Y when viewed by an observer in reference frame Z) it refers to a hypothetical observer; the underlying physics are still occurring even if reference frame Z is nothing but empty vacuum.
Might be. It depends on how much credit you want to give the media; whether they changed the wording based on the shooting or the shooter.
Regardless of how cynical you are toward the media reaction, I still think that, given the political manifesto, the attack ought to be called terrorism. Fits the dictionary definition to a T.
Because the speed of sound is variable and not tied to any fundamental physical laws.
Look at it this way. Don't think of the "speed of light". Think of C, the universal speed limit. Light travels at that speed in vacuum, but it does so by default. It isn't that light is special, it's just that it lacks rest mass.
The speed of sound on the other hand is simply a property of the medium the sound is travelling in. Nothing special.
Now, the other thing you're going to have a hell of a time wrapping your head around is that cause and effect can't proceed faster than C. When we say universal speed limit, we really do mean "universal". If event A occurs then observer B who is four light minutes away from where A occurs has absolutely no way of knowing that event A has happened until those four minutes have passed. In fact, from B's perspective, event A hasn't happened until B can see it; there is no such thing as universal simultaneity.
I think that's incorrect. Neither is a superset of the other, however you want to slice it.
You can have a terrorist attack that isn't a massacre. If someone used a radiological weapon for the express purpose of causing terror to further a political agenda, it would be "terrorism", but not a massacre - there might not even be any immediate deaths, though there would be terror without question.
You can have a massacre that isn't terrorism. All that requires is a large scale loss of life to violence without an express political aim or intent to spread fear. Examples range from genocide, to indiscriminate warfare, to deliberate acts of mass murder carried out by damaged individuals with no particular agenda.
Ven diagram is a better way to look at it. |Massacre|Terrorist Massacre|Terrorism| This was both, and can be called either a massacre or a terror attack.
I do agree however that the media called it "terrorism" when the bomb hit Oslo and the perp was unknown and shifted more to "massacre" when it became known that the attack was domestic rather than foreign. There seems to be a certain amount of denial around the idea that this terrorist is a white christian killing his countrymen instead of a brown muslim from some dusty corner of the middle east.
Honestly, I think I've seen more references in the mainstream news of Breivik's religion, politics and manifesto than I have of his preferred entertainment. In fact, the first link in TFS is the first such news story I've seen. Maybe I just don't follow the sorts of news outlets that jump on that anti-game bandwagon.
It might be that games are the default boogeyman in shootings when the killer doesn't give a motive - that explanation is offered when other explanations fail to pan out. When the perpetrator is outspoken about his motives the media doesn't need to invent new ones. In this case, the murderous bastard had an entire freaking manifesto dedicated to telling the world why he did what he did.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.
Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.
Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.
It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.
(Crap, I just realized you might be talking about a different game; I responded as if you were replying to the GP about Arkham City, but now I suspect you were referring to GTA4. My bad if I misunderstood.)
Actually no, I'm gonna chime in here as another person who owns Arkham City and does not have a live account. Your statement is incorrect.
What happens instead is, you get prompted to log into GFWL, and can click "cancel" to just work offline. Save game still works, no features lost. You can't do online scores, but who cares, really? Dunno if it'll require a login for DLC, but I rarely bother with that anyway. And, just to be clear on this point, I'm currently a quarter way through the game, have never made a live account (I dislike Microsoft), have saved plenty of times and am playing a non-pirated, bought off of steam version of the game.
I don't know where you got your information, but it's either out of date, was never correct in the first place, or something got misunderstood along the way.
Actually, omnivores are all over the map in terms of taste. Pigs are tasty, bears are edible, but nobody's lining up to try crow-pie.
Regarding carnivores, I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.
Might want to amend your rules to say that scavengers aren't tasty, herd animals are delicious, and seafood is exempt.
Don't be stupid, the whole point of a strategic nuclear weapon is deterrence and/or nationalistic posturing. Hiding your capabilities does not further either cause. Delivery systems may have some secrecy about them to prevent the development of countermeasures, but the actual bomb yields are no secret.
Plus, you don't know if a design works until you test it, and you can't test a nuke without essentially letting every other nation with an intelligence agency know the yield, since the math for determining TNT equivalence isn't hard, and the detonation isn't subtle.
Further to that, most of the really big designs are older and outdated, as miniaturization became the focus (smaller bombs equals more warheads per missile/bomber). Meaning the bombs from the end of the cold war are actually lower yield than the ones from the middle.
In short, you're letting knee jerk "the government is hiding secrets" paranoia get in the way of common sense, and you don't know nukes.
You're undermining your point by insisting on antagonizing the religious. Which is unfortunate, because your first sentence is entirely correct.
In the developed world, the average number of children per woman is 1-2 depending on where you are. The women with no kids and the ones with three or more tend to cancel out. Replacement level fertility (i.e. the fertility rate of a stable population with no immigration or emigration) is 2.1 children per woman, roughly. Meaning that if the entire world enjoyed a first world standard of living, the growth rate would fall below replacement level and the population would begin to shrink within a generation or three. In truth, the only reasons the population of the developed world is still growing are immigration and inertia.
Why only two kids at most? Because that's all it takes to satisfy most people's desire for children, because people no longer rely on their children to care for them when they get old, because most pregnancies these days are deliberate rather than accidental, and because if your kids aren't part of the labour force, there's no economic advantage to large families. Kids are a huge burden in the first world.
In point of fact, a long term population study carried out in 2006 suggested that the global population would likely stabilize at around nine billion by midcentury, with rising standards of living being the deciding factor. This is still a problem, in terms of supplying energy to those billions without wrecking the ecology or exhausting finite resources, but feeding nine billion shouldn't be a stretch.
Since I can't imagine the average life expectancy skyrocketing outside of first world nations, the talk of "if people live longer lives, we'd run out of food" is bunk. At best, enhanced longevity would counteract the decline in population; more likely it wouldn't even do that, since we're not talking complete immortality here.
Doesn't matter in context. You're bitching about the wrong problem for the article.
Most of the time when a web based email account gets cracked it isn't that you set your password to "password". Instead it's that you logged in from a compromised machine, and someone got ahold of your actual password, whether it's "fido" or "1xe34v3tsAad". There's a damn good reason I don't check my email anywhere other than devices I know are clean.
(Had something like what TFA describes happen to someone I know; it took her forever to realize that what had transpired was that she'd checked gmail on a coworker's computer and said coworker had been grossly lax in terms of safety. When a scan was run on the box for the first time ever it returned over a hundred bits of malware, some of it serious. The coworker, incidentally, was a private secretary to a lawyer, so this was a "holy shit" moment if ever there was one.)
Think about it for a moment and you'll see why the perpetrators use malware and/or social engineering rather than, say, a dictionary attack; there's nothing google, facebook or yahoo can do about it. They can easily limit the number of login attempts, encrypt usernames and passwords, reject really common passwords during account creation, etc, but if some third party gets the correct password from an infected PC, then when they log in it will appear legitimate.
That isn't to say you shouldn't bother with strong passwords, but if you think having a strong password protects you from everything, you're fooling yourself. The solution here also requires security software and education about admin privileges and trusted vs. untrusted sources for "free" software as it's the likeliest vector for infection (presupposing for a moment that the user needs a windows box, and frankly half the time the answer to that is "yes" for a number of reasons).
You've got it the wrong way around.
The idea of winning a war by way of killing so many of the opposition that the rest will surrender or retreat is viable some of the time, but horrific. And truth be told, it doesn't work nearly as well in real life as it does on paper; people are unpredictable creatures at the best of times, and there are plenty of cases of soldiers or entire armies fighting to the very last, horrific fate be damned, rather than surrender. In particular populations and politicians may fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy i.e. "We've already lost N soldier fighting this war, we can't give up now, else they died for nothing." You can't expect to win a war if you assume your opponents are rational actors who prioritize self preservation, because that isn't always going to be the case.
The right way to do it, and in fact the way that's had a better track record of making wars end, is to destroy the ability of the enemy to make war altogether. For a protracted conflict, you get more bang for your buck destroying logistic, communication and supply capability than you do killing enemy soldiers in a fair fight. Any modern national military is only as capable of making war as they are capable of supplying, commanding and reinforcing their armed forces. Obviously this doesn't work in a guerrilla engagement, where supply lines may be nonexistent, or against a foe who hides among civilians. Iraq is a good example of where this strategy does and doesn't work; the official conflict ended rapidly, with the army defeated in short order (and without massive casualties; many Iraqi soldiers never even saw action), but the same approach cannot be used to maintain an occupation.
For a hypothetical conflict between two nations armed with robots, this form of conflict is even more likely; infantry forces require less logistical support than drone forces. In order to win, you don't grind your enemy's robotic forces into dust in a fair fight and you don't try to terrorize their populace into surrendering; instead you destroy their communications so they can't send in the drones, you destroy their factories, airbases, munitions dumps and whatever else they need to build and maintain their robotic fleet and you prevent them from doing the same thing to you. You don't have much chance of occupying a country with a robotic army any more than you can occupy a country with tanks, aircraft or warships; occupation pretty much requires men on the ground. This does mean that a robot armed nation might win a conflict without casualties, but must be prepared to suffer losses if they plan on conquering rather than letting their foe surrender and retain their own government.
Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case, though it would not surprise me to learn there's an actual event obscured by the retelling.
Regardless, the GP has the right idea. I've heard of blind tests of "EM sensitivity" done in the past, with results that unambiguously showed a purely psychosomatic condition - that is to say, the subjects felt sick when they believed they were being exposed, regardless of their actual exposure, and felt fine when they believed they were "safe". But to the patient, this is always going to be met with denial. "Can you believe that doctor thought it was all in my head! Where the hell did he learn medicine? I don't like being called crazy, I'm going to go to my homeopath for advice from now on!"
Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy". Nobody wants to admit that there could be anything wrong with their head, ergo all psychosomatic illnesses are attributed to external causes, sensible or otherwise. The prevalence of quacks and snake oil salesmen ready to cash in on the latest hysterical bandwagon only makes the problem worse.
There's very little economic reason to trade in used games at Gamestop. The value you get from them is minimal; you'd have to get rid of a whole stack of games (games that are still recent enough and saleable titles for the store to want them, mind you) in order to get one in exchange. I'm quite sure the only reason the practice persists is because Gamestop has done such an excellent job of convincing people otherwise.
If you remove trade-ins from the equation, what does Gamestop really offer, or have a monopoly on? They're an upscale, specialized pawnshop that sells new games on the side.
I'm not saying it isn't an effective business model on their part mind you, just that their business model is a half and half mixture of good marketing and a target audience who's bad at arithmetic.
I'm not talking philosophy.
I'm talking about evolution.
The basic unit of life isn't the organism, it's the gene. Genes proliferate if they confer reproductive success to the organism they're attached to. They, in a very real and literal way, exist to make more of themselves, because several billion years of evolution has selected in favour of reproductively successful genes.
Genes do not go extinct when the organism they are attached to dies; rather genes go extinct when there are no copies left in any organism. There are genes that have been lost forever, and genes that have been succeeded by their own mutant descendants (erroneous copies that happened to do better than the original), but at the same time there are genes kicking around today that existed in the time of the dinosaurs.
So yes, from a genetic evolutionary standpoint, it is entirely fair to say "life exists to procreate". Just don't mistake fact for philosophy or morality; trying to find moral meaning in evolution has proven to be a bad idea, historically.
Generalists in nature have a harder time of things than specialists. Else no organism would become specialized in the first place.
There's a good reason all that green goo is specialized; because if you took an non-specialized plant and dropped it in the soil of a specialist, it's going to get choked out by the native. There are successful invasive plant species, but even then what you've often got is an invasive specialist out competing the native specialists for the kind of environment they both thrive in.
So your non-discriminating grey goo has all the drawbacks of the non-discriminating green goo. Only it has the much larger handicap of not actually existing yet.
You misunderstand; if a "bad solution" as you call it, did arise, it would become the new normal.
Life exists to procreate. A life form that manages to cover the entire planet in it's own self-replicating mass is an evolutionary success. It won't die out; if its replication created an unfavourable environment for its own survival, it may die back, but it will persist.
I'm not talking hypotheticals here either. What I've just described is exactly what happened around three billion years ago.
Photosynthesis arose. Living things used sunlight to split CO2, and spewed toxic oxygen into the biosphere, killing the competition. This "green goo" was so successful, that it diversified, evolved into new niches and took over the world. We call them "plants".
This isn't a unique incident - there are whole eras of living organisms wiped out by competition from something better adapting at making more of itself. And it isn't a coincidence that what I've just described sounds an awful lot like "grey goo"; the people who proposed a grey goo scenario were familiar with the evolution of plant life.
I don't disagree with you that grey goo is possible; where I disagree is that you seem to think it's easy. Show me a self-replicating machine, and I'll be seriously impressed. Show me a self-replicating nanomachine, I'll be even more impressed. Nobody has that technology yet, and I'd be amazed to see it in my lifetime.
What I won't live to see, and neither will you, is a self-replicating nanomachine that can out-compete living things. Sorry, but your grey goo fears are a couple hundred years too early, and I'm not sure they'll ever be realized.
If a trivial sequence of proteins allowed for the kind of replication you're talking about, the world would already have ended. There's been living things fucking around with differing types of biochemistry for the past few billion years; if the self-replicating apocalypse could be achieved trivially, it would have. Some would say that's exactly what did happen.
What you and all the other "grey goo" crowd are overlooking is that it isn't enough to build a machine capable of self-replication. Living things do that already. The "grey goo" scenario already happened around three billion years ago when photosynthesis first arose and organisms began harvesting solar energy. You, the person reading this right now, are a form of naturally occurring self-replicating carbon based machinery. And you've had a few billenia of evolution to optimize the "self-replicating" part.
We could build self-replicating nanotechnology tomorrow, deliberately release it into the environment and it would do... nothing. If it were carbon based, it'd probably become something's dinner.
No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.
I'm going to bold this part for anyone skimming this (admittedly long) post: To end the world with nanotechnology requires self-replicating machines (which we don't have) that are better at reproducing themselves than existing organisms . I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I am going to say with absolute certainty that it won't happen in the twenty-first century. We'll be lucky to even have self-replicating machines in a hundred years. "Grey goo" today is about as likely as a renaissance inventor building a thermonuclear weapon.
The stupidity of it all is that MRSA is not necessary and can be prevented.
While I agree with you that overuse of antibiotics for trivial purposes has sped up the development of resistant strains, I think you're overstating it. The tone of your post suggests you blame MRSA entirely on factory farming and physician incompetence/laziness, which simply isn't the case.
To begin with, there are two more or less unavoidable problems that lead to the development of resistant strains. The first is that people prescribed antibiotics for actual bacterial infections often stop taking them when the symptoms abate, rather than taking the full course. The second is that hospitals are breeding grounds for resistant infections. Even a well managed hospital isn't completely safe.
Now, you can reduce those problems with public education and changes to hospital policies, but you can't eliminate the threat, which brings us to the larger issue; resistant strains are inevitable. In a perfect world, where no antibiotics were misused and all hospitals were entirely sterile, there would still arise antibiotic resistant bacteria over time. Basic evolution in action.
So no, MRSA and it's kin cannot be prevented, they can merely be reduced in prevalence.
Now, obviously new treatments can be devised to try and shift our antibacterial measures as the bacteria adapt; in particular if we retire treatments that have become ineffective, the strains resistant to those drugs might die out from competition, allowing us to revive "useless" antibiotics decades or more in the future.
Doing what you suggest - essentially banning antibiotic misuse - is still a good idea, but without the other solutions mentioned above, it's just a delaying tactic.
Why is the limit C?
You're asking a question that physicists haven't answered yet. If I had the answer to that, do you really think I'd be wasting my time on slashdot?
Ah, okay, I misunderstood. Or got too focused on the 20% figure.
Yeah, pretty much every corner of the internet has at least some crazy racists who frequent it. If you want an upside, they're fewer than they look; take the total number of racist remarks and filter out the obvious trolls, and then assume some of the rest are trolls being a little more subtle. Which doesn't mean the trolls aren't also racist (lots of people are at least a little racist and in denial about it), but it does mean that they aren't expressing their own true opinions, they're just going for shock value.
If you believe the internet, Hitler was whatever the opposite of the person posting is. In point of fact, I'm pretty sure he wasn't much of anything. Deeply narcissistic individuals don't do religion, except insofar as they wish others to worship them.
And he did have a cult of personality.
Something similar seems to hold true for most leaders of totalitarian states. If you're The Leader, then you honestly expect others to treat you as either an actual god (see: various historical tyrants), an agent of god (see: absolute monarchs) or an idol (see: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Kim Jong-il, too many others to list). Anything less is disloyalty, and disloyalty is tantamount to treason.
I think, in his warped mind, it's an "enemy of my enemy" thing. He has it in for muslims. Palestinians are muslims. Palestinians have a beef with Israel. Q.E.D he mentions Israel in positive terms in his manifesto. Doesn't make him any less bigoted.
I don't know where you got that 20% figure, but I can think of a few obvious flaws.
If a fifth of slashdot's regular posters were crazy racists, and even a fraction got mod points, you wouldn't have to read the "raw" comments, they'd get upmodded by their fellow crazy racists. Hell, I've seen more creationist drivel upmodded than racist drivel, which should tell you something right there. As it stands I've seen plenty of racist remarks coming from accounts posting at 0 or -1 or from ACs, but the fact that they're consistently modded down suggests they're significantly in the minority. Plus, many of them are obvious troll comments, meaning they may or may not be KKK types IRL, but they want you to think they are in order to get you angry.
Five percent I'd believe. And that's defining "racist" in the broad sense.
Being unable to perceive it doesn't make it not there.
For example, human beings cannot perceive most of the fundamental stuff in the universe ourselves. We need machines to do it for us, then output that mechanical perception into forms that we can understand. Strong nuclear force comes to mind as an example of something fundamental and invisible to our senses.
Also, when you talk of an "observer" in physics (i.e. X will appear to be Y when viewed by an observer in reference frame Z) it refers to a hypothetical observer; the underlying physics are still occurring even if reference frame Z is nothing but empty vacuum.
Might be. It depends on how much credit you want to give the media; whether they changed the wording based on the shooting or the shooter.
Regardless of how cynical you are toward the media reaction, I still think that, given the political manifesto, the attack ought to be called terrorism. Fits the dictionary definition to a T.
Because the speed of sound is variable and not tied to any fundamental physical laws.
Look at it this way. Don't think of the "speed of light". Think of C, the universal speed limit. Light travels at that speed in vacuum, but it does so by default. It isn't that light is special, it's just that it lacks rest mass.
The speed of sound on the other hand is simply a property of the medium the sound is travelling in. Nothing special.
Now, the other thing you're going to have a hell of a time wrapping your head around is that cause and effect can't proceed faster than C. When we say universal speed limit, we really do mean "universal". If event A occurs then observer B who is four light minutes away from where A occurs has absolutely no way of knowing that event A has happened until those four minutes have passed. In fact, from B's perspective, event A hasn't happened until B can see it; there is no such thing as universal simultaneity.
I think that's incorrect. Neither is a superset of the other, however you want to slice it.
You can have a terrorist attack that isn't a massacre. If someone used a radiological weapon for the express purpose of causing terror to further a political agenda, it would be "terrorism", but not a massacre - there might not even be any immediate deaths, though there would be terror without question.
You can have a massacre that isn't terrorism. All that requires is a large scale loss of life to violence without an express political aim or intent to spread fear. Examples range from genocide, to indiscriminate warfare, to deliberate acts of mass murder carried out by damaged individuals with no particular agenda.
Ven diagram is a better way to look at it. |Massacre|Terrorist Massacre|Terrorism| This was both, and can be called either a massacre or a terror attack.
I do agree however that the media called it "terrorism" when the bomb hit Oslo and the perp was unknown and shifted more to "massacre" when it became known that the attack was domestic rather than foreign. There seems to be a certain amount of denial around the idea that this terrorist is a white christian killing his countrymen instead of a brown muslim from some dusty corner of the middle east.
Honestly, I think I've seen more references in the mainstream news of Breivik's religion, politics and manifesto than I have of his preferred entertainment. In fact, the first link in TFS is the first such news story I've seen. Maybe I just don't follow the sorts of news outlets that jump on that anti-game bandwagon.
It might be that games are the default boogeyman in shootings when the killer doesn't give a motive - that explanation is offered when other explanations fail to pan out. When the perpetrator is outspoken about his motives the media doesn't need to invent new ones. In this case, the murderous bastard had an entire freaking manifesto dedicated to telling the world why he did what he did.