It strikes me as odd -- and that's the polite term for it -- that anyone would propose that the university system as a whole emulate the University of Phoenix. UofP degrees are worse than worthless. Given a choice between a self-educated candidate with respectable sample code and the ability to get through an interview and a graduate of the University of Phoenix, the self-educated candidate wins every time. Of course, I'd look at people with real degrees from real universities first, but getting a degree from a diploma mill really calls into question the candidate's judgment, above and beyond letting me know that they probably didn't learn very much to begin with.
Hopefully, not everyone will feel a need to monetize what they provide, and we'll be able to share in people's passions, not just their livelihood. I may not like what you're selling me, but I'll be interested in what interests you, and Rupert Murdoch can't have that.
Amen. I seldom visit "commercial" sites, save for advertising-supported blogs like this one. If you spend a lot of time looking at websites that are run by media conglomerates with their roots (and the bulk of their profits) in television, film, music, and print, you can't really claim surprise when the people running those sites try to make them more like the rest of their empires. In other words, if what you're interested in can only be produced by gigantic corporations, then you're going to have to dance to their tune. There's nothing special about the web in that respect.
That said, the one area where the media conglomerates are a threat to the 99.9% of content that isn't cranked out by them is net neutrality. That's something to get upset (and take action) about. What Rupert Murdoch is doing with his own content isn't really much of an issue unless you can't enjoy yourself without Rupert Murdoch's output. And if that's the case, you need to get out more. And possibly seek therapy.
Newton lived from 1643 to 1727. If you're looking for smart people with feet in both worlds at that critical juncture, Newton is a good one: he was also into astrology at least as much as alchemy. Johannes Kepler came immediately before Newton (1571-1630) and is best remembered for having figured out the basics of planetary orbits, which Newton's laws later helped explain. Kepler was originally looking for an idealized heaven based on the Platonic solids and only later, reluctantly, came to realize that the real solar system was much messier and less regular than that. He was also an astrologer, though it's not entirely clear that he believed much in it; it may have just been a way to pay the bills. Newton, on the other hand, vigorously defended the validity of astrology.
If you want to read about the mystico-religious influences on both, you can do worse than to read the works of Pico della Mirandola, who was one of the major proponents of Renaissance humanism and was involved in popularizing the Corpus Hermeticum, and influencing everyone from mostly-scientists like Newton and Kepler, to mostly-magicians like Giordano Bruno (who was burned at the stake for, among other things, proposing intelligent life on other planets), the physician-philosopher Robert Fludd, the full-blown but covert magician Cornelius Agrippa, and magician-mathematician Dr. John Dee, who was court astrologer to Elizabeth I and coined the expression "British Empire", and whose sidekick Edward Kelley was one of the puffers. The end of Renaissance magic goes back to Pico's much-vaunted Corpus Hermeticum, which was widely believed to be the work of ancient Egyptian sages, but which was revealed to be a later Greek forgery by Meric Casaubon.
All in all, it's a very interesting time period, with the last of the magicians on one end, the first of the scientists on the other, and religious fanatics of all stripes fighting each other tooth and nail before being blindsided by the rise of the modern nation-state.
How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy [...]
There's an amazing amount of sensationalism and cluelessness tightly packed in that one clause.
First of all, Newton was hardly "the ultimate scientist". He was a very good scientist and a brilliant mathematician, but his achievements and fame have a lot to do with being one of the first modern scientists. He wasn't the only early scientist working on the problems of optics or, for that matter, gravity, and Leibniz developed calculus independently around the same time. Had Newton decided to go into alchemy full-time, someone else would have discovered the same things before long. Calling him the ultimate scientist is just pseudo-journalistic puffery.
And secondly, alchemy wasn't obvious bullshit when Newton was working on it. It's only obviously bullshit now that we have an understanding of real chemistry and -- even more recently -- nuclear physics. More to the point, one of the most important bullshit detectors in the arsenal of science is modern statistics, which rests upon a foundation of calculus, which Newton (along with Leibniz) invented! To stand today on the shoulders of Newton and complain about his lack of perspective pushes the outer limits of irony.
Alchemy has little to do with chemistry. It's about the purification of the soul through repeated heatings and coolings, and as Newton was learning Hebrew, I'd guess he'd probably figured out some of the fundamentals in play re Gnostic Christianity and similar. "Lead into Gold" is a metaphor, as was much else about alchemy.
That is indeed one branch of traditional alchemy, but a lot of alchemists were very serious about transmuting literal lead into literal gold. Once you get used to the jargon, it's fairly easy to separate the texts of one branch from those of the other. (There's a third strand in alchemical writings: lofty-sounding gobbledygook cranked out and sold to turn an easy profit, much like the get-rich-quick TV infomercials and spam of the present day. Theophrastus Paracelsus was one of those, complete with miracle cures for all that ails you and an extra helping of the-Lord-works-in-mysterious-ways if it didn't work.) It's worth noting that the less-than-noble physical alchemists, denounced as "puffers" by the spiritual alchemists, were the ones that stumbled their way into the beginnings of modern chemistry.
As for the Gnostics, they were largely unknown in Newton's time, having been completely suppressed more than a thousand years before his time. The rediscovery of the Gnostics by the lay public came later. In any case, Hebrew would not have helped Newton understand the Gnostics: all their writings were in Greek, just like the rest of early Christian writings before the rise of the church in Rome. Newton may have been influenced by Christianized versions of the Kabbalah that were much admired by alchemists and other occultists in the early modern period, but that's just speculation, as documentary evidence is lacking.
If I find a device on my car and I don't know you put it there. It's mine, period.
You can safely assume that if I find a device on my car, it's going to "fall off" on some heavily traveled road. If it happens to be a GPS tracking device, then you'll know exactly where to look when you want to collect data about its durability.
It's a lot harder to hide anything on a motorcycle than it is to hide something on a car.
Eh, sort of. When's the last time you looked at the underside of your engine block? While there are fewer places to hide things on a bike, even one is enough if you don't check it.
Advances in game theory from Israel
on
Gambling On Bacteria
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I expect no less from a country whose national sport is the Prisoner's Dilemma.
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people (if a single person didn't matter, why would the Chinese government care so much about Liu XiaoBao?)
Ideas like this certainly feel good, but there's really not much to them. The fact of the matter is that people don't all sit down and wait for someone else to do it. Humans, or at least a certain subset of them, are restless, greedy, vain, and smart to varying degrees. They're going to be constantly scheming and fiddling, and if that common tendency manifests in the middle of a culture that encourages it and has the scientific base to make something of it, some of them will come up with interesting and occasionally profitable novelties. If Zuckerberg had been hit by a bus before he could start Facebook, some other social network would be in the dominant position.
Everyone wants to think they're special, but it's doubtful that the world would be changed very much if any one of us spontaneously combusted. It may be that some specific person plays an indispensable role from time to time, but that's far more likely to be a janitor somewhere making a minor change to the inputs of the chaotic system of human society than it is a classical "great man" like Gandhi or Einstein.
And China cares so much about Liu XiaoBao because the Nobel committee turned him into an overnight world sensation. It's not like he's the only dissident in China, or that the Chinese government wouldn't be equally upset, or nearly so, if some other Chinese dissident had gotten the prize. Why conclude that Liu XiaoBao is the important actor instead of whomever argued his case on the Nobel committee?
(how can you otherwise predict the arrival of a genius, a singular event?)
Actually, it's so easy that it's boring. Human intelligence follows a simple Gaussian distribution. It's about as singular as passing gas.
And that website on the other side of the world totally has the same level of Quality of Service as a phone call. People put up with crappy cell phone calls, d ppin ev ry ther s lla le, but complain to high hell when there's the least bit of echo or static on a (non-VoIP) land line.
Funny, but that website on the other side of the world comes through perfectly without any data corruption or loss of quality even when I'm downloading tens or hundreds of megabytes of data more than I'd be receiving through a several hour long phone call. Hell, I can stream HD video just fine most of the time, but I can't get better than 3.3 kHz on a voice call -- by design.
If voice telephone service sucked as bad as the channel I get to someone's cheap personal website, it would be a vast improvement.
A Facebook spokeswoman said, 'If you have a friend that is adding you to Groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend -- and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any Group.' In somewhat related news, guillotines ensure you won't have dandruff on your shoulders anymore.
Yeah, I'm a bit puzzled by the submitter's reaction, too. It may be the norm among high school jocks, college frat boys, and, after graduation, stalkers, to use abusive behavior as a form of affection, but mature, self-respecting people don't put up with it. Blocking someone on Facebook is what, two or three clicks? Anyone who thinks that's like the guillotine really needs to develop some perspective.
You've gotta be trolling. 21 million copies sold of her debut album, MTV Music awards, BRIT awards, Grammy nominated, #98 best selling of the 21st century, duet with Eminem, music featured in a big movie, song the opening theme of a US TV show, haircut named after her, sold-out world tours...
For what it's worth, I've never heard of her either, and you just explained why: she's a Top 40 pop musician. That's actually a pretty narrow audience demographic, albeit a lucrative one. I don't know the figures off the top of my head, and I'm going to deviate from normal Slashdot practice and refrain from pulling them out of my ass, but a large chunk of the population just doesn't follow that sort of thing.
He's getting off easy. In the USA, the cops would get a court order and the judge could order him jailed for contempt of court until he gives up the password.
If I'm remembering this right, US courts recently ruled that the Fifth Amendment does protect Americans from being compelled to produce their encryption keys.
This is exactly the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is superbly well-suited for solution by software and quite possibly the last kind of problem you want to hand to a bunch of humans, unless those humans happen to be programmers with backgrounds in celestial mechanics, heuristics, and genetic algorithms.
As a way of driving public interest in the ESA's space program, it's not a bad idea at all, but if any of its users manage to come up with a better solution than the ESA's software, it's not a triumph for crowdsourcing, it's a sign that the ESA needs to hire new programmers.
I agree; it sounds exactly like an LVAD. I'm similarly dubious about the long-term prospects for this particular patient with this particular device, but perhaps it will buy him enough time for improved technology to become available, whether that's a truly reliable artificial heart or, far better, gene therapy to cure the underlying muscular dystrophy.
No. Sound is the vibration of air molecules, so when you speak or drop something, it creates compression waves that travel through the air and vibrate your eardrum, which in turn creates waves in the fluid of your cochlea that stimulate hair cells connected to the acoustic nerve. Since outer space has (almost) no air, these waves have no medium on which to travel, and sound as we know it does not happen.
Well, yes and no. There's no sound in space that a human could hear -- especially over the deafening roar of their blood boiling in the near-vacuum of space -- but there is a tremendous amount of diffuse gas and dust in galaxies and galaxy clusters, through which compression waves travel, albeit very weakly and slowly. If you were to observe those waves, then you could convert that data into an audio waveform in the range of human hearing. I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall that a group of researchers did precisely that with the (vastly smaller, nearer, and more easily observable) waves of gas being propelled outward by the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula.
And yes, I know that really stretches the human notion of sound, but objects the size of galaxy clusters stretch most of our petty human notions, so it only seems fair.
Anti-virus experts said O'Murchu's hypothesis about the origins of Stuxnet were plausible, though some continue to wonder how the authors of such a sophisticated piece of malware allowed it to break into the wild and attract attention.
Seriously? We refer to this kind of programs by names like "worm" and "virus" because they resemble their biological namesakes in that they get into all kinds of places and reproduce. Who wonders about shit like this?
If Stuxnet was designed by a hostile state to damage Iranian industry, it's quite possible that, lacking any good way to deploy it inside Iran, it was released into the wild in hopes that it would find its way in on its own. Even states like the US and Israel, who probably have at least some operatives inside Iran, would probably prefer to take this approach than to risk compromising their inside operatives.
While Israel and the US are the most likely nation-state actors, it's worth considering that there are any number of NGOd that are hostile to Iran and would have the resources to hire programmers to build a worm -- if they didn't already have some in-house. It's also possible that this is the work of a lone individual: the idea that it would take a state actor to create a worm is even more laughable than SCO's contention that Linus Torvalds couldn't have possibly written a kernel by himself. And finally, Iran has plenty of competitors and outright enemies in the Islamic world. Pakistan in particular has the technical personnel, a nuclear monopoly within the Islamic world to defend, and an ongoing struggle with Iran over influence in Afghanistan. If I was forced to bet on the question, I'd put my money on Israel, but at the same time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I lost the bet. Iran has lots of enemies, internal and external. It's almost like one of those cliched murder mysteries where a broadly disliked person is murdered and everyone he knew is a suspect.
simple logic says that there is a unified equation
Simple logic says no such thing. Logic is just a system for manipulating symbols. What you think is logic is just the instinctual human preference for neat, all-inclusive, unitary schemes, which is the same thing that gives us political and religious fanaticism and, somewhat less harmfully, endless flamewars on which language or text editor is the best. It might turn out that the vision of a Theory of Everything was just unconscious baggage from our recent (and far from complete) emergence as a society from many centuries of authoritarian rule by kings and a monotheistic religious hierarchy. It may come as news to physicists, but all of the other sciences have had to come to terms with a universe that is messy and full of intractable and undecidable problems.
That's by no means to say that we won't eventually come up with a Theory of Everything, but we have no firm reason to believe that we will, and a number of reasons -- Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, for one -- to believe that no fundamentally mathematical theory will be sufficient.
And best of all, you can find out things through Facebook that you are prohibited by law from asking your employees. Want to discriminate against employees on the basis of religious or political beliefs? Gotcha covered!
The most telling detail for me is that everyone involved or potentially involved is issuing denials at multiple levels.
My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that the Germans created it, hoping to throw a spanner into the works at the Iranian reactor because someone in their intelligence community got wind of Russian (and not only Russian-made) SAMs being moved into position to protect their investment, and while no one could predict the exact outcome of an unexpected direct US-Russian clash, the Germans were pretty certain it wouldn't do them any good. (The reason for this guess -- and I emphasize guess -- is the recent change in message from one of the Russian number stations, recently noted here on Slashdot.)
3. We knew Apple was a bully. Turns out, it is an even bigger bully than we realized. According to the complaint: "Apple requested an agreement from Adobe to refrain from cold-calling each other's employees. Faced with the likelihood that refusing would result in retaliation and significant competition for its employees, Adobe agreed." Pissing off a key ally? Dumb.
Adobe is not a key Apple ally. Apple has been trying to damage Adobe across a number of fronts with increasing intensity for a couple of decades now, beginning with a partnership with Microsoft to undercut Postscript fonts with TrueType and leading to the current broad effort to kill Flash. Adobe, for its part, is not in any hurry to lose its dominance in graphics software on the Mac platform, but it's been quite a long time since the Mac version of anything in what's now called the Creative Suite came out before the Windows version. There is no love lost between those two companies despite their mutual dependence, and I would not be at all surprised if it was driven by personal animosity between the executives on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
It strikes me as odd -- and that's the polite term for it -- that anyone would propose that the university system as a whole emulate the University of Phoenix. UofP degrees are worse than worthless. Given a choice between a self-educated candidate with respectable sample code and the ability to get through an interview and a graduate of the University of Phoenix, the self-educated candidate wins every time. Of course, I'd look at people with real degrees from real universities first, but getting a degree from a diploma mill really calls into question the candidate's judgment, above and beyond letting me know that they probably didn't learn very much to begin with.
Hopefully, not everyone will feel a need to monetize what they provide, and we'll be able to share in people's passions, not just their livelihood. I may not like what you're selling me, but I'll be interested in what interests you, and Rupert Murdoch can't have that.
Amen. I seldom visit "commercial" sites, save for advertising-supported blogs like this one. If you spend a lot of time looking at websites that are run by media conglomerates with their roots (and the bulk of their profits) in television, film, music, and print, you can't really claim surprise when the people running those sites try to make them more like the rest of their empires. In other words, if what you're interested in can only be produced by gigantic corporations, then you're going to have to dance to their tune. There's nothing special about the web in that respect.
That said, the one area where the media conglomerates are a threat to the 99.9% of content that isn't cranked out by them is net neutrality. That's something to get upset (and take action) about. What Rupert Murdoch is doing with his own content isn't really much of an issue unless you can't enjoy yourself without Rupert Murdoch's output. And if that's the case, you need to get out more. And possibly seek therapy.
Newton lived from 1643 to 1727. If you're looking for smart people with feet in both worlds at that critical juncture, Newton is a good one: he was also into astrology at least as much as alchemy. Johannes Kepler came immediately before Newton (1571-1630) and is best remembered for having figured out the basics of planetary orbits, which Newton's laws later helped explain. Kepler was originally looking for an idealized heaven based on the Platonic solids and only later, reluctantly, came to realize that the real solar system was much messier and less regular than that. He was also an astrologer, though it's not entirely clear that he believed much in it; it may have just been a way to pay the bills. Newton, on the other hand, vigorously defended the validity of astrology.
If you want to read about the mystico-religious influences on both, you can do worse than to read the works of Pico della Mirandola, who was one of the major proponents of Renaissance humanism and was involved in popularizing the Corpus Hermeticum, and influencing everyone from mostly-scientists like Newton and Kepler, to mostly-magicians like Giordano Bruno (who was burned at the stake for, among other things, proposing intelligent life on other planets), the physician-philosopher Robert Fludd, the full-blown but covert magician Cornelius Agrippa, and magician-mathematician Dr. John Dee, who was court astrologer to Elizabeth I and coined the expression "British Empire", and whose sidekick Edward Kelley was one of the puffers. The end of Renaissance magic goes back to Pico's much-vaunted Corpus Hermeticum, which was widely believed to be the work of ancient Egyptian sages, but which was revealed to be a later Greek forgery by Meric Casaubon.
All in all, it's a very interesting time period, with the last of the magicians on one end, the first of the scientists on the other, and religious fanatics of all stripes fighting each other tooth and nail before being blindsided by the rise of the modern nation-state.
How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy [...]
There's an amazing amount of sensationalism and cluelessness tightly packed in that one clause.
First of all, Newton was hardly "the ultimate scientist". He was a very good scientist and a brilliant mathematician, but his achievements and fame have a lot to do with being one of the first modern scientists. He wasn't the only early scientist working on the problems of optics or, for that matter, gravity, and Leibniz developed calculus independently around the same time. Had Newton decided to go into alchemy full-time, someone else would have discovered the same things before long. Calling him the ultimate scientist is just pseudo-journalistic puffery.
And secondly, alchemy wasn't obvious bullshit when Newton was working on it. It's only obviously bullshit now that we have an understanding of real chemistry and -- even more recently -- nuclear physics. More to the point, one of the most important bullshit detectors in the arsenal of science is modern statistics, which rests upon a foundation of calculus, which Newton (along with Leibniz) invented! To stand today on the shoulders of Newton and complain about his lack of perspective pushes the outer limits of irony.
Alchemy has little to do with chemistry. It's about the purification of the soul through repeated heatings and coolings, and as Newton was learning Hebrew, I'd guess he'd probably figured out some of the fundamentals in play re Gnostic Christianity and similar. "Lead into Gold" is a metaphor, as was much else about alchemy.
That is indeed one branch of traditional alchemy, but a lot of alchemists were very serious about transmuting literal lead into literal gold. Once you get used to the jargon, it's fairly easy to separate the texts of one branch from those of the other. (There's a third strand in alchemical writings: lofty-sounding gobbledygook cranked out and sold to turn an easy profit, much like the get-rich-quick TV infomercials and spam of the present day. Theophrastus Paracelsus was one of those, complete with miracle cures for all that ails you and an extra helping of the-Lord-works-in-mysterious-ways if it didn't work.) It's worth noting that the less-than-noble physical alchemists, denounced as "puffers" by the spiritual alchemists, were the ones that stumbled their way into the beginnings of modern chemistry.
As for the Gnostics, they were largely unknown in Newton's time, having been completely suppressed more than a thousand years before his time. The rediscovery of the Gnostics by the lay public came later. In any case, Hebrew would not have helped Newton understand the Gnostics: all their writings were in Greek, just like the rest of early Christian writings before the rise of the church in Rome. Newton may have been influenced by Christianized versions of the Kabbalah that were much admired by alchemists and other occultists in the early modern period, but that's just speculation, as documentary evidence is lacking.
If I find a device on my car and I don't know you put it there. It's mine, period.
You can safely assume that if I find a device on my car, it's going to "fall off" on some heavily traveled road. If it happens to be a GPS tracking device, then you'll know exactly where to look when you want to collect data about its durability.
It's a lot harder to hide anything on a motorcycle than it is to hide something on a car.
Eh, sort of. When's the last time you looked at the underside of your engine block? While there are fewer places to hide things on a bike, even one is enough if you don't check it.
I expect no less from a country whose national sport is the Prisoner's Dilemma.
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people (if a single person didn't matter, why would the Chinese government care so much about Liu XiaoBao?)
Ideas like this certainly feel good, but there's really not much to them. The fact of the matter is that people don't all sit down and wait for someone else to do it. Humans, or at least a certain subset of them, are restless, greedy, vain, and smart to varying degrees. They're going to be constantly scheming and fiddling, and if that common tendency manifests in the middle of a culture that encourages it and has the scientific base to make something of it, some of them will come up with interesting and occasionally profitable novelties. If Zuckerberg had been hit by a bus before he could start Facebook, some other social network would be in the dominant position.
Everyone wants to think they're special, but it's doubtful that the world would be changed very much if any one of us spontaneously combusted. It may be that some specific person plays an indispensable role from time to time, but that's far more likely to be a janitor somewhere making a minor change to the inputs of the chaotic system of human society than it is a classical "great man" like Gandhi or Einstein.
And China cares so much about Liu XiaoBao because the Nobel committee turned him into an overnight world sensation. It's not like he's the only dissident in China, or that the Chinese government wouldn't be equally upset, or nearly so, if some other Chinese dissident had gotten the prize. Why conclude that Liu XiaoBao is the important actor instead of whomever argued his case on the Nobel committee?
(how can you otherwise predict the arrival of a genius, a singular event?)
Actually, it's so easy that it's boring. Human intelligence follows a simple Gaussian distribution. It's about as singular as passing gas.
And that website on the other side of the world totally has the same level of Quality of Service as a phone call. People put up with crappy cell phone calls, d ppin ev ry ther s lla le, but complain to high hell when there's the least bit of echo or static on a (non-VoIP) land line.
Funny, but that website on the other side of the world comes through perfectly without any data corruption or loss of quality even when I'm downloading tens or hundreds of megabytes of data more than I'd be receiving through a several hour long phone call. Hell, I can stream HD video just fine most of the time, but I can't get better than 3.3 kHz on a voice call -- by design.
If voice telephone service sucked as bad as the channel I get to someone's cheap personal website, it would be a vast improvement.
Sounds like Mac OS X.
Except that Mac OS X isn't funded by the US military. I'm not an Apple fan, but their motives are all up front: they want your money.
A Facebook spokeswoman said, 'If you have a friend that is adding you to Groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend -- and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any Group.' In somewhat related news, guillotines ensure you won't have dandruff on your shoulders anymore.
Yeah, I'm a bit puzzled by the submitter's reaction, too. It may be the norm among high school jocks, college frat boys, and, after graduation, stalkers, to use abusive behavior as a form of affection, but mature, self-respecting people don't put up with it. Blocking someone on Facebook is what, two or three clicks? Anyone who thinks that's like the guillotine really needs to develop some perspective.
You've gotta be trolling. 21 million copies sold of her debut album, MTV Music awards, BRIT awards, Grammy nominated, #98 best selling of the 21st century, duet with Eminem, music featured in a big movie, song the opening theme of a US TV show, haircut named after her, sold-out world tours...
For what it's worth, I've never heard of her either, and you just explained why: she's a Top 40 pop musician. That's actually a pretty narrow audience demographic, albeit a lucrative one. I don't know the figures off the top of my head, and I'm going to deviate from normal Slashdot practice and refrain from pulling them out of my ass, but a large chunk of the population just doesn't follow that sort of thing.
Now would you please get off my lawn?
He's getting off easy. In the USA, the cops would get a court order and the judge could order him jailed for contempt of court until he gives up the password.
If I'm remembering this right, US courts recently ruled that the Fifth Amendment does protect Americans from being compelled to produce their encryption keys.
Yet, the simple answer here is to not just support geothermal, but do it in a smart way.
When someone comes up with a "smart way", I'll be all ears. In the meantime, they seem to only have the dumb way, which generates lots of earthquakes.
This is exactly the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is superbly well-suited for solution by software and quite possibly the last kind of problem you want to hand to a bunch of humans, unless those humans happen to be programmers with backgrounds in celestial mechanics, heuristics, and genetic algorithms.
As a way of driving public interest in the ESA's space program, it's not a bad idea at all, but if any of its users manage to come up with a better solution than the ESA's software, it's not a triumph for crowdsourcing, it's a sign that the ESA needs to hire new programmers.
I agree; it sounds exactly like an LVAD. I'm similarly dubious about the long-term prospects for this particular patient with this particular device, but perhaps it will buy him enough time for improved technology to become available, whether that's a truly reliable artificial heart or, far better, gene therapy to cure the underlying muscular dystrophy.
No. Sound is the vibration of air molecules, so when you speak or drop something, it creates compression waves that travel through the air and vibrate your eardrum, which in turn creates waves in the fluid of your cochlea that stimulate hair cells connected to the acoustic nerve. Since outer space has (almost) no air, these waves have no medium on which to travel, and sound as we know it does not happen.
Well, yes and no. There's no sound in space that a human could hear -- especially over the deafening roar of their blood boiling in the near-vacuum of space -- but there is a tremendous amount of diffuse gas and dust in galaxies and galaxy clusters, through which compression waves travel, albeit very weakly and slowly. If you were to observe those waves, then you could convert that data into an audio waveform in the range of human hearing. I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall that a group of researchers did precisely that with the (vastly smaller, nearer, and more easily observable) waves of gas being propelled outward by the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula.
And yes, I know that really stretches the human notion of sound, but objects the size of galaxy clusters stretch most of our petty human notions, so it only seems fair.
Everyone does it.
Anti-virus experts said O'Murchu's hypothesis about the origins of Stuxnet were plausible, though some continue to wonder how the authors of such a sophisticated piece of malware allowed it to break into the wild and attract attention.
Seriously? We refer to this kind of programs by names like "worm" and "virus" because they resemble their biological namesakes in that they get into all kinds of places and reproduce. Who wonders about shit like this?
If Stuxnet was designed by a hostile state to damage Iranian industry, it's quite possible that, lacking any good way to deploy it inside Iran, it was released into the wild in hopes that it would find its way in on its own. Even states like the US and Israel, who probably have at least some operatives inside Iran, would probably prefer to take this approach than to risk compromising their inside operatives.
While Israel and the US are the most likely nation-state actors, it's worth considering that there are any number of NGOd that are hostile to Iran and would have the resources to hire programmers to build a worm -- if they didn't already have some in-house. It's also possible that this is the work of a lone individual: the idea that it would take a state actor to create a worm is even more laughable than SCO's contention that Linus Torvalds couldn't have possibly written a kernel by himself. And finally, Iran has plenty of competitors and outright enemies in the Islamic world. Pakistan in particular has the technical personnel, a nuclear monopoly within the Islamic world to defend, and an ongoing struggle with Iran over influence in Afghanistan. If I was forced to bet on the question, I'd put my money on Israel, but at the same time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I lost the bet. Iran has lots of enemies, internal and external. It's almost like one of those cliched murder mysteries where a broadly disliked person is murdered and everyone he knew is a suspect.
simple logic says that there is a unified equation
Simple logic says no such thing. Logic is just a system for manipulating symbols. What you think is logic is just the instinctual human preference for neat, all-inclusive, unitary schemes, which is the same thing that gives us political and religious fanaticism and, somewhat less harmfully, endless flamewars on which language or text editor is the best. It might turn out that the vision of a Theory of Everything was just unconscious baggage from our recent (and far from complete) emergence as a society from many centuries of authoritarian rule by kings and a monotheistic religious hierarchy. It may come as news to physicists, but all of the other sciences have had to come to terms with a universe that is messy and full of intractable and undecidable problems.
That's by no means to say that we won't eventually come up with a Theory of Everything, but we have no firm reason to believe that we will, and a number of reasons -- Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, for one -- to believe that no fundamentally mathematical theory will be sufficient.
And best of all, you can find out things through Facebook that you are prohibited by law from asking your employees. Want to discriminate against employees on the basis of religious or political beliefs? Gotcha covered!
It's highly focused on what actually matters.
What actually matters is job performance, period.
The most telling detail for me is that everyone involved or potentially involved is issuing denials at multiple levels.
My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that the Germans created it, hoping to throw a spanner into the works at the Iranian reactor because someone in their intelligence community got wind of Russian (and not only Russian-made) SAMs being moved into position to protect their investment, and while no one could predict the exact outcome of an unexpected direct US-Russian clash, the Germans were pretty certain it wouldn't do them any good. (The reason for this guess -- and I emphasize guess -- is the recent change in message from one of the Russian number stations, recently noted here on Slashdot.)
Mostly good points. The major exception is this:
3. We knew Apple was a bully. Turns out, it is an even bigger bully than we realized. According to the complaint: "Apple requested an agreement from Adobe to refrain from cold-calling each other's employees. Faced with the likelihood that refusing would result in retaliation and significant competition for its employees, Adobe agreed." Pissing off a key ally? Dumb.
Adobe is not a key Apple ally. Apple has been trying to damage Adobe across a number of fronts with increasing intensity for a couple of decades now, beginning with a partnership with Microsoft to undercut Postscript fonts with TrueType and leading to the current broad effort to kill Flash. Adobe, for its part, is not in any hurry to lose its dominance in graphics software on the Mac platform, but it's been quite a long time since the Mac version of anything in what's now called the Creative Suite came out before the Windows version. There is no love lost between those two companies despite their mutual dependence, and I would not be at all surprised if it was driven by personal animosity between the executives on both sides.
lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy
If there is anything that lasers are not, it's white.