Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it most certainly does imply causation.
No, it doesn't even do that - but it certainly suggests causation.
I agree that it's far and away the most likely bet that we are in some way the cause of the amphibians' decline, especially since the decline is taking place worldwide. It's hard to think of any other recent worldwide change or event that might be the cause.
The overwhelming scientific consensus it that the warming is proceeding much faster than in the past and that this caused at least in part by human activity.
The earth has experienced many periods of warming and cooling even within historic times, let alone during geologic time. Many of these warming and cooling periods were actually fairly rapid; the earth's climate could be called a metastable system that often experiences fairly rapid change between a number of more stable states. It's just simply untrue that the speed of recent climate change is unprecedented.
That said, what I think you meant to say is that warming is proceeding much faster than in the recent past - and with that minor edit, that's quite true. The prevailing scientific opinion is that human activity is at least partly to blame, possibly helping to accelerate and amplify a natural cyclical change into a warmer state.
But on the other hand, global warming has not yet had a major effect on most temperate and tropical habitats (as opposed to arctic and alpine habitats). For most amphibian loss, it's necessary to look at other causes - which, FWIW, is all that the parent article was saying.
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
It's fairly clear that the main issues involved with recent amphibian declines are pollution, habitat loss, and disease. Global warming is at most a distant fourth, and the reason is not hard to find: temperatures just aren't changing that much in most places, yet amphibian decline is extremely widespread and includes nearly every habitat. The places where temperature changes have been most extreme are in high mountain regions and the high arctic, neither of which are prime amphibian habitat - not that there aren't a few there, but most of them live at lower altitudes and latitudes.
Blaming global warming for every bad thing that happens reminds me of the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail. It is a terrible oversimplification to a single issue which can hardly be the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world. Pollution - especially the acidification of the aquifers in many parts of the world - is too often overlooked by many people who want to blame everything on global warming.
That said, "global warming" is hardly a scam, although the data are extremely difficult to analyze and the precise degree of man's involvement in it is still open to some debate; but it appears very likely that both natural cycles and man-made causes have been at work. However it certainly makes sense to do what we can to limit its effects, especially since we only have one planet we can call home.
At least a couple of the articles say that the password he used (whatever that means, see my other comments on the subject) belonged to "another student." Oh, really?! Why did that other student have access to the data?! And why isn't he being charged?!
Clearly what we have been told about this incident is highly misleading. Either
(1) The file was in a location that could be accessed by ANYONE on the school network, or
(2) it had already been hacked by another student, who for some reason is not being charged, or
(3) He hacked into an administrative area, where the file may have been inadequately secured. Comments by the administration and law enforcement to the effect that the password he used belonged to another student are either incorrect or misleading.
Something is clearly rotten about this story, unfortunately it is difficult to tell if he did anything wrong or not, or whether he is a criminal or a scapegoat. Not only do we have to get information filtered through the administration and law enforcement (for whom computer security is usually at best an arcane art that they understand only poorly if at all), but all the primary sources are articles written by local news journalists rather than technical journalists, who are generally not much better at understanding the technical details.
It would appear however that unless he needed to hack into a reasonably well protected account in order to obtain the data, the school is clearly facing a serious HIPAA breach. That alone could be making them overreact, by trying to find some way - any way - to pin the blame on someone else.
What, exactly, do they mean by that? Remember, we're talking about governmental entities that have a long history of not understanding much about computer security. For example:
$ ftp ftp.myschool.edu
Connected to ftp.myschool.edu
User (none): guest
331 Enter email address for anonymous login password
Password: myusername@yahoo.com
230 User guest logged in.
FTP>
Law Enforcement: "Clearly he was trying to impersonate Mr. Guest!"
You: !@#@#$
You think that's too silly? It's no worse than any number of other things I've heard about from such people. Or consider this:
You: "Let's see if that cute girl Angela in my English class has put up a home page on the school computer system. Let's see, use Firefox to browse to www.myschool.edu/~angela/... That's odd, doesn't look like what she'd have on her home page. What's this file?"
Cops: "Clearly he was trying to break into the Assistant Principal Angela H's computer work area!"
I don't think these examples are unrepresentative of the typical computer security understanding of law enforcement, unfortunately.
I don't think we know enough about what he did to speculate very much on what his original intentions were.
It's not exactly as if every file that contains personal data will have a big sign on the outside saying "PRIVATE DATA INSIDE" - often the only way that you'd even suspect that would be to open up and actually look at it, which will usually involve some form of copying; therefore your argument that his primary offense was copying is bogus. The crucial thing is what he was doing there in the first place and what he had to do in order to get there.
If all he was doing was looking around in apparently "public" areas for a couple of racy pictures or some interesting games or other programs and stumbled on this file, then the administration is clearly overreacting. On the other hand, if he was deliberately trying to log in with different usernames and found one that didn't have a password on it (or something similar), that's very different - the administration should be grateful for having been alerted to the security problem but he shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. Or if he was trying lots of username and password combinations and found one that worked because the password was trivial, that's yet another thing. Or if he was trying to exploit one of any number of published security flaws and found that the school computers had not been secured against one of them, that's yet another. Clearly each of these examples represent an escalating level of culpability on his part, but we just don't know which (if any) of them correspond with what he did.
I do not think we can trust the police trooper's characterization of his actions - most law enforcement officials are clueless about computer security issues. The bottom line is that none of us have enough information to make an informed comment on the specifics of his case. And the sad part is, I suspect that the police don't either.
I think they showed that in about 80,000 years, genetic material is just broken up into a bunch of tiny, useless snippets, especially if it's on a rock passing between stars, there is much less protection against radiation than there is within a star's heliopause.
Stop right there - you've already made a fatal logical error. Even genetic material ON THE EARTH has a much lower life expectancy than 80,000 years unless it's part of a living organism. If you're just trying to transport a bacterium in its dormant state from one star system to another, you may have a point - but that's probably not a likely scenario anyway. If it's actually able to metabolize as a living organism, living off whatever energy is available on the bit of rock it lives on and producing offspring, any fatal genetic errors will be weeded out of the little colony fairly quickly.
If things were as simple as you imply, life on earth would have died out billions of years ago.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
Not true. It's quite possible to observe signals from much farther away; it's only a question of sorting through them to see if any of them look like evidence of intelligent life. There's no particular reason to think that they must have started transmitting at the exact moment that Galileo did his experiments.
Where the relationship between time and distance matters is when you want to communicate with those civilizations, or determine whether they are close enough to detect our signals.
There is another issue about distance that is completely independent of how long our civilization has been capable of detecting evidence of extraterrestrial life, and that is how much power such a signal would require in order to be detected. It is probably impractical for any civilization to produce an omnidirectional signal (unless, possibly, they were only interested in their immediate galactic neighborhood), so we'd have to assume that they take turns beaming the signal to a large number of "promising" stars. The exact number depends on their resources and level of technology, but again there's no reason to think that it has any relationship to pre-Galileo civilization.
The only area where the length of time we've been able to detect such signals is relevant is that that time tends to limit the window of time that such civilizations might have been sending signals that we can detect. We've only been able to detect very weak radio signals for around 60-75 years or so, so if nobody in our light cone has been on the phone to us in that time period, we couldn't have heard them - to say nothing of the fact that given our current level of technology we'd probably also need to have our equipment pointed right at them in order to be able to hear them.
I'm afraid that all that doesn't really tell us very much, except that signals from ET civilizations must be very rare - and given the continued failure to find anything, it tends to cast doubt on whether there are such signals to detect. Either they aren't there (within a detectable distance, anyway) or they're not interested in chatting.
I'm not at all sure that that's the case - we certainly have exposure to more novel toxic compounds, which has consequences that are difficult to predict, but the ancient human environment was in fact quite toxic - probably more so on average than the modern environment. One major cause of this would have been the use of fire, often in poorly-ventilated spaces; this is well-known to produce numerous toxic and mutagenic chemical oxides (And that's not even including CO and CO2 which can be suffocating in confined spaces). Additionally there are many "natural" compounds - both biologic and non-biologic - which are quite hazardous, and which early man did not understand well enough to avoid.
Even most of the population of "second world" and even "third world" countries aren't living in the extremely primitive conditions of 250,000 years ago, though in many areas the pollution problems in third world countries do produce very hazardous living conditions which may justify your characterization.
It's not so much that individuals in modern industrialized "First World" countries are exposed to so much more toxic material, it's more that we're more aware of it than was early man - but we're also more aware of how to protect ourselves from it.
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent.
Not exactly - it also depends on what you DO with the false positives; the negative consequences that you mention only come about if the government takes concrete action against them based solely on "fitting the profile" (Often by holding them for long periods of time without a trial; they'd need more than a profile to bring someone to trial). Although there have been a few highly publicized cases such as you mention, for most such individuals it's no more than an occasional inconvenience, if they're even aware of being on the list at all. Not that I'm excusing the government for some of the things they've done to certain individuals, but those actions are really a separate issue from whether those people were falsely identified in a profile list.
Given the huge number of false positives that are inevitable in such a scheme, the only thing that makes sense to do with anyone identified in such a list is to investigate them more carefully, not to detain them or otherwise make it impossible for them to function in society.
It is, of course, trivially easy to construct a profiling technique that will have ZERO false negatives: Simply put EVERYONE on the list! But then your profiling scheme has rendered itself redundantly redundant. But it does illustrate the difficulty: In order to reduce the false negatives to be (effectively) zero, it is necessary to vastly increase the number of false positives. This is elementary statistics.
The biggest problem is actually not the false positives - that would just mean extra wasted effort to screen the individuals, which "only" costs time and money.
The larger problem is that in order to do any real good you need an unbelievably low false negative rate. Let's take the 9/11 hijackers as an example: they were only about 0.00000667% of the population. Unless you could capture all but 2 or 3 them, you're still vulnerable to the plot unless you can get one of the ones you captured to spill the beans - at best you've just mitigated the plot. How realistic is it that ALL 20 (or 19 if you believe that Zacarias Moussaoui was not part of the conspiracy) of them could have been identified (let alone captured) using such a method, even given the expenditure of vast resources sifting through all of the false positives? Even if 4 or 5 of them manage to fall in the "negative" group or, alternatively, if they're able to slip through your second-level screening procedures, you still have a disaster on your hands.
It's not likely that you could get the accuracy high enough to stop very many plots by itself, I suspect.
Katrina was a red herring. Remember? Bush did it intentionally.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I've certainly heard people say things like that who were quite serious. One should never attribute to malice what can be better laid on incompetence or indifference.
And, unfortunately, there was not a SINGLE elected Government official, of either party, at either the Federal, State, or local level, who responded effectively to the Katrina disaster. Were all of them evil people? By no means - Like most governments in all times and in all places, they were all just ineffective.
Sorry if that doesn't go along with anyone's political preconceptions, but it appears to be true, unfortunately.
As it happens this thread was the first I'd heard about Horowitz. Possibly I'd have known something about him if AIDS research or treatment were my specialty, but it's not.
However his name is plastered all though Google if you just do a search for "Horowitz AIDS". His own websites http://www.tetrahedron.com and http://www.healthyworldstore.com show up very high on the list, and have all the earmarks of quackery.
By the way, for anyone who stumbles across this and hasn't heard about him, his only doctoral degree is apparently in dentistry - hardly a closely-related field. I certainly wouldn't dismiss anyone's research merely because their degree was in a different field (many researchers start out in one field and later move on into another one or even into several others over their lifetime), however it is telling that he uses that degree as a club against any opponents, claiming that it somehow gives anything he writes legitimacy.
But in a real scientific endeavor, the thing that will give your work the most legitimacy isn't your degree, or even how many papers you have published, but how many other researchers in the field cite your results, especially prominent ones. That's the ultimate endorsement of your work.
Huh? I don't follow your logic at all. The earlier prevailing view was that the disease passed into the human population much later; if the earlier view had been that the disease had been in the human population for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and was now thought to be much more recent, then you might have a point. As it is, at best all you can say is that neither view explicitly contradicts the "young earth" theory, while providing no additional support whatsoever either for or against the theory.
Besides, even if you might be inclined to see such things as evidence of God's wrath, it is difficult to picture how this could be reconciled with a Christian world view. Why would an all-powerful and just God make such an imperfect instrument for which such a large proportion of the victims were not gay? Or why would a loving God create a temporal punishment like AIDS that offers no hope of escape even for those who repent?
Certainly AIDS reduces the body's resistance to a number of viral diseases, as well as being generally debilitating so that those diseases will be more severe.
However the diseases you mention are generally either relatively minor (even if unpleasant), or also require significant incubation periods as well as additional infection vectors (viruses always require a host, usually of a specific species). Unlike viruses, many bacterial and fungal infectious agents can survive quite well outside the body, and therefore exposure to them would therefore be much more likely to occur in the kind of rural and tribal (and therefore insular) societies that we're talking about.
Just to see what happens what happens when an undergraduate science student can do with his ignorance, when he isn't acting like a raving lunatic, check Infidel Guy's interview with him and SA Smith: [...]
Yikes!! I just listened to the interview, and this Horowitz guy is a lunatic. He tries to make a big deal about how a couple of his papers were published in a "peer reviewed" scientific journal, and that this somehow proves that his claims are all true. But anyone who's read very many scientific journal articles (in whatever field) knows that the mere fact that an article was published doesn't say much about whether it's true: Maybe the data were contaminated in some way unbeknownst to the researcher. Maybe the author designed the experiment poorly or did the analysis improperly. Maybe the results are simply an anomaly (the improbable thing will happen with exactly that probability). Maybe someone (possibly not even the author) falsified the results. Moreover some journals are simply more well-known in the relevant field, while others are obscure, and this will affect the quality of articles accepted by that journal in that field.
Researchers and authors make mistakes and often have axes to grind. Ditto with reviewers. Ditto even with journals themselves. The system doesn't guarantee that every article ever published is worth even the paper it's written on, rather it tries to ensure that articles generally meet certain minimal standards in terms of their procedures, results, and analysis. Sometimes bad articles get in, and sometimes good ones get rejected. There's nothing magical about the mere fact of having been published; reviewers can't possibly be expected to catch everything.
Moreover when listening to the interview I get the distinct impression that Dr. Horowitz doesn't even understand the problems that the other participants raised with his thesis. Some of the issues raised were pretty damning, yet all he seemed able to do was to complain about being treated unfairly and to repeat the same assertions in a louder voice - usually a very bad sign.
My opinion is that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it is most likely really a duck. Dr. Horowitz gives every appearance of being a fraud.
Also 9/11. That was after the fact, you say? What you're not taking into account was that there were all of these *SECRET RECORDS* in the towers that had to be destroyed one way or another. What better way than to pin the destruction on a bunch of Islamic extremists?
It all ties into the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians and Jesus' blood line through Mary Magdalene. It's a truly VAST conspiracy spanning dozens of centuries, I tell you!!
Oh hi there. You look like a nice chap with that white coat and all. What's that you say? You want me to go with you? Are you one of them too?
This is the problem with most "vast conspiracy theories" about just about any topic. The problem is that the success of any conspiracy is usually inversely proportional to both the number of individuals involved and the technical difficulty of achieving its goals. Do you really think that any large governmental body (pick your favorite villain country, it doesn't matter) is both able to cover its tracks so well that nobody (except for the conspiracy theorists, of course, but they always have an infinite supply of tinfoil) is able to see through the ruse, and able to command such fanatic loyalty that thousands or even millions of individuals are sworn to silence for decades?! These are the same people who brought you such monumental successes as the Watergate break-in, the Katrina relief effort, the Maginot line, etc, etc.
Rather what governments are good at (to the extent that they're good at anything) are massive commitments of resources, getting things done by sheer brute force, but often not in a timely or efficient manner. As one person I know says about government, "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn."
You are basically correct that most of those early victims would have died of other, well-known diseases. In addition there were (and still are) a lot of poorly-understood tropical diseases circulating in the affected population, which would have been almost exclusively native Africans living in great poverty in often remote areas of the continent. It would not have registered high on anyone's radar - everyone knew there were a lot of obscure diseases circulating there, but they didn't affect anyone in the "developed" world and nobody had the tools to track them down or treat them in any event; antibiotics were still decades in the future.
However the specific examples of smallpox and yellow fever would probably not have been the most likely secondary infections to cause death. These two diseases are viral diseases, and most of the opportunistic infections that characterize AIDS are bacterial or fungal.
Nevertheless your main point - that the secondary infections would have been mistakenly believed to be the primary infections - is well-taken, it's just that the secondary infections would have been primarily things like cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and so forth.
Pffft. I'm hardly poor, and I've never had cable. For the few hours of TV I watch per month (mostly news broadcasts), it's hardly worth it to pay for the privilege.
Yeah, I'm tight. One woman who used to work with me after hearing about something like that once said, "You must really be Scottish." Yeah, I probably resemble that remark too.
Yeah, business accounting is probably the best way. It's something that is likely to continue to be familiar.
... Which is one reason why business accounting records are so prized by archaeologists, along with the fact that they provide a good deal of insight into the workings of their economy.
What knowledge has survived unchanged from four thousand years ago?
Much of the technical writing that was around 4000 years ago (of any description) wouldn't be very familiar. The ancients before Pythagoras didn't fully understand the Pythagorean theorem (though they did know that a few specific examples were right-angled triangles). The "astronomy" was mostly observations of the movements of the stars and planets, and the precession of the sun and moon through the zodiac over the years. They had no idea what might cause these patterns. The engineering principles, such as they were, were extremely rudimentary by modern standards - they didn't know about the arch or the dome, for example.
So what writing was there from 4000 years ago that might look pretty familiar to moderns? A few stories (particularly hero stories and love stories), and business accounting (!). The modern equivalents (more or less) might be pulp fiction (Romance novels and science fiction), and Excel spreadsheets. 8-) Not exactly deep scientific insights.
I suspect that a good part of the reason for that is that the Chinese civilization has not been the victim of the kind of turmoil that went on in Europe and the Middle East. Internal turmoil, yes, and having to defend themselves against foreign invaders; but look at what happened in Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa: Wave after wave of invading armies from various other civilizations, the sacking of each of the major cities not once but multiple times, etc.
Certainly history has not been as kind to any of the other ideographic writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform, Mayan hieroglyphics, etc) as it has been to the Chinese form of writing. I suspect that the relative stability of the Han ideographs has more to do with the relative stability of China as a nation.
Who knows what another 2000 years might bring, to any of us?
It is? How many religions from two thousand years ago are still around? Two? And one of those (Christianity) is having some serious recruiting problems.
Surely you jest. I can think of something around a dozen (!) religions from around 2000 years ago that are still around. Besides Christianity and Judaism, there's also Samaritanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism, which all still retain a significant number of adherents, as well as numerous smaller groups such as Gnosticism and various minority and native religions. If you're willing to go just a bit later you can add Islam and Shintoism, or even Sikhism.
And, for what it's worth, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are all most likely still growing, at least in absolute numbers of adherents.
The world is a whole lot bigger and more diverse than the geeks on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it most certainly does imply causation.
No, it doesn't even do that - but it certainly suggests causation.
I agree that it's far and away the most likely bet that we are in some way the cause of the amphibians' decline, especially since the decline is taking place worldwide. It's hard to think of any other recent worldwide change or event that might be the cause.
The overwhelming scientific consensus it that the warming is proceeding much faster than in the past and that this caused at least in part by human activity.
The earth has experienced many periods of warming and cooling even within historic times, let alone during geologic time. Many of these warming and cooling periods were actually fairly rapid; the earth's climate could be called a metastable system that often experiences fairly rapid change between a number of more stable states. It's just simply untrue that the speed of recent climate change is unprecedented.
That said, what I think you meant to say is that warming is proceeding much faster than in the recent past - and with that minor edit, that's quite true. The prevailing scientific opinion is that human activity is at least partly to blame, possibly helping to accelerate and amplify a natural cyclical change into a warmer state.
But on the other hand, global warming has not yet had a major effect on most temperate and tropical habitats (as opposed to arctic and alpine habitats). For most amphibian loss, it's necessary to look at other causes - which, FWIW, is all that the parent article was saying.
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
It's fairly clear that the main issues involved with recent amphibian declines are pollution, habitat loss, and disease. Global warming is at most a distant fourth, and the reason is not hard to find: temperatures just aren't changing that much in most places, yet amphibian decline is extremely widespread and includes nearly every habitat. The places where temperature changes have been most extreme are in high mountain regions and the high arctic, neither of which are prime amphibian habitat - not that there aren't a few there, but most of them live at lower altitudes and latitudes.
Blaming global warming for every bad thing that happens reminds me of the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail. It is a terrible oversimplification to a single issue which can hardly be the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world. Pollution - especially the acidification of the aquifers in many parts of the world - is too often overlooked by many people who want to blame everything on global warming.
That said, "global warming" is hardly a scam, although the data are extremely difficult to analyze and the precise degree of man's involvement in it is still open to some debate; but it appears very likely that both natural cycles and man-made causes have been at work. However it certainly makes sense to do what we can to limit its effects, especially since we only have one planet we can call home.
The real world is rarely simple.
At least a couple of the articles say that the password he used (whatever that means, see my other comments on the subject) belonged to "another student." Oh, really?! Why did that other student have access to the data?! And why isn't he being charged?!
Clearly what we have been told about this incident is highly misleading. Either
(1) The file was in a location that could be accessed by ANYONE on the school network, or
(2) it had already been hacked by another student, who for some reason is not being charged, or
(3) He hacked into an administrative area, where the file may have been inadequately secured. Comments by the administration and law enforcement to the effect that the password he used belonged to another student are either incorrect or misleading.
Something is clearly rotten about this story, unfortunately it is difficult to tell if he did anything wrong or not, or whether he is a criminal or a scapegoat. Not only do we have to get information filtered through the administration and law enforcement (for whom computer security is usually at best an arcane art that they understand only poorly if at all), but all the primary sources are articles written by local news journalists rather than technical journalists, who are generally not much better at understanding the technical details.
It would appear however that unless he needed to hack into a reasonably well protected account in order to obtain the data, the school is clearly facing a serious HIPAA breach. That alone could be making them overreact, by trying to find some way - any way - to pin the blame on someone else.
What, exactly, do they mean by that? Remember, we're talking about governmental entities that have a long history of not understanding much about computer security. For example:
$ ftp ftp.myschool.edu
Connected to ftp.myschool.edu
User (none): guest
331 Enter email address for anonymous login password
Password: myusername@yahoo.com
230 User guest logged in.
FTP>
Law Enforcement: "Clearly he was trying to impersonate Mr. Guest!"
You: !@#@#$
You think that's too silly? It's no worse than any number of other things I've heard about from such people. Or consider this:
You: "Let's see if that cute girl Angela in my English class has put up a home page on the school computer system. Let's see, use Firefox to browse to www.myschool.edu/~angela/ ... That's odd, doesn't look like what she'd have on her home page. What's this file?"
Cops: "Clearly he was trying to break into the Assistant Principal Angela H's computer work area!"
I don't think these examples are unrepresentative of the typical computer security understanding of law enforcement, unfortunately.
I don't think we know enough about what he did to speculate very much on what his original intentions were.
It's not exactly as if every file that contains personal data will have a big sign on the outside saying "PRIVATE DATA INSIDE" - often the only way that you'd even suspect that would be to open up and actually look at it, which will usually involve some form of copying; therefore your argument that his primary offense was copying is bogus. The crucial thing is what he was doing there in the first place and what he had to do in order to get there.
If all he was doing was looking around in apparently "public" areas for a couple of racy pictures or some interesting games or other programs and stumbled on this file, then the administration is clearly overreacting. On the other hand, if he was deliberately trying to log in with different usernames and found one that didn't have a password on it (or something similar), that's very different - the administration should be grateful for having been alerted to the security problem but he shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. Or if he was trying lots of username and password combinations and found one that worked because the password was trivial, that's yet another thing. Or if he was trying to exploit one of any number of published security flaws and found that the school computers had not been secured against one of them, that's yet another. Clearly each of these examples represent an escalating level of culpability on his part, but we just don't know which (if any) of them correspond with what he did.
I do not think we can trust the police trooper's characterization of his actions - most law enforcement officials are clueless about computer security issues. The bottom line is that none of us have enough information to make an informed comment on the specifics of his case. And the sad part is, I suspect that the police don't either.
I think they showed that in about 80,000 years, genetic material is just broken up into a bunch of tiny, useless snippets, especially if it's on a rock passing between stars, there is much less protection against radiation than there is within a star's heliopause.
Stop right there - you've already made a fatal logical error. Even genetic material ON THE EARTH has a much lower life expectancy than 80,000 years unless it's part of a living organism. If you're just trying to transport a bacterium in its dormant state from one star system to another, you may have a point - but that's probably not a likely scenario anyway. If it's actually able to metabolize as a living organism, living off whatever energy is available on the bit of rock it lives on and producing offspring, any fatal genetic errors will be weeded out of the little colony fairly quickly.
If things were as simple as you imply, life on earth would have died out billions of years ago.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
Not true. It's quite possible to observe signals from much farther away; it's only a question of sorting through them to see if any of them look like evidence of intelligent life. There's no particular reason to think that they must have started transmitting at the exact moment that Galileo did his experiments.
Where the relationship between time and distance matters is when you want to communicate with those civilizations, or determine whether they are close enough to detect our signals.
There is another issue about distance that is completely independent of how long our civilization has been capable of detecting evidence of extraterrestrial life, and that is how much power such a signal would require in order to be detected. It is probably impractical for any civilization to produce an omnidirectional signal (unless, possibly, they were only interested in their immediate galactic neighborhood), so we'd have to assume that they take turns beaming the signal to a large number of "promising" stars. The exact number depends on their resources and level of technology, but again there's no reason to think that it has any relationship to pre-Galileo civilization.
The only area where the length of time we've been able to detect such signals is relevant is that that time tends to limit the window of time that such civilizations might have been sending signals that we can detect. We've only been able to detect very weak radio signals for around 60-75 years or so, so if nobody in our light cone has been on the phone to us in that time period, we couldn't have heard them - to say nothing of the fact that given our current level of technology we'd probably also need to have our equipment pointed right at them in order to be able to hear them.
I'm afraid that all that doesn't really tell us very much, except that signals from ET civilizations must be very rare - and given the continued failure to find anything, it tends to cast doubt on whether there are such signals to detect. Either they aren't there (within a detectable distance, anyway) or they're not interested in chatting.
I'm not at all sure that that's the case - we certainly have exposure to more novel toxic compounds, which has consequences that are difficult to predict, but the ancient human environment was in fact quite toxic - probably more so on average than the modern environment. One major cause of this would have been the use of fire, often in poorly-ventilated spaces; this is well-known to produce numerous toxic and mutagenic chemical oxides (And that's not even including CO and CO2 which can be suffocating in confined spaces). Additionally there are many "natural" compounds - both biologic and non-biologic - which are quite hazardous, and which early man did not understand well enough to avoid.
Even most of the population of "second world" and even "third world" countries aren't living in the extremely primitive conditions of 250,000 years ago, though in many areas the pollution problems in third world countries do produce very hazardous living conditions which may justify your characterization.
It's not so much that individuals in modern industrialized "First World" countries are exposed to so much more toxic material, it's more that we're more aware of it than was early man - but we're also more aware of how to protect ourselves from it.
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent.
Not exactly - it also depends on what you DO with the false positives; the negative consequences that you mention only come about if the government takes concrete action against them based solely on "fitting the profile" (Often by holding them for long periods of time without a trial; they'd need more than a profile to bring someone to trial). Although there have been a few highly publicized cases such as you mention, for most such individuals it's no more than an occasional inconvenience, if they're even aware of being on the list at all. Not that I'm excusing the government for some of the things they've done to certain individuals, but those actions are really a separate issue from whether those people were falsely identified in a profile list.
Given the huge number of false positives that are inevitable in such a scheme, the only thing that makes sense to do with anyone identified in such a list is to investigate them more carefully, not to detain them or otherwise make it impossible for them to function in society.
It is, of course, trivially easy to construct a profiling technique that will have ZERO false negatives: Simply put EVERYONE on the list! But then your profiling scheme has rendered itself redundantly redundant. But it does illustrate the difficulty: In order to reduce the false negatives to be (effectively) zero, it is necessary to vastly increase the number of false positives. This is elementary statistics.
The biggest problem is actually not the false positives - that would just mean extra wasted effort to screen the individuals, which "only" costs time and money.
The larger problem is that in order to do any real good you need an unbelievably low false negative rate. Let's take the 9/11 hijackers as an example: they were only about 0.00000667% of the population. Unless you could capture all but 2 or 3 them, you're still vulnerable to the plot unless you can get one of the ones you captured to spill the beans - at best you've just mitigated the plot. How realistic is it that ALL 20 (or 19 if you believe that Zacarias Moussaoui was not part of the conspiracy) of them could have been identified (let alone captured) using such a method, even given the expenditure of vast resources sifting through all of the false positives? Even if 4 or 5 of them manage to fall in the "negative" group or, alternatively, if they're able to slip through your second-level screening procedures, you still have a disaster on your hands.
It's not likely that you could get the accuracy high enough to stop very many plots by itself, I suspect.
Katrina was a red herring. Remember? Bush did it intentionally.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I've certainly heard people say things like that who were quite serious. One should never attribute to malice what can be better laid on incompetence or indifference.
And, unfortunately, there was not a SINGLE elected Government official, of either party, at either the Federal, State, or local level, who responded effectively to the Katrina disaster. Were all of them evil people? By no means - Like most governments in all times and in all places, they were all just ineffective.
Sorry if that doesn't go along with anyone's political preconceptions, but it appears to be true, unfortunately.
Completely offtopic, but the video in your signature is just really cool - I hadn't seen it before.
As it happens this thread was the first I'd heard about Horowitz. Possibly I'd have known something about him if AIDS research or treatment were my specialty, but it's not.
However his name is plastered all though Google if you just do a search for "Horowitz AIDS". His own websites http://www.tetrahedron.com and http://www.healthyworldstore.com show up very high on the list, and have all the earmarks of quackery.
By the way, for anyone who stumbles across this and hasn't heard about him, his only doctoral degree is apparently in dentistry - hardly a closely-related field. I certainly wouldn't dismiss anyone's research merely because their degree was in a different field (many researchers start out in one field and later move on into another one or even into several others over their lifetime), however it is telling that he uses that degree as a club against any opponents, claiming that it somehow gives anything he writes legitimacy.
But in a real scientific endeavor, the thing that will give your work the most legitimacy isn't your degree, or even how many papers you have published, but how many other researchers in the field cite your results, especially prominent ones. That's the ultimate endorsement of your work.
Huh? I don't follow your logic at all. The earlier prevailing view was that the disease passed into the human population much later; if the earlier view had been that the disease had been in the human population for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and was now thought to be much more recent, then you might have a point. As it is, at best all you can say is that neither view explicitly contradicts the "young earth" theory, while providing no additional support whatsoever either for or against the theory.
Besides, even if you might be inclined to see such things as evidence of God's wrath, it is difficult to picture how this could be reconciled with a Christian world view. Why would an all-powerful and just God make such an imperfect instrument for which such a large proportion of the victims were not gay? Or why would a loving God create a temporal punishment like AIDS that offers no hope of escape even for those who repent?
Certainly AIDS reduces the body's resistance to a number of viral diseases, as well as being generally debilitating so that those diseases will be more severe.
However the diseases you mention are generally either relatively minor (even if unpleasant), or also require significant incubation periods as well as additional infection vectors (viruses always require a host, usually of a specific species). Unlike viruses, many bacterial and fungal infectious agents can survive quite well outside the body, and therefore exposure to them would therefore be much more likely to occur in the kind of rural and tribal (and therefore insular) societies that we're talking about.
Just to see what happens what happens when an undergraduate science student can do with his ignorance, when he isn't acting like a raving lunatic, check Infidel Guy's interview with him and SA Smith: [...]
Yikes!! I just listened to the interview, and this Horowitz guy is a lunatic. He tries to make a big deal about how a couple of his papers were published in a "peer reviewed" scientific journal, and that this somehow proves that his claims are all true. But anyone who's read very many scientific journal articles (in whatever field) knows that the mere fact that an article was published doesn't say much about whether it's true: Maybe the data were contaminated in some way unbeknownst to the researcher. Maybe the author designed the experiment poorly or did the analysis improperly. Maybe the results are simply an anomaly (the improbable thing will happen with exactly that probability). Maybe someone (possibly not even the author) falsified the results. Moreover some journals are simply more well-known in the relevant field, while others are obscure, and this will affect the quality of articles accepted by that journal in that field.
Researchers and authors make mistakes and often have axes to grind. Ditto with reviewers. Ditto even with journals themselves. The system doesn't guarantee that every article ever published is worth even the paper it's written on, rather it tries to ensure that articles generally meet certain minimal standards in terms of their procedures, results, and analysis. Sometimes bad articles get in, and sometimes good ones get rejected. There's nothing magical about the mere fact of having been published; reviewers can't possibly be expected to catch everything.
Moreover when listening to the interview I get the distinct impression that Dr. Horowitz doesn't even understand the problems that the other participants raised with his thesis. Some of the issues raised were pretty damning, yet all he seemed able to do was to complain about being treated unfairly and to repeat the same assertions in a louder voice - usually a very bad sign.
My opinion is that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it is most likely really a duck. Dr. Horowitz gives every appearance of being a fraud.
Also 9/11. That was after the fact, you say? What you're not taking into account was that there were all of these *SECRET RECORDS* in the towers that had to be destroyed one way or another. What better way than to pin the destruction on a bunch of Islamic extremists?
It all ties into the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians and Jesus' blood line through Mary Magdalene. It's a truly VAST conspiracy spanning dozens of centuries, I tell you!!
Oh hi there. You look like a nice chap with that white coat and all. What's that you say? You want me to go with you? Are you one of them too?
This is the problem with most "vast conspiracy theories" about just about any topic. The problem is that the success of any conspiracy is usually inversely proportional to both the number of individuals involved and the technical difficulty of achieving its goals. Do you really think that any large governmental body (pick your favorite villain country, it doesn't matter) is both able to cover its tracks so well that nobody (except for the conspiracy theorists, of course, but they always have an infinite supply of tinfoil) is able to see through the ruse, and able to command such fanatic loyalty that thousands or even millions of individuals are sworn to silence for decades?! These are the same people who brought you such monumental successes as the Watergate break-in, the Katrina relief effort, the Maginot line, etc, etc.
Rather what governments are good at (to the extent that they're good at anything) are massive commitments of resources, getting things done by sheer brute force, but often not in a timely or efficient manner. As one person I know says about government, "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn."
You are basically correct that most of those early victims would have died of other, well-known diseases. In addition there were (and still are) a lot of poorly-understood tropical diseases circulating in the affected population, which would have been almost exclusively native Africans living in great poverty in often remote areas of the continent. It would not have registered high on anyone's radar - everyone knew there were a lot of obscure diseases circulating there, but they didn't affect anyone in the "developed" world and nobody had the tools to track them down or treat them in any event; antibiotics were still decades in the future.
However the specific examples of smallpox and yellow fever would probably not have been the most likely secondary infections to cause death. These two diseases are viral diseases, and most of the opportunistic infections that characterize AIDS are bacterial or fungal.
Nevertheless your main point - that the secondary infections would have been mistakenly believed to be the primary infections - is well-taken, it's just that the secondary infections would have been primarily things like cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and so forth.
Pffft. I'm hardly poor, and I've never had cable. For the few hours of TV I watch per month (mostly news broadcasts), it's hardly worth it to pay for the privilege. Yeah, I'm tight. One woman who used to work with me after hearing about something like that once said, "You must really be Scottish." Yeah, I probably resemble that remark too.
Yeah, business accounting is probably the best way. It's something that is likely to continue to be familiar.
... Which is one reason why business accounting records are so prized by archaeologists, along with the fact that they provide a good deal of insight into the workings of their economy.
What knowledge has survived unchanged from four thousand years ago?
Much of the technical writing that was around 4000 years ago (of any description) wouldn't be very familiar. The ancients before Pythagoras didn't fully understand the Pythagorean theorem (though they did know that a few specific examples were right-angled triangles). The "astronomy" was mostly observations of the movements of the stars and planets, and the precession of the sun and moon through the zodiac over the years. They had no idea what might cause these patterns. The engineering principles, such as they were, were extremely rudimentary by modern standards - they didn't know about the arch or the dome, for example.
So what writing was there from 4000 years ago that might look pretty familiar to moderns? A few stories (particularly hero stories and love stories), and business accounting (!). The modern equivalents (more or less) might be pulp fiction (Romance novels and science fiction), and Excel spreadsheets. 8-) Not exactly deep scientific insights.
FWIW.
I suspect that a good part of the reason for that is that the Chinese civilization has not been the victim of the kind of turmoil that went on in Europe and the Middle East. Internal turmoil, yes, and having to defend themselves against foreign invaders; but look at what happened in Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa: Wave after wave of invading armies from various other civilizations, the sacking of each of the major cities not once but multiple times, etc.
Certainly history has not been as kind to any of the other ideographic writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform, Mayan hieroglyphics, etc) as it has been to the Chinese form of writing. I suspect that the relative stability of the Han ideographs has more to do with the relative stability of China as a nation.
Who knows what another 2000 years might bring, to any of us?
It is? How many religions from two thousand years ago are still around? Two? And one of those (Christianity) is having some serious recruiting problems.
Surely you jest. I can think of something around a dozen (!) religions from around 2000 years ago that are still around. Besides Christianity and Judaism, there's also Samaritanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism, which all still retain a significant number of adherents, as well as numerous smaller groups such as Gnosticism and various minority and native religions. If you're willing to go just a bit later you can add Islam and Shintoism, or even Sikhism.
And, for what it's worth, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are all most likely still growing, at least in absolute numbers of adherents.
The world is a whole lot bigger and more diverse than the geeks on /.