The solution offered here is an example of the class of solution it is supposedly an alternative to:
Forget CFLs, hybrid cars, and organic jeans. Buying our way out of climate change â" even if it's green consumption â" won't get us far. A new paper (PDF), published in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment by NYU bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao, poses an answer: engineer humans to use less.
Buying bioengineered humans is certainly an example of "buying our way out of climate change", and its far more speculative in its utility than any of the forms of buying our way out of climate change it is offered as an alternative to in TFS.
There are still good uses for incandescents, particularly in environments where the heat is a major benefit.
As an example, my wife's theater group has a detached wooden shed which is used to store costumes, wigs, etc. She keeps a 60-watt light bulb burning in that shed to keep the place warm enough that condensation and mildew aren't a problem. Since the bulb hangs in open space from the ceiling, it's a lot safer and much more efficient than any space heater,
Neither lightbulbs nor space heaters are particularly ideal as dehumidifiers, which is really what you want to prevent condensation and mildew.
This is one of the areas that the DMCA creates an illusory right.
No, it isn't.
The law specifically states that the right to fair use, which includes time and format shifting, is not to be affected by the law.
Fair use is a pre-existing (compared to the DMCA) statutory right in copyright law (and, at least in part, reflects limitations on copyright imposed by the Constitutional rights of free speech & free press), and not a right created by the DMCA. Ergo, leaving aside questions of the exact extent of fair use and whether or not the DMCA renders it illusory, it can't be an example of the DMCA creating an illusory right, since the right existed (and not in an illusory form) prior to the DMCA.
It might be an example of the DMCA destroying a right and leaving a illusory shell behind, but that's a very different thing than creating an illusory right.
What they're actually doing is saying "Science is wrong because my holy book says so!"
Technically, what ID proponents are saying is more like "Evolution is wrong because I don't understand how it can do what it does". (The predisposition to reject evolution may be religious in origin, and there is certain documentary evidence that the whole thing was dreamt up as a mechanism for promoting religious ideals without being overtly religious, but ID doesn't actually state that evolution is wrong because some holy book says so, it argues that it is wrong because what it does is too complicated to do without deliberate planning.)
That senior government officials are posting things deemed sensative to facebook?
Most of things mentioned aren't particularly sensitive, they are things that are public, or at least not security-sensitive though private-for-efficiency information that would usually take a little more effort for spies to compile.
I just mentally change everything as if the script had stuck with humans as CPUs. Picture Morpheus holding an Intel chip instad of a Duracel, and it all works out and makes so much more sense.
Or you can just imagine that the script stuck with humans as CPUs but still has Morpheus holding a battery and saying exactly what he said about the machines using humans for energy, but that Morpheus is a religious fanatic successfully deceived by misleading propaganda spread by the machines as part of a system of control...
Which, even though it may not ever be stated on screen to be the explanation for that particular statement by Morpheus, is actually entirely consistent with the rest of the series.
You just have to drop the idea of Morpheus as a completely reliable narrator, which, is a pretty unjustified idea to start with.
GP said the philosophy, not the technology, in the first movie made sense, so the question is irrelevant.
(Also, Morpheus and others reporting and believing as an article of revealed quasi-religious truth that the machines were using humans as batteries makes sense -- as Zion and the illusion of "free" humanity, and consequently the information the "free" humans are fed are revealed to be part of the same system of control that the Matrix is -- in the context revealed by the later movies, even though using humans as batteries itself doesn't make a lick of sense.)
And they should, it is a perfectly legal activity....
First off, lots of things that are "perfectly legal activities" when done in private where only consenting adults are exposed to them cease to be perfectly legal activities when they affect people other than adults voluntarily participating in the activity.
Secondly, California allows public smoking, it just prohibits most indoor workplaces (though there are some exceptions) from subjecting workers to tobacco smoke. In doing so, its rules are in line with those in the majority of US states. (There are some localities, notably Calabasas, in California with stronger smoking bans than the state has, but those are local rules, not state rules.)
Carcinogenesis is generally stochastic. That means the probability is directly proportional to the dose.
No, it doesn't. In the simplest case of a stochastic process (where each particle of the carcinogen had a fixed percentage chance of causing cancer in a given time window), the probability of getting cancer would increase with dose the same way that independent probabilities combine (since that's exactly what it would be), which isn't linearly. If one unit had a 50% chance of causing cancer, two would have a 75% chance, not a 100% chance.
(I'm not saying carcinogens actually work that way, I'm saying that your idea of what "stochastic" means is wacky.)
So if 1000 doses given to one mouse causes cancer, then it's likely that 1 dose given to each of 1000 people will cause one case of cancer.
Even ignoring your misunderstanding of "stochastic", this is wrong, since it ignores that there is a difference between "mouse" and "person".
The thing is, even if we accept 'beg' as an alternative to 'raise', 'begging the question' is not grammatically correct.
Neither the bad translation from Latin into English that is described as the only correct use by some pedants, nor the newer common "incorrect" use of "begging the question" works in English if you consider the words separately.
They both work as unit phrases. The "correct" intransitive use ("begs the question" without any specified question) is completely distinct and impossible to confuse with the "incorrect" transitive use ("begs the question <question>"), both are widely used, both are clear in meaning, and, the latter works as a (etymologically incorrect, but that's hardly relevant) generalization of the former which renders the former into the special case of the latter where the question forming the implied object is the proposition under discussion.
The pedantry of those who would argue that the newer use is "incorrect" is rather misguided.
Is there a significant difference between, say, swiping across a phone's screen and making the same gesture a few inches away?
Maybe, maybe not, but this probably isn't about even "a few inches away". Look at claim 3: "The method of claim 1, wherein detecting motions comprises: receiving images from the image capturing device, each of the received images is associated with a motion of the object; determining an illumination level for each of the received images; comparing each of the determined illumination level to a predetermined threshold; and determining, for each received image, if the associated motion is a touch motion where the object touches on the image capturing device or a release motion where the object releases or stays away from the image capturing device based on the comparison." (emphasis added)
It looks like the main focus here is to develop a system where if you have a camera with the right orientation and field of view, you don't need a touchscreen, you can use a non-touch display and still interact with it in much the same way as a touchscreen. This has the potential for lowering the cost of portable devices while providing essentially the same user experience compared to touchscreen devices.
In addition to the kinds of devices that commonly have touch screens now, this could be used anyplace you are likely to have a display and a camera together where the additional cost of making the display touch would usually be prohibitive to provide a touch-like interface in addition to whatever existing control interface exists -- netbooks and traditional laptops (even desktop displays) would be an obvious use, giving you swipe-and-tap capability which could be convenient for more "consumptive" activities, while still keeping a traditional interface for more "productive" activities.
You don't think those software people spending all that time and energy hacking into someone else's shit, couldn't instead better utilize their resources writing a new (and possibly better) implementation from scratch?
Insofar as it makes a difference to the open-hardware vs. open-software discussion, that really only makes a difference to the very small share of the people working on open software that would be writing low-level device drivers and the like, And the quality of low-level software isn't the big barrier holding back open hardware from mass acceptance, so, yeah, it's still a false choice.
If the server is where the real money is, then how come Apple's 2011 revenues beat Microsoft's by 77%, and their profits by 40%?
If you read the post you are responding to, you will note this language "the client side won't, in the long term, be where the real money is -- the real money will be on the server side infrastructure."
Do you understand the differences between "won't, in the long term" and "isn't, now" and between "will be" and "is"?
The rise of mobile devices will certainly lead to a big increase in hosted services, true.
That's the point.
However, most of the major hosted services providers (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) all use Linux and/or UNIX for their backend.
Microsoft isn't trying to get used by other hosted service providers (well, they are, but its not the center piece of their focus, though for traditional web hosting my understanding is that IIS is still growing in share), they are trying to be a hosted services provider (cf., for end-user services, Office 365, and for infrastructure to support third-party-developed services, Windows Azure.)
Microsoft is still the power player when it comes to PCs, but it has yet to figure out how to become more than an afterthought when it comes to the devices people are using more and more instead of PCs.
The devices people are using more and more instead of PCs are mobile devices for consuming web services (whether via web apps or native apps consuming web services.) I think Microsoft is significantly more than an afterthought when it comes to solutions for hosting web services.
Microsoft might be an afterthought on the client side of those new devices, but as long as no one manages to monopolize the client side, the client side won't, in the long term, be where the real money is -- the real money will be on the server side infrastructure. Not having a major platform on the client side may be a disadvantage in making money on the back end, but its not insurmountable as long as no client-side player has enough clout to shut out connections to other server-side solutions, and as long as there is robust competition on the client side -- even if Microsoft isn't part of that -- that kind of power seems unlikely.
Because that one area of effort is the most likely to actually affect anything.
The claim that only open mobile hardware will is likely to "affect anything", while open mobile software is unlikely to, ought to have some evidence presented to support it if it is to be taken seriously. Both open mobile hardware and open mobile software exist, and the latter seems to have had some notable impact already.
Further, even if it was the area most likely to have impact, the people with the skills to pursue it aren't necessarily the same people with the skills to pursue better and more complete open mobile software, so it wouldn't be an real "either/or" situation, since the resources available for each effort aren't freely convertible.
Why on Earth would Iran want to do that? Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan have a fairly well documented collaboration on nuclear weapons technology.
China would disapprove, but America might not. The UK probably would approve. Who would retaliate against Iran? Who would be allowed to bomb or even nuke Teheran?
Yes, if Iran launched something that might be a nuke in China's direction (look at a map), China would probably reduce Iran to ashes before the missile hit anywhere.
And if Iran launched something that might be a nuke anywhere near the direction of Japan and South Korea, the US probably would do the same.
Given the geography, Russia probably would have similar concerns, and Pakistan might as well.
And North Korea's delivery technology is on par with Iran's and their actual weapons technology is ahead, so presumably we can expect that by the time Iran has both usable warheads and the reach to hit North Korea, the reverse is also true, so North Korea would probably get in on the retaliation game as well.
At what point would the *whole* world unanimously support wiping Iran off the map?
All of the nuclear powers would support it as soon as Iran did something that had a credible appearance of being a nuclear attack directed at any of them or their close allies, because the firm principle that such attacks cannot be tolerated is the basis on which their own deterrence efforts work. No one is going to even going to get upset about the retaliating countries not waiting until the attack lands to retaliate, because no one wants to establish that standard as a norm.
At what point would the *whole* world unanimously support wiping Iran off the map?
All you need is an excuse that makes one nuclear power actively support wiping Iran off the map, and makes the rest of the nuclear powers unwilling to intervene in defense of Iran. Iran nuking anybody, anywhere, would be enough to do that.
Rules of MAD don't apply to Islamic regimes the same way that they did to Communists. Sure, the Communists (Soviets & Chinese) were evil, but they were at least rational about it - while they undoubtedly wanted to wipe out their enemies, they themselves wanted to survive.
Muslims, like Christians, American patriots, Communists, and people with lots of other belief systems, have a notable and vocal subgroup that holds that it is better to die than to live in circumstances where there values are not realized.
OTOH, that obviously doesn't make them particularly special -- every group to which MAD has applied has had the same kind of groups (and the USSR, China, and USA also had regimes that were, publicly at least, convinced that they had survivability measures in place to allow the regime to survive a large-scale nuclear exchange, so as well as the "live in our preferred manner or die" element, there was also the "nuclear war is winnable" element to contend with.
The entire phenomenon of suicide bombers makes it clear that they'd be happy to pay the price if they can have some guarantee that they'll wipe out their enemies - like Israel or India.
No, it doesn't, because suicide bombers, you'll note, aren't generally from the privileged classes that lead the countries -- their usually from social groups oppressed by even the local government, and affiliated with organizations opposed to their local governments. Suicide bombers are from groups that have nothing to lose, but those aren't the people making decisions about national strategy.
The people making decisions about national strategy have lots to lose, and generally have expended considerable effort to acquire and secure those things that they would stand to lose.
The only reason Pakistan hasn't done it as yet is that they don't have enough nukes to wipe out India, and their long range missiles don't cover even most of India.
Pakistan doesn't want to destroy India, it wants to control territory over which it has had conflict with India since the two countries became independent countries. Both the Pakistani and the Indian nuclear forces exist in large part to deter the other from extreme action in regard to that ongoing conflict (though India's also exists as a counterbalance to China).
The reason Iran hasn't done it to Israel is that they've not completed it as yet.
Iran hasn't launched on offensive war anywhere since the Islamic Revolution (they have been the victim of a war launched by Iraq with the support of the US -- and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; interestingly, since then, the states that initiated and backed that war against Iran have since fought two additional wars among themselves, starting right after the end of the war with Iran.)
Also, just like Muslims hate Infidels, within the ummah, there are the various sectarian divisions, like the Shia vs the Sunni. Saudi Arabia can't stand the idea of a Shia Iran having the bomb
Most of the Sunni-ruled states that can't stand Iran having the bomb can't stand Israel having it either, so Iran having it doesn't really change things.
So Iran's getting nukes will start an arms race where oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, et al will pay Pakistan to give them a part of their arsenal.
The Middle East/North Africa nuclear arms race has been going on a long time -- including various states in the region purchasing nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan -- and the main catalyst for it is Israel's nuclear arsenal, not the maybe-someday Iranian one. So Iran can't start a nuclear arms race in the region, because Israel did that decades ago and its still going on -- Iran getting nuclear weapons would be a product of that arms race, not its initiator.
While all the attempts to work around proprietary obstacles (rooting, homebrew, emulation etc) undoubtedly have their merits and utility, I think the real focus ought to be on getting hold of open, documented, standards-based, royalty-free hardware.
There are people working on that, but why does that have to be the real focus rather than a real focus? You seem to suggest that there ought to be only one area of effort, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
If someone can sneak in like that what does it say about your product that you are selling?
Since an important part of security planning is usability and scaling defenses -- especially those that impose significant costs, whether direct monetary costs or impositions on legitimate use -- appropriately given the probability and scale of harm expected from a breach, what it says that you don't go overboard in hermetically sealing your sales conference is that you have some clue about security planning.
Solstice is significant because it is not an arbitrary day- it is a measurable location on earth's flight. Jan 1 is just arbitrary with no scientific marker. It is very likely when the calendar were first created they intended it to be on the solstice- but human ineptitude made it drift to what is Jan 1 today.
The oldest known version of the Roman calendar that became the calendar we have now had its start date fixed to the vernal equinox, actually.
Jan. 1 wasn't reached by the date floating because the calendar wasn't pinned to the solar year, it was reached by Roman Republican practice of naming years after the consuls in office, which resulted in the year (for documentary purposes) starting on whatever date consular terms switched, which eventually got ended up being Jan. 1. This start date then stuck even after Roman consular terms became irrelevant.
Its not like all this isn't well documented, perhaps you should bother to read up on what is known about a topic before trumpeting assumptions as likely-to-be-true that are based on nothing more than your speculation about dates that happen to be near each other.
Our whole calendar is messed up. First- Jan 1st is a poor start date.
All start dates are equally arbitrary, so Jan. 1 is as good as anything else.
I suspect the original pioneers intended the year to start on the Winter Solstice
No, The starting day of the year under the old Roman Republican system (from which our modern system evolved by way of the Julian and Gregorian reforms) was whatever day happened to start the Roman consular term (since years weren't numbered, they were named after the consuls in office), this moved more than once during the life of the Roman Republic and came to rest at January 1 in 153 B.C.
The starting date stuck in most places using the Julian calendar (at least in common usage as to what was "New Years Day"; though lots of places moved the official starting date for the numbered year to some church holiday, and which holiday was chosen varied from place to place) and eventually became a universal norm.
Then- our months are supposed to be based on cycles of the moon (Approx every 28 days)- but because there were 13 and superstitious nitwits didn't like 13 we have 12 months with varying days.
Actually, no, the ancient Roman Calendar had ten months of 30 to 31 days, the months in it were never aligned to cycles of the moon, and there weren't 13 of them. It started on the vernal equinox (not the winter solistice, as you've suggested must be the case), and had a number of days added outside of any month at the end to make sure the next year started on a vernal equinox (and, since it only had 304 days in its 10 months, there were a bunch of those days.)
A later reform brought it up to 12 months, all of which (except February) had an odd number of days (29 or 31) because odd numbers were considered lucky. February was addressed by splitting it into to pieces, each of which had an odd number of days (23 and 5), and whenever a leap month (the basic calendar was 354 days long) was added to align it with the equinoxes, the leap month was added after the first part of February and incorporated the last part of February.
Our current concept of a month is meaningless. The whole 7 day week is rather random too- based on some out-of-date dogma that is probably mistranslated.
Actually, the 7-day week makes sense as 1/4 of the 28-day lunar cycle; its quite likely that that shaped the creation story you are referring to rather than the other way around.
Let's make a week 10 days- a much more logical number.
Its a completely arbitrary number. Matching up with the median number of fingers a human has doesn't make it a "logical number".
Not perfect- but based more on logic than our current system and no-silly formulas needed (other than determining the solstice)
Actually, its based on no more logic than the worst of the older calendars -- its just pick some arbitrary numbers as a basis for the basic schedule based on criteria that have no fundamental utility except aesthetic appeal to the designer, and then when it doesn't match to its basic goal (aligning with the cycle of equinoxes) add however many days necessary outside the regular cycles to fix that
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The solution offered here is an example of the class of solution it is supposedly an alternative to:
Buying bioengineered humans is certainly an example of "buying our way out of climate change", and its far more speculative in its utility than any of the forms of buying our way out of climate change it is offered as an alternative to in TFS.
Well, not what I'd call a lifetime; typical LED bulbs have lifespans rated around 12 years or so of 6 hour/day use.
Neither lightbulbs nor space heaters are particularly ideal as dehumidifiers, which is really what you want to prevent condensation and mildew.
No, it isn't.
Fair use is a pre-existing (compared to the DMCA) statutory right in copyright law (and, at least in part, reflects limitations on copyright imposed by the Constitutional rights of free speech & free press), and not a right created by the DMCA. Ergo, leaving aside questions of the exact extent of fair use and whether or not the DMCA renders it illusory, it can't be an example of the DMCA creating an illusory right, since the right existed (and not in an illusory form) prior to the DMCA.
It might be an example of the DMCA destroying a right and leaving a illusory shell behind, but that's a very different thing than creating an illusory right.
Technically, what ID proponents are saying is more like "Evolution is wrong because I don't understand how it can do what it does". (The predisposition to reject evolution may be religious in origin, and there is certain documentary evidence that the whole thing was dreamt up as a mechanism for promoting religious ideals without being overtly religious, but ID doesn't actually state that evolution is wrong because some holy book says so, it argues that it is wrong because what it does is too complicated to do without deliberate planning.)
Most of things mentioned aren't particularly sensitive, they are things that are public, or at least not security-sensitive though private-for-efficiency information that would usually take a little more effort for spies to compile.
Or you can just imagine that the script stuck with humans as CPUs but still has Morpheus holding a battery and saying exactly what he said about the machines using humans for energy, but that Morpheus is a religious fanatic successfully deceived by misleading propaganda spread by the machines as part of a system of control...
Which, even though it may not ever be stated on screen to be the explanation for that particular statement by Morpheus, is actually entirely consistent with the rest of the series.
You just have to drop the idea of Morpheus as a completely reliable narrator, which, is a pretty unjustified idea to start with.
GP said the philosophy, not the technology, in the first movie made sense, so the question is irrelevant.
(Also, Morpheus and others reporting and believing as an article of revealed quasi-religious truth that the machines were using humans as batteries makes sense -- as Zion and the illusion of "free" humanity, and consequently the information the "free" humans are fed are revealed to be part of the same system of control that the Matrix is -- in the context revealed by the later movies, even though using humans as batteries itself doesn't make a lick of sense.)
First off, lots of things that are "perfectly legal activities" when done in private where only consenting adults are exposed to them cease to be perfectly legal activities when they affect people other than adults voluntarily participating in the activity.
Secondly, California allows public smoking, it just prohibits most indoor workplaces (though there are some exceptions) from subjecting workers to tobacco smoke. In doing so, its rules are in line with those in the majority of US states. (There are some localities, notably Calabasas, in California with stronger smoking bans than the state has, but those are local rules, not state rules.)
No, it doesn't. In the simplest case of a stochastic process (where each particle of the carcinogen had a fixed percentage chance of causing cancer in a given time window), the probability of getting cancer would increase with dose the same way that independent probabilities combine (since that's exactly what it would be), which isn't linearly. If one unit had a 50% chance of causing cancer, two would have a 75% chance, not a 100% chance.
(I'm not saying carcinogens actually work that way, I'm saying that your idea of what "stochastic" means is wacky.)
Even ignoring your misunderstanding of "stochastic", this is wrong, since it ignores that there is a difference between "mouse" and "person".
Neither the bad translation from Latin into English that is described as the only correct use by some pedants, nor the newer common "incorrect" use of "begging the question" works in English if you consider the words separately.
They both work as unit phrases. The "correct" intransitive use ("begs the question" without any specified question) is completely distinct and impossible to confuse with the "incorrect" transitive use ("begs the question <question>"), both are widely used, both are clear in meaning, and, the latter works as a (etymologically incorrect, but that's hardly relevant) generalization of the former which renders the former into the special case of the latter where the question forming the implied object is the proposition under discussion.
The pedantry of those who would argue that the newer use is "incorrect" is rather misguided.
Maybe, maybe not, but this probably isn't about even "a few inches away". Look at claim 3: "The method of claim 1, wherein detecting motions comprises: receiving images from the image capturing device, each of the received images is associated with a motion of the object; determining an illumination level for each of the received images; comparing each of the determined illumination level to a predetermined threshold; and determining, for each received image, if the associated motion is a touch motion where the object touches on the image capturing device or a release motion where the object releases or stays away from the image capturing device based on the comparison." (emphasis added)
It looks like the main focus here is to develop a system where if you have a camera with the right orientation and field of view, you don't need a touchscreen, you can use a non-touch display and still interact with it in much the same way as a touchscreen. This has the potential for lowering the cost of portable devices while providing essentially the same user experience compared to touchscreen devices.
In addition to the kinds of devices that commonly have touch screens now, this could be used anyplace you are likely to have a display and a camera together where the additional cost of making the display touch would usually be prohibitive to provide a touch-like interface in addition to whatever existing control interface exists -- netbooks and traditional laptops (even desktop displays) would be an obvious use, giving you swipe-and-tap capability which could be convenient for more "consumptive" activities, while still keeping a traditional interface for more "productive" activities.
Insofar as it makes a difference to the open-hardware vs. open-software discussion, that really only makes a difference to the very small share of the people working on open software that would be writing low-level device drivers and the like, And the quality of low-level software isn't the big barrier holding back open hardware from mass acceptance, so, yeah, it's still a false choice.
If you read the post you are responding to, you will note this language "the client side won't, in the long term, be where the real money is -- the real money will be on the server side infrastructure."
Do you understand the differences between "won't, in the long term" and "isn't, now" and between "will be" and "is"?
That's the point.
Microsoft isn't trying to get used by other hosted service providers (well, they are, but its not the center piece of their focus, though for traditional web hosting my understanding is that IIS is still growing in share), they are trying to be a hosted services provider (cf., for end-user services, Office 365, and for infrastructure to support third-party-developed services, Windows Azure.)
The devices people are using more and more instead of PCs are mobile devices for consuming web services (whether via web apps or native apps consuming web services.) I think Microsoft is significantly more than an afterthought when it comes to solutions for hosting web services.
Microsoft might be an afterthought on the client side of those new devices, but as long as no one manages to monopolize the client side, the client side won't, in the long term, be where the real money is -- the real money will be on the server side infrastructure. Not having a major platform on the client side may be a disadvantage in making money on the back end, but its not insurmountable as long as no client-side player has enough clout to shut out connections to other server-side solutions, and as long as there is robust competition on the client side -- even if Microsoft isn't part of that -- that kind of power seems unlikely.
The claim that only open mobile hardware will is likely to "affect anything", while open mobile software is unlikely to, ought to have some evidence presented to support it if it is to be taken seriously. Both open mobile hardware and open mobile software exist, and the latter seems to have had some notable impact already.
Further, even if it was the area most likely to have impact, the people with the skills to pursue it aren't necessarily the same people with the skills to pursue better and more complete open mobile software, so it wouldn't be an real "either/or" situation, since the resources available for each effort aren't freely convertible.
Why on Earth would Iran want to do that? Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan have a fairly well documented collaboration on nuclear weapons technology.
Yes, if Iran launched something that might be a nuke in China's direction (look at a map), China would probably reduce Iran to ashes before the missile hit anywhere.
And if Iran launched something that might be a nuke anywhere near the direction of Japan and South Korea, the US probably would do the same.
Given the geography, Russia probably would have similar concerns, and Pakistan might as well.
And North Korea's delivery technology is on par with Iran's and their actual weapons technology is ahead, so presumably we can expect that by the time Iran has both usable warheads and the reach to hit North Korea, the reverse is also true, so North Korea would probably get in on the retaliation game as well.
All of the nuclear powers would support it as soon as Iran did something that had a credible appearance of being a nuclear attack directed at any of them or their close allies, because the firm principle that such attacks cannot be tolerated is the basis on which their own deterrence efforts work. No one is going to even going to get upset about the retaliating countries not waiting until the attack lands to retaliate, because no one wants to establish that standard as a norm.
All you need is an excuse that makes one nuclear power actively support wiping Iran off the map, and makes the rest of the nuclear powers unwilling to intervene in defense of Iran. Iran nuking anybody, anywhere, would be enough to do that.
Muslims, like Christians, American patriots, Communists, and people with lots of other belief systems, have a notable and vocal subgroup that holds that it is better to die than to live in circumstances where there values are not realized.
OTOH, that obviously doesn't make them particularly special -- every group to which MAD has applied has had the same kind of groups (and the USSR, China, and USA also had regimes that were, publicly at least, convinced that they had survivability measures in place to allow the regime to survive a large-scale nuclear exchange, so as well as the "live in our preferred manner or die" element, there was also the "nuclear war is winnable" element to contend with.
No, it doesn't, because suicide bombers, you'll note, aren't generally from the privileged classes that lead the countries -- their usually from social groups oppressed by even the local government, and affiliated with organizations opposed to their local governments. Suicide bombers are from groups that have nothing to lose, but those aren't the people making decisions about national strategy.
The people making decisions about national strategy have lots to lose, and generally have expended considerable effort to acquire and secure those things that they would stand to lose.
Pakistan doesn't want to destroy India, it wants to control territory over which it has had conflict with India since the two countries became independent countries. Both the Pakistani and the Indian nuclear forces exist in large part to deter the other from extreme action in regard to that ongoing conflict (though India's also exists as a counterbalance to China).
Iran hasn't launched on offensive war anywhere since the Islamic Revolution (they have been the victim of a war launched by Iraq with the support of the US -- and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; interestingly, since then, the states that initiated and backed that war against Iran have since fought two additional wars among themselves, starting right after the end of the war with Iran.)
Most of the Sunni-ruled states that can't stand Iran having the bomb can't stand Israel having it either, so Iran having it doesn't really change things.
The Middle East/North Africa nuclear arms race has been going on a long time -- including various states in the region purchasing nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan -- and the main catalyst for it is Israel's nuclear arsenal, not the maybe-someday Iranian one. So Iran can't start a nuclear arms race in the region, because Israel did that decades ago and its still going on -- Iran getting nuclear weapons would be a product of that arms race, not its initiator.
There are people working on that, but why does that have to be the real focus rather than a real focus? You seem to suggest that there ought to be only one area of effort, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Its approximately infinitely better if you want to use software designed for Windows without actually purchasing or pirating Windows.
On the other hand, its worse than Windows-in-a-VM if you want to test how something runs under Windows.
That's what spy operations are, though.
Since an important part of security planning is usability and scaling defenses -- especially those that impose significant costs, whether direct monetary costs or impositions on legitimate use -- appropriately given the probability and scale of harm expected from a breach, what it says that you don't go overboard in hermetically sealing your sales conference is that you have some clue about security planning.
When code does not correctly model the problem domain, the error isn't with the domain.
The oldest known version of the Roman calendar that became the calendar we have now had its start date fixed to the vernal equinox, actually.
Jan. 1 wasn't reached by the date floating because the calendar wasn't pinned to the solar year, it was reached by Roman Republican practice of naming years after the consuls in office, which resulted in the year (for documentary purposes) starting on whatever date consular terms switched, which eventually got ended up being Jan. 1. This start date then stuck even after Roman consular terms became irrelevant.
Its not like all this isn't well documented, perhaps you should bother to read up on what is known about a topic before trumpeting assumptions as likely-to-be-true that are based on nothing more than your speculation about dates that happen to be near each other.
All start dates are equally arbitrary, so Jan. 1 is as good as anything else.
No, The starting day of the year under the old Roman Republican system (from which our modern system evolved by way of the Julian and Gregorian reforms) was whatever day happened to start the Roman consular term (since years weren't numbered, they were named after the consuls in office), this moved more than once during the life of the Roman Republic and came to rest at January 1 in 153 B.C.
The starting date stuck in most places using the Julian calendar (at least in common usage as to what was "New Years Day"; though lots of places moved the official starting date for the numbered year to some church holiday, and which holiday was chosen varied from place to place) and eventually became a universal norm.
Actually, no, the ancient Roman Calendar had ten months of 30 to 31 days, the months in it were never aligned to cycles of the moon, and there weren't 13 of them. It started on the vernal equinox (not the winter solistice, as you've suggested must be the case), and had a number of days added outside of any month at the end to make sure the next year started on a vernal equinox (and, since it only had 304 days in its 10 months, there were a bunch of those days.)
A later reform brought it up to 12 months, all of which (except February) had an odd number of days (29 or 31) because odd numbers were considered lucky. February was addressed by splitting it into to pieces, each of which had an odd number of days (23 and 5), and whenever a leap month (the basic calendar was 354 days long) was added to align it with the equinoxes, the leap month was added after the first part of February and incorporated the last part of February.
Actually, the 7-day week makes sense as 1/4 of the 28-day lunar cycle; its quite likely that that shaped the creation story you are referring to rather than the other way around.
Its a completely arbitrary number. Matching up with the median number of fingers a human has doesn't make it a "logical number".
Actually, its based on no more logic than the worst of the older calendars -- its just pick some arbitrary numbers as a basis for the basic schedule based on criteria that have no fundamental utility except aesthetic appeal to the designer, and then when it doesn't match to its basic goal (aligning with the cycle of equinoxes) add however many days necessary outside the regular cycles to fix that