But how many of those seventeen lost because they don't know how to reply to e-mail
half
and how many lost because they had been using AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, or some other non-Microsoft word processing application? none, none, facebook = half
Right. I really like phoneming out those strange error messages and dumps of odd data and code for 15 minutes instead of doing a cut-and-paste.
OK, I'll be less snarky--- talking to somebody is great when you want to talk with them to come to an understanding. Othertimes you need to get a path to directory or some standard or ask a question about something you saw, and email is right.
Email is good because I don't want to impose a IM or phone call interrupting somebody when they're thinking when it could be answered later.
"So basically you're saying "we know so little therefore let's keep knowledge secret". Makes sense."
Yes. When we may know enough to cause Extinction Level Event, but don't know enough to stop said event fast enough, keeping knowledge secret is a very very very very very very very good idea.
When it comes to potentially lethal global pandemics, how about asking biologists who work on potentially lethal global pandemics?
Since the consequence is really bad, it's worth keeping it tight unless every single one of them says it's OK. Obviously some of them are already pretty concerned, hence the appearance on Slahsdot.
"If a good countermeasure is factually impossible (i.e. there's a law of nature denying it), keeping things secret only delay the inevitable. I'd rather struggle against inevitable death fully knowing this very fact (and fail), than live blissfully ignorant."
Really? Homo sapiens survived a few tens of thousands of years.
I think dying, along with everybody I know, of a weaponized disease because somebody has some theoretical crap about "not wanting to delay the inevitable" really sucks donkey dick. I'm not suicidal, and I'd like very very much to delay as long as possible the not-necessarily-inevitiable-if-we-STFU-about-it.
"As for the black swan bad guy argument, I just point out that the good guys are just as many as the bad guys, and as competent, if not better (and I assume much better). The bad guys can walk the earth unhindered only if their arsenal are not understood by the good guys."
Come back to reality and stop fluffy theoretical arguments. Sure there will be people trying to stop it but it is quite possible a vaccine is much harder than the weapon and takes far longer, regardless of how many good guys work on the vaccine vs bad guys with the weapon. And the good guys could all end up dead first. Surely you've seen the movies where the conference of microbiologists gets infected by the killer germ.
Barbarians conquered Rome because they had numerical and qualitative military and resource superiority and they persisted for over a century, as the Romans had done to its enemies for the previous 7 centuries.
This virus crap is like finding some 'hack' where by the action of 5 or 10 clever people, the citizens of the Roman Empire could be exterminated in a year. Without providing 700 years of economic gains previously.
"On the other hand, if the study becomes available for the scientific community, it could allow researchers to ”be prepared” for a potential H5N1 pandemic. Since Fouchier’s study suggests that the risk for this to occur is greater than previously thought. Some researchers believe that banning the paper will leave mankind helpless if the virus naturally mutates and becomes contagious."
How about plan C:
*) keep this thing secret with lethal force (not an exaggeration) *) work on an exceptionally effective vaccine *) repeat until vaccine is successful *) vaccinate the planet *) release some information and say how we protected you from what could have been a disaster
Was that experiment a massive release of airborne infectious disease which has a history of causing pandemics which was then further modified to be far more lethal and quickly transmissible?
"Terrorists generally want to target specific sub-populations of the human species, whether that sub-population be defined by nationality, ethnicity, wealth etc."
yes, their massive car bombs are exceptionally precise.
Really, just like HIV has been made harmless. Just took two or three labs a few weeks to have an effective vaccine.
Wait, it didn't happen that way. Because HIV hacks into your immune system.
And other viruses if sufficiently malevolent can do the same, explaining how to do this in detail is exceptionally dangerous.
Your biology is not like a computer. You and the laws of biochemistry are not infinitely reprogrammable.
HIV still kills, but slowly and is not transmissible easily. Suppose you get a combination viruswhich suppresses your immune response, is transmitted by air, and is lethal? You will be dead.
No such a thing has not occurred in evolutionary history because, without non-random malevolent selection, they do not thrive by doing that.
"You have to assume that the other side (be it an enemy nation, a terrorist, a tax collector, or whatever) can obtain the information if they wanted it. It's stupid to assume they can't know (they're capable of spying)."
This is false. Sufficiently strong security measures mean that only the most determined adversary can obtain the information if they wanted. In practice this means that the information will be available to intelligence agencies of the most advanced nation-states and nobody else (for example, who has detailed thermonuclear weapons design knowledge? there is apparently one 1960's era secret not at all yet publicly revealed.). These people have institutional and practical barriers to instigating mass genocide.
However, there are many smaller groups with insufficient capability to penetrate a well-protected technical secret (e.g. TS/SCI) but more than enough capability to do some apparently reasonably simple molecular biology.
"Banning publication doesn't even remotely make sense. If he's got super killer virus, publication informs the public and other guys can use the information to develop a countermeasure. By keeping the knowledge secret you're just granting even more leverage to potential abusers of the knowledge."
Why is that?
What if there isn't any good countermeasure? What if the information is really good for making continual polymorphic variations to evade vaccines?
"By keeping the knowledge secret you're just granting even more leverage to potential abusers of the knowledge."
How does that work? The chance that a Dutch researcher is going to kill people with his privately-held is minuscule. The chance that among 7 billion people there somebody who reads this and wants to kill 6 billion people and can find sufficient people to execute it is 1.
I think people haven't really thought this through. The potential danger is extreme, and not Y2K-hype-level extreme but close to global thermonuclear war extreme. There's no 'wipe drive and reinstall' option to cure genocide.
The fix may be a vaccine against one particular instantiation---and deploying vaccines to 7 billion people for a virus which doesn't exist naturally is a big and expensive problem. There's no such thing as auto-update. This is real and expensive and will take away resources from other things which could also improve people's help. Any failures mean people, like your family, will die.
The real danger is that the techniques and insight involved could be used to make a wide variety of weaponizable viruses, in which case one might face a wave of dangerous viruses each of which is not covered by the previous's virusweapon's vaccine. These waves would sweep faster than vaccines could be isolated and produced (which for influenza is about 9 months to a year---for this you have to count proven manufacturing not some future hope of how something might work). How fast can Dr Evil produce new sequences? A bunch faster.
If the description of the research is accurate, this is like publishing a paper on how to manufacture, and mass-produce thermonuclear weaponry with the tech available in a typical university lab, without using any expensive fissile nuclear materials or isotopic separation. What a wonderful world.
That's also a bad example, nothing with Einstein was necessary. You can derive the equations of motion in the different frames perfectly well with Newton's mechanics (Einsteinian corrections are tiny), and yes the description really is simpler in some frames than others.
It was really Kepler's refinements which astronomers bought into, because of its experimental predictability; and then Newton explained Kepler's results from first principles, unifying gravitation on the ground and in the sky, which was the real achievement. And yes, the intellectual clarity of the Copernican theory helped get us there.
"We can measure light as both a wave and a particle. But they are both physical? So is the particle a dot which waves? Or springs back to a dot and out again to a wave?"
The problem is more complicated than that, but it has been solved completely satisfactorily now with the proper application of quantum mechanics to electromagnetic fields, known as quantum optics, and verified experimentally.
Very toughly, light is a quantum mechanical superposition of the electromagnetic modes. A 'wave function of functions', and the 'particles' are the elementary excitations of the modes, meaning there is an operator which can count them and give an integer.
Note that photons, unlike normal matter we otherwise come in contact with (protons + electrons + neutrons) does not have a conservation law. In 99.999% of our interactions, protons/electrons/neutrons are not destroyed or created, but with photons that happens really easily. So the practical experience is very different, though some fundamental properties are similar.
I think the wave function is a physically real object(*), and the randomness is not intrinsic or magically special but comes from thermodynamics and chaos, and, yes, Einstein was right: Copenhagen is a nonsensical load of bollocks.
More specifically that dice are not actually random in an ineffable sense, but their practical use has a sufficiently high Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy rate (roughly average amount of chaos generated per time) that they're random enough. In other words, quantum mechanics is regular physics, not mystical Copenhagen mumbo jumbo. Copenhagen works for computation, but that's because it's a very useful approximation for experimentally relevant circumstances, just like Fermi's "Golden Rules". Einstein was right, at least about the problem. His proposed solutions weren't, but the experimental evidence wasn't available until after he died and obviously he would have changed his mind given new results, because he was a physicist foremost and not a mystical philosopher.
Entanglement and uncertainty principle are not horse shit, because the central mystery of QM, that everything is operating in a Hilbert space still remains.
(*) To me, physically real means "acts as a source term in gravitation". This pretty clearly distinguishes "electrons/protons/photons" from "set of all sets of sets" crap and is as useful as any other description I know. Of course we don't have quantum gravity working yet but when we do it's pretty likely something like the wavefunction will be in there.
You don't mind if it's a $10 propane tank, but you're not likely to exchange a new, working battery worth $5000 for a random one you find at a gas station.
If there are really 44 bits of entropy then it should be OK. XKCD looks at 4 words of 11 bits---2048 possibilities if uniformly distributed, given humans, that's probably not unreasonable.
We have to let the computer choose the password, and the human agree to memorize it. And it MUST be 4 words, not one, or three.
sounds just like the True Communist system that the deluded advocates seemed to insist was "Coming Real Soon Now, so ignore the bad Commies with guns and reindoctrination camps and in any case aren't they better than what was there before?"
Hint: Ayn Rand 'novels' have the same structure as Stalinist propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
But how many of those seventeen lost because they don't know how to reply to e-mail
half
and how many lost because they had been using AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, or some other non-Microsoft word processing application?
none, none, facebook = half
Right. I really like phoneming out those strange error messages and dumps of odd data and code for 15 minutes instead of doing a cut-and-paste.
OK, I'll be less snarky--- talking to somebody is great when you want to talk with them to come to an understanding. Othertimes you need to get a path to directory or some standard or ask a question about something you saw, and email is right.
Email is good because I don't want to impose a IM or phone call interrupting somebody when they're thinking when it could be answered later.
snookivir!
Try this: Friedrich Nietzsche is a big dead idiot.
about as well as old flu vaccinations do to protect against new strains of flu in the new year: not too well.
"So basically you're saying "we know so little therefore let's keep knowledge secret". Makes sense."
Yes. When we may know enough to cause Extinction Level Event, but don't know enough to stop said event fast enough, keeping knowledge secret is a very very very very very very very good idea.
When it comes to potentially lethal global pandemics, how about asking biologists who work on potentially lethal global pandemics?
Since the consequence is really bad, it's worth keeping it tight unless every single one of them says it's OK. Obviously some of them are already pretty concerned, hence the appearance on Slahsdot.
"If a good countermeasure is factually impossible (i.e. there's a law of nature denying it), keeping things secret only delay the inevitable. I'd rather struggle against inevitable death fully knowing this very fact (and fail), than live blissfully ignorant."
Really? Homo sapiens survived a few tens of thousands of years.
I think dying, along with everybody I know, of a weaponized disease because somebody has some theoretical crap about "not wanting to delay the inevitable" really sucks donkey dick. I'm not suicidal, and I'd like very very much to delay as long as possible the not-necessarily-inevitiable-if-we-STFU-about-it.
"As for the black swan bad guy argument, I just point out that the good guys are just as many as the bad guys, and as competent, if not better (and I assume much better). The bad guys can walk the earth unhindered only if their arsenal are not understood by the good guys."
Come back to reality and stop fluffy theoretical arguments. Sure there will be people trying to stop it but it is quite possible a vaccine is much harder than the weapon and takes far longer, regardless of how many good guys work on the vaccine vs bad guys with the weapon. And the good guys could all end up dead first. Surely you've seen the movies where the conference of microbiologists gets infected by the killer germ.
Roads are bidirectional.
Barbarians conquered Rome because they had numerical and qualitative military and resource superiority and they persisted for over a century, as the Romans had done to its enemies for the previous 7 centuries.
This virus crap is like finding some 'hack' where by the action of 5 or 10 clever people, the citizens of the Roman Empire could be exterminated in a year. Without providing 700 years of economic gains previously.
"On the other hand, if the study becomes available for the scientific community, it could allow researchers to ”be prepared” for a potential H5N1 pandemic. Since Fouchier’s study suggests that the risk for this to occur is greater than previously thought. Some researchers believe that banning the paper will leave mankind helpless if the virus naturally mutates and becomes contagious."
How about plan C:
*) keep this thing secret with lethal force (not an exaggeration)
*) work on an exceptionally effective vaccine
*) repeat until vaccine is successful
*) vaccinate the planet
*) release some information and say how we protected you from what could have been a disaster
"I haven't been vaccinated in 10 years. In that time span, I never got sick from anything other than a hangover."
In those 10 years, how many times have you been exposed to a weaponized aerosolised virus?
Was that experiment a massive release of airborne infectious disease which has a history of causing pandemics which was then further modified to be
far more lethal and quickly transmissible?
Oh, no it was actually rather contained.
"Terrorists generally want to target specific sub-populations of the human species, whether that sub-population be defined by nationality, ethnicity, wealth etc."
yes, their massive car bombs are exceptionally precise.
Really, just like HIV has been made harmless. Just took two or three labs a few weeks to have an effective vaccine.
Wait, it didn't happen that way. Because HIV hacks into your immune system.
And other viruses if sufficiently malevolent can do the same, explaining how to do this in detail is exceptionally dangerous.
Your biology is not like a computer. You and the laws of biochemistry are not infinitely reprogrammable.
HIV still kills, but slowly and is not transmissible easily. Suppose you get a combination viruswhich suppresses your immune response, is transmitted by air, and is lethal? You will be dead.
No such a thing has not occurred in evolutionary history because, without non-random malevolent selection, they do not thrive by doing that.
"You have to assume that the other side (be it an enemy nation, a terrorist, a tax collector, or whatever) can obtain the information if they wanted it. It's stupid to assume they can't know (they're capable of spying)."
This is false. Sufficiently strong security measures mean that only the most determined adversary can obtain the information if they wanted. In practice this means that the information will be available to intelligence agencies of the most advanced nation-states and nobody else (for example, who has detailed thermonuclear weapons design knowledge? there is apparently one 1960's era secret not at all yet publicly revealed.). These people have institutional and practical barriers to instigating mass genocide.
However, there are many smaller groups with insufficient capability to penetrate a well-protected technical secret (e.g. TS/SCI) but more than enough capability to do some apparently reasonably simple molecular biology.
This is a historically unique situation.
"Banning publication doesn't even remotely make sense. If he's got super killer virus, publication informs the public and other guys can use the information to develop a countermeasure. By keeping the knowledge secret you're just granting even more leverage to potential abusers of the knowledge."
Why is that?
What if there isn't any good countermeasure? What if the information is really good for making continual polymorphic variations to evade vaccines?
"By keeping the knowledge secret you're just granting even more leverage to potential abusers of the knowledge."
How does that work? The chance that a Dutch researcher is going to kill people with his privately-held is minuscule. The chance that among 7 billion people there somebody who reads this and wants to kill 6 billion people and can find sufficient people to execute it is 1.
I think people haven't really thought this through. The potential danger is extreme, and not Y2K-hype-level extreme but close to global thermonuclear war extreme. There's no 'wipe drive and reinstall' option to cure genocide.
This is false. It is not like a computer patch.
The fix may be a vaccine against one particular instantiation---and deploying vaccines to 7 billion people for a virus which doesn't exist naturally is a big and expensive problem. There's no such thing as auto-update. This is real and expensive and will take away resources from other things which could also improve people's help. Any failures mean people, like your family, will die.
The real danger is that the techniques and insight involved could be used to make a wide variety of weaponizable viruses, in which case one might face a wave of dangerous viruses each of which is not covered by the previous's virusweapon's vaccine. These waves would sweep faster than vaccines could be isolated and produced (which for influenza is about 9 months to a year---for this you have to count proven manufacturing not some future hope of how something might work). How fast can Dr Evil produce new sequences? A bunch faster.
If the description of the research is accurate, this is like publishing a paper on how to manufacture, and mass-produce thermonuclear weaponry with the tech available in a typical university lab, without using any expensive fissile nuclear materials or isotopic separation. What a wonderful world.
Yes, actually, there's been some pretty fine plans implemented.
hey flower chicka, i'd love to incent your totally awesome consultations with my stakeholder.
That's also a bad example, nothing with Einstein was necessary. You can derive the equations of motion in the different frames perfectly well with Newton's mechanics (Einsteinian corrections are tiny), and yes the description really is simpler in some frames than others.
It was really Kepler's refinements which astronomers bought into, because of its experimental predictability; and then Newton explained Kepler's results from first principles, unifying gravitation on the ground and in the sky, which was the real achievement. And yes, the intellectual clarity of the Copernican theory helped get us there.
"We can measure light as both a wave and a particle. But they are both physical? So is the particle a dot which waves? Or springs back to a dot and out again to a wave?"
The problem is more complicated than that, but it has been solved completely satisfactorily now with the proper application of quantum mechanics to electromagnetic fields, known as quantum optics, and verified experimentally.
Very toughly, light is a quantum mechanical superposition of the electromagnetic modes. A 'wave function of functions', and the 'particles' are the elementary excitations of the modes, meaning there is an operator which can count them and give an integer.
Note that photons, unlike normal matter we otherwise come in contact with (protons + electrons + neutrons) does not have a conservation law. In 99.999% of our interactions, protons/electrons/neutrons are not destroyed or created, but with photons that happens really easily. So the practical experience is very different, though some fundamental properties are similar.
I think it's great.
I think the wave function is a physically real object(*), and the randomness is not intrinsic or magically special but comes from thermodynamics and chaos, and, yes, Einstein was right: Copenhagen is a nonsensical load of bollocks.
More specifically that dice are not actually random in an ineffable sense, but their practical use has a sufficiently high Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy rate (roughly average amount of chaos generated per time) that they're random enough. In other words, quantum mechanics is regular physics, not mystical Copenhagen mumbo jumbo. Copenhagen works for computation, but that's because it's a very useful approximation for experimentally relevant circumstances, just like Fermi's "Golden Rules". Einstein was right, at least about the problem. His proposed solutions weren't, but the experimental evidence wasn't available until after he died and obviously he would have changed his mind given new results, because he was a physicist foremost and not a mystical philosopher.
Entanglement and uncertainty principle are not horse shit, because the central mystery of QM, that everything is operating in a Hilbert space still remains.
(*) To me, physically real means "acts as a source term in gravitation". This pretty clearly distinguishes "electrons/protons/photons" from "set of all sets of sets" crap and is as useful as any other description I know. Of course we don't have quantum gravity working yet but when we do it's pretty likely something like the wavefunction will be in there.
You don't mind if it's a $10 propane tank, but you're not likely to exchange a new, working battery worth $5000 for a random one you find at a gas station.
Having actually attended an ivy league university......www.yalesluts.xxx and the like is, much to many undergrad's chagrin, deceptive advertising.
If there are really 44 bits of entropy then it should be OK. XKCD looks at 4 words of 11 bits---2048 possibilities if uniformly distributed, given humans, that's probably not unreasonable.
We have to let the computer choose the password, and the human agree to memorize it. And it MUST be 4 words, not one, or three.
Five is *right* *out*.
A Real Capitalist system?
sounds just like the True Communist system that the deluded advocates seemed to insist was "Coming Real Soon Now, so ignore the bad Commies with guns and reindoctrination camps and in any case aren't they better than what was there before?"
Hint: Ayn Rand 'novels' have the same structure as Stalinist propaganda.