I envy your overly-simplistic view on the world. The reality is that information relating to nuclear weapons has complicated and often-undefined and arbitrary secrecy policies behind it. Look at, for instance, the United States vs. The Progressive case. That was the first time that anyone had released specific information about thermonuclear weapons to the public. Government lawyers tried to censor it but the court ruled against them and allowed the magazine to publish. In a private session (the details of which aren't public), the lawyers on both sides actually shared a huge amount of highly classified information relating to bomb design. It was directly due to the results of this session that the court decided that what The Progressive was publishing was not damaging to US security, since no one seriously pursuing nuclear weapons would find anything new in the article that they didn't already know.

By the way, the US government still does not formally acknowledge the existence of the Teller-Ulam design, even though everyone knows about it at this point. Yet, many details of the Teller-Ulam design *have* been made public (for instance, the existence of a radiation channel, something that only makes sense in that design). It's a contradictory situation.

And to counter the Fed's stupidity, here is a link to a book that basically contains all the physics you need to know to get started on building your very own hydrogen bomb (written by a former Soviet hydrogen bomb designer, no less - I have no idea how the Soviets let him publish this stuff): http://books.google.co.nz/book...

(And if you're not sure about my claim, just ask, I'll gladly explain.)

Which is bullshit, of course. If you're talking about 10 or 20 years in the future, maybe, but are we to believe that 100 years down the road (or 1000), we still won't have AI? And if that's not what the article meant, then please clarify what is meant by 'future', because for me 'the future' includes all time after the present.

From that link:

> A robot combines four things:
        computer hardware
        control software
        sensor array
        effector array

So... how does this invalidate HalAtWork's point? Garage door openers, washing machines, and plenty of other stuff have all four of these things.

s/on/in

From an interview on July 2005 about the housing bubble:

        INTERVIEWER: Tell me, what is the worst-case scenario? Sir, we have so many economists coming on our air and saying, "Oh, this is a bubble, and it's going to burst, and this is going to be a real issue for the economy." Some say it could even cause a recession at some point. What is the worst-case scenario, if in fact we were to see prices come down substantially across the country?

        BERNANKE: Well, I guess I don't buy your premise. It's a pretty unlikely possibility. We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize: might slow consumption spending a bit. I don't think it's going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.

You're not only missing the point, you're also falling for the line that companies like facebook want you to fall for. There's no way to say this nicely and you'll probably hate me and disagree with me, but I have to tell you anyway.

No, no, no, you are paranoid and delusional to think that they will keep you from disabling secure boot. Microsoft only cares about your security and safety, and you're a conspiracy theorist if you think otherwise.

On that note: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/w...

This is extremely and wildly not true. The most basic part of doing literature review is following original sources and everyone I know does this. You have to, because reviewers pick this stuff up. Even when I couldn't find a pdf or physical copy of an original source, I'd still cite it. Also, you're fooling yourself if you think that just because something was done 30 years ago, there's no point in citing more recent sources. A lot of more recent work is nothing more than just repeating old ideas but with slight modifications that nevertheless reveal new insights. Finally, when writing a paper, there is no need to cite everything that has been done right back to ancient Greece. The audience of a scientific paper is assumed to be the scientific community which is already familiar with the body of work.

> and the history of humanity seems to suggest that effective weapons, once developed, will eventually be used.

Yes and fact is, a lot of international policy is currently based around the assumption that nukes are no deterrent to direct confrontation. The US/Israel reaction to N Korea and Iran's nuclear program, for instance. Or the very real threat of nuclear terrorism via stolen warheads. MAD isn't a principle that applies here.

Nuclear weapons are more relevant than ever and even though Russia may not want to use them, there are a lot of people who do.

We've had nukes for about 70 years, and over half of this time period was spent with world leader's fingers trembling nervously over the launch buttons. The past 30 years have seemed relatively peaceful but is it because of nukes or general worldwide economic progress? Supposing a causal relationship between nukes and peace seems bordering on magical thinking.

They only cause hearing damage at high volume levels. A lot of earbuds have good bass reproduction. It's true, though, that they aren't sanitary and that they can irritate the ear and cause earwax buildup/blockage (the reason I don't use them).

It's important to define a common vocabulary in science, because the less ambiguity you have in communicating your intent, the better.

If you think this is just something that's done in astronomy, you're incredibly wrong. Mathematicians and physicists and all other types of scientists put in a lot of effort in naming and standardization. It's important.

I agree that it's a *bit* rare to change terms that are already in wide use. But in this case they had to. Their hand was forced because of all the new KBOs that were found.

I'm just going to concentrate on your last point as all the rest have been taken care of by Your.Master.

> This sounds a bit lame as justifications go... lose efficiency? Since when are scientists in the business of conserving syllables? In astronomy especially they seem to be preoccupied with naming things after _all_ the principals who discovered them.

It's not just scientists, it's human beings. Language evolves towards better efficiency. That's why the word for 'house' isn't supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and you use the word 'me' to refer to yourself, not 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis' (that's an actual word).

There is such a tight relationship between how often a word is used and how long it is, that you can actually use that as a metric for discriminating natural and non-natural languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...

Even in science, over time people tend to abbreviate and contract words. In scientific writing, you don't write "The force is 11 Newtons", you write "The force is 11 N", or just "f = 11 N" and most other scientists know what you mean even if you don't explain those symbols.