I disagree.

Wikileaks was effectively stopped when all credit card companies refused service. Defense distributed lost their payment processor ("Stripe").

The TOS for many online resellers restrict what you can and cannot sell - eBay won't let you sell booze or their empty, collectible containers, animals, or event tickets. (Why can't I resell my event ticket if I decide I'm not going to use it?) Amazon, even Craigslist have similar restrictions. You can't sell fart apps on the apple store.

This will also put a crimp in the way Corporate Law Enforcement operates. Instead of spending time tracking down the distributor of pirated works, they'll have to fall back to investigating murders, thefts, and assaults.

And then there's the economic upheaval which will happen when previously banned markets become easily accessible. Drugs come to mind, but this will also have an effect on easily-copied data streams such as games, movies, and books. Knowing that your movie will be immediately copied and that you will get no revenue *after* it's made, entertainment might have to switch to a kickstarter-style model. Stephen king proposes a new book, gets $100,000 in seed money, writes it and sets it free on the internet. That sort of thing.

These are just the first few things that come to mind. Some are speculative, but others are happening right now.

I'm pretty sure you're under-estimating the effect that secure untraceable commerce would have on the world.

I had a related discussion with some friends recently about what they would/wouldn't work on in their job.

Einstein and others famously regretted developing the atomic bomb.

At the time, it was thought that nuclear chain reactions were impossible because the neutrons emitted by a fissile nucleus were too fast to interact with neighboring atoms. Leó Szilárd discovered that graphite would act as a neutron moderator, slowing them down so that they could interact. Each decaying nucleus releases two(*) neutrons, each neutron causes two other nuclei to decay, and so on. Two becomes four, becomes eight, in an exponential manner.

Here's the thing. At the time, conventional wisdom felt that chain reactions were impossible; and entrenched ideas in science are hard to pry loose. If Szilárd had chosen not to publish, it would have delayed nuclear fission research for decades - possibly indefinitely.

Consider the ramifications of having a few decades of technological development before attempting to build nuclear reactors, of social development before ICBMs and Mutually Assured Destruction, and so on. We've come a long way since then - we're much closer to planetary cooperation. The conflicts of the early 20th century seem almost tribal in retrospect.

Here's the essential question: Should Szilárd have published? Knowing that his research was the keystone for nuclear weapons, should he have just kept quiet about it?

The tools make no political judgments, but unenlightened bureaucrats do. And right now there's a lot of abuse by the people in power, the people we should be able to trust with our welfare. One only has to look at elections to see how psychological research is being used - en mass - on the population for political ideology.

Would it not be better to put this research off a couple of decades so that other, more directly beneficial technologies can come first? An environment of secure communications, anonymous surfing, safe and untraceable whistle-blowing seems to be on the horizon.

We have the hindsight to see the results of Szilárd's choice. Should we choose differently?

(*) Average 2.5 neutrons per nucleus

To misquote Ash: Republican? Democrat? I'm the one with the vote!

People believe the promises, so the election becomes a competition to see who can promise the best.

Is your life any better for having these party affiliations? Since the last election, has the government made the country better or worse? Will your kids have a harder or easier time when they go out into the world? Will you retire in ease or hardship?

Since the last election, do you have more freedoms or less?

Don't buy into the promises, they mean nothing. Vote against the people in office. That's the way to promote change, that's the way to force people to action.

Vote out the incumbents.

To misquote Ash: Republican? Democrat? I'm the one with the vote!

None of what you said matters - not of the republican words, not democratic promises, not adverts or sound-bites.

What matters is what they've *done* while in office. It's the only metric that matters.

Is your life better since the last election? Will your kids be better off or worse off when they leave the nest to go out on their own? Is the government giving you more freedoms or less?

You shouldn't care which party that is. Vote for change, not for words.

When they realize that they have to actually *do* something during their term in order to get re-elected, then we'll start to see some changes.

Regressive, reschmessive. Vote out the crappy incumbents.

There's no realistic way to determine *what* a candidate will do once they're in office. The words don't matter, what they promise doesn't matter, fluffy nice adverts don't matter. The only metric we have that's in any way useful is what they've done *since being elected*.

Ask the meaningful questions: has your life improved over the last few years? Have you're kids gained or lost opportunities over the last few years? Has the standard of living risen over the last few years?

Once they realize that they have to actually *do* something during their term in order to get reelected, then we'll start seeing change.

Kick out the incumbents. Unless you can point to an *action* that they did that helps the lives of Americans, kick 'em out.

I'm trying to become a rationalist, so here's (my take on) the fallacy.

Police learn that "all drug labs use chemicals", so they think "all chemicals are intent to make drugs". If they see your home laboratory, you'll be arrested and have all your chemicals confiscated - even if you don't have the complete drug-making kit. I know of one home lab where this is exactly what happened. Frequently, having a scale is considered sufficient evidence of drug dealing.

I've read several news reports of people being arrested for having "bomb making materials" where the kit was incomplete - in one case a box of [glass] canning jars in the back of a vehicle along with a bag of fertilizer. No fuel oil (for ANFO), nothing that could be a fuse, no apparent intent, and no apparent target. A guy's life got completely fucked up for no apparent reason.

Another example: explosives are delivered by rocket, so rockets will be used to deliver explosives. We have to ban model rocketry!

Sexual harassment is done by ribald speech, therefore all ribald speech is sexual harassment. (Even if there's no threat?)

Other examples too numerous to mention.

This is formally the Fallacy of the Reversed Conditional, and it's used in lots and lots of news articles to stoke fear and promote the writer's agenda.

It's a problem in Bayesian probability. Consider whether the following reversals are valid or invalid:

Probability that someone carries a purse, given that they're a woman (high or low), probability that someone is a woman, given that they're carrying a purse (high or low)? Is reversing this conditional valid?

Probability that John is dead, given that he was executed (high or low), probability that John was executed, given that he is dead (high or low)? Is reversing the conditional valid?

Two examples of reversed the conditionals, but only one is valid when reversed.

We need to sort through the bias and clever manipulation of innuendo, and consider the arguments on their merits. Owning any of the cited tech is not evidence of bomb-making, and invasive tracking laws will not help stop nuclear proliferation.

The fallacy is used for a reason: they want to impose invasive tracking for other reasons, using your emotions against you.

Don't be fooled.

It would appear that trolling works on you...

I was *at* the con when this went down, was in the rotunda where the marshal/police were, and listened in on all the conversations. The fire marshal is completely to blame for this, he's an idiot.

To reduce the number of people, the fire marshal ordered anyone leaving the con could not reenter for any reason, and decided that going to the ground floor constituted leaving the con... despite having con functions on the ground floor.

Volunteers and con workers who went to the ground floor to connect with the main desk couldn't get back in, vendors who went to their cars couldn't get back to their stalls, program participants (celebrities with scheduled appearances) couldn't make their appointments, people who had paid $$$ for a photo-op with the celebs couldn't make their appointments, and so on.

I innocently went down the escalator to check out the [ground floor] kids area and was marooned. No jacket, no cell phone, and no car keys to get into my vehicle and it was 'friggin cold outside. I saw one woman who couldn't get back in to her special-needs child, I saw one man who came down for wheelchair and couldn't bring it back up.

A better solution would have been to stop letting new people in, while letting the steady stream of outgoers reduce the number. There was no fire, no emergency, no need to be a complete prick to people who were already at the con.

This was the fire marshal being ignorant and inflexible. He's an idiot.

Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way [...]

What the bloody fuck? Scientists failed us?

Not short-sighted politicians, not lobbyists for climate-raping corporations, not greedy corporate types.

No, of course the Scientists failed us. They didn't warn us strongly enough!!!

Okay, breathe.

Getting over the initial outrage, note that to have an actual effect on modern day policies, Oreskes could have written that the politicians were to blame. If modern-day people are shown that they will be remembered in infamy, it might just cause them to change. It happens with presidents all the time - doing something to be remembered by, leaving a positive mark for future historians, &c.

I've been working on strong AI for the past 7 years. Here's my take on the whole issue:

Military person: We want your software/techniques for an autonomous war machine.

Me: Uh... that's a really, really bad idea. You'll make mistakes, and then...

Military person: We know what we're doing, son.

Government - any government - won't see the problems until it's too late. To take obvious examples from history, government never thought that land mines would pose any sort of problem for future generations, and never thought that randomly bombing terrorist organizations would increase their number.

Having just finished "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", there's a concept in that book "never reveal the secrets of power to someone who's not intelligent enough to figure them out for themselves", as applied to - for example - the atomic bomb. Einstein and others regretted ever unleashing that level of destructive power on humanity, not for any reason other than it would be misused by short-sighted people. It held promise for a utopian easing of the worlds troubles, while at the same time made it easy to obliterate a city on a whim.

For example Leó Szilárd (IIRC - I may be remembering the wrong name) discovered that graphite can be used as a neutron moderator thus making chain reactions possible. Had he not published his results, the atomic bomb might have been delayed by decades - possibly indefinitely.

I've discovered a few things that might be "results" in strong AI. I dunno if I want to publish, though(*) - the idea of a house-cleaning drone seems pleasant enough, but reading about a sentient tank going berserk in Afghanistan and wiping out a small village puts me to pause.

"No one's to blame, it was a software glitch. We've patched and fixed all the other units."

(*) Moral advice on this issue would be appreciated.

Huh. I hadn't thought of that. A quick google search shows that solar cells can be used as radiation detectors, and they generally have large capture areas. I'll have to try this out.

This looks like a good background document for detecting radiation using semiconductors.

This is the type of amplifier you need as a 1st stage in your detector, should you want to build your own. (Google "Charge Amplifier" for more info.)

The radiation comes in as quick pulses (3 us or so in my circuits), so normal incident light shouldn't interfere with the detection. You could perhaps get both power and detection from the same cell.

I've been interested in detecting not only the radiation, but the direction it came from. A 3-d array of detectors with an incidence/correlation circuit can give a general idea of the direction of the source, relative to the detector. I haven't done this yet due to the complexity and expense of the detectors, but solar cells being cheap and easily available I might just try this out. Hmmm...

Thanks for the suggestion.

I've been building geiger counters as a hobby for the past couple of years. I was consulting with some people in Japan right after Fukishima helping to build reliable detectors.

Geiger Muller tubes require a specific "plateau" of voltage to get consistent results. Too low and you're not picking up much radiation, too high and you get spurious results and can burn out the tube. The correct voltage varies with individual tubes.

This isn't normally a problem, except that there's a glut of surplus Russian geiger tubes on the market right now with unknown provenance and unknown parameters. Unless you calibrate each tube to find the plateau voltage, and unless you calibrate the resulting counter with a known source, the data you get will have no predictive value.

It's straightforward for a hobbyist to put together a project using one of these tubes and get it to click in the presence of radiation, and this makes a fine project for electronics learning, but you have to take further steps to get a reliable instrument. No one ever does this. The circuits I've seen have an unregulated high-voltage proportional to the battery voltage - it gets lower over time as the battery runs down. The voltage is chosen from the tube spec sheet, instead of determining the correct voltage for the tube. Circuits have design flaws such as using zener diodes for regulation, but not allowing enough current through the diode for proper function. And so on.

I've seen lots of these hobbyist projects in the past few years, especially since Fukishima. They're fine projects and well-intentioned, but generally not of any practical use.

Virtually any semiconductor will detect radiation. What you want is a semiconductor with a large capture aperture(*), which is the area through which the radiation passes. A 2n2222 transistor will detect radiation quite well, but it's capture area is tiny and won't see much of the radiation (saw the top off of a metal-can version and use a charge amplifier).

Power transistors such as the 2n3055 have large silicon dies and therefore larger apertures - as much as a square centimeter - but this is also quite small for capture.

The modern equivalent is to use a big diode such as a PIN diode. These can be quite large, but also expensive for the hobbyist.

A GM tube has a capture area which is the cross sectional area of the tube. These can be made quite large; and as a result can be made quite sensitive to the amount of radiation flux in the area. Hobbyists can also make their own tubes with enormous capture areas - it's not very difficult.

Large diodes are available for detecting radiation, but a GM tube is simple and can be easily made with a very large capture aperture. Also, GM tube their capture efficiency (the percent of radiation that gets in which is is actually detected) can be higher than the diode solution.

(*) There's capture aperture and detection efficiency. GM tubes have an efficiency of about 10%, meaning that only 10% of the radiation that gets into the tube is detected. Diodes have similar efficiencies, depending on the photon energy and thickness of the silicon die.

That sounds suspiciously like an ad-hominem argument. "Most average" Ob/Gyn? What does that even mean, other than to convey dark undertones?

Shouldn't we be debating the things he says? Shouldn't we be considering the merits of his argument, rather than his background?

Obama's Ebola czar (Ron Klain) is a lawyer and former chief-of-staff. Do you think *he's* qualified to tell us what we're doing wrong?

What the heck are you getting at? What's your purpose in posting this? Is there some way in which you gain by posting such drivel?

You're right about being modded down - your post does nothing to inform the discussion.

With this and the new ebola infections coming out, it looks like we're on the verge of solving both the energy crisis and overpopulation

I never thought I'd see so much progress in my lifetime. We live in the future!(*)

(*) ...of a Stephen King novel, apparently.

Frieden and other officials say such a move would be counterproductive, citing lessons learned from the SARS outbreak a decade ago. "The SARS outbreak cost the world more than $40 billion, but it wasn't to control the outbreak," says Frieden. "Those were costs from unnecessary and ineffective travel restrictions and trade changes that could have been avoided."

Unnecessary and ineffective travel restrictions? Have these guys been to an airport recently?

The government doesn't give squat about unnecessary and ineffective policies. It will be decades before we can get back to reasonable airport security. A waste and burden on all Americans, helping to keep the economy down (viz. international tourism) with no end in sight.

If the government believes that people will feel safer with more restrictions, then that's what will happen. Hell, even if that weren't the case the government will still do it because they can say that it's to keep people safer.

This will just be another excuse for draconian policies. Trading more freedoms for more safety, because "safety at any cost" lets them reform the nation.