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Submission + - Trump officials struggled to reinstate nuclear weapons staff after firing hundre (cnn.com)

directvox writes: Some of the initially fired employees included NNSA staff who work at facilities where nuclear weapons are built, oversee contractors who build nuclear weapons and who are responsible for inspecting those weapons.

Many of the employees affected hold a âoeQâ security clearance within the Energy Department, meaning they have access to nuclear weapons design and systems.

Comment Hmmm. (Score 2) 67

We could test whether the argument presented makes sense, but only if the quantum uncertainty principle is actually what I was taught (teachers aren't necessarily reliable).

What I was taught was that uncertainty in position times uncertainty in velocity cannot ever fall below Planck's constant.

If quantum particles can move freely in spacetime, then uncertainty in position is uncertainty in position in spacetime, not merely uncertainty in space. Which means the limits on precision in space alone can't ever be as tight as that. It also means, though, that you should be able to predict how this would impact interference pattern experiments, and then see if the prediction matches observation.

Comment Re:So the human brain doesn't finish developing (Score 1) 71

Artificial wombs seem more sensible, c-sections can cause scarring and present risks for any future pregnancy. C-sections also limit exposure of the skin to the mother's microbiome, although the effects of that aren't clear to me.

With artificial wombs, there's obviously no scarring and you can control all the parameters as you like.

There's also evidence that, during the last trimester, the foetus' brain is influenced by sounds outside the womb and that this impacts the sounds the person can generate later in life. This would be enormously useful.

Although there's a fair bit of doubt about modern human brains shrinking during the Neolithic, if they did, it would almost certainly have been because survival rates were higher. Again, with an artificial womb, this limit wouldn't apply. So, if such shrinkage happened, it could be reversed.

So, artificial wombs would seem to be the logical way for IVF to go.

Comment Re:It's just a tax (Score 4, Interesting) 129

Agreed. It would be better to reduce the number of taxes and increase those left to cover the actual costs of British services. You then cut the costs of monitoring and collecting.

However, if this was done, the BBC Charter would need protecting in law to prevent what the Tories did, which was to renege on the charter and redo it to benefit them. The charter should not be for the government to rewrite at will, it should be a contract that neither side can legally violate or ignore.

Comment Interesting. (Score 1) 87

Whilst I do prefer precise labelling, I can understand functional labelling and treatment-based classification.

If you think about it in geographical terms, you wouldn't (usually) identify a country as a subunit of the continent it is on, but may well identify a city by its State or country, even when it's not ambiguous, although not always. So there's a history of using a range of labelling techniques, humans aren't consistent.

Of course, we also differentiate between benign tumours and aggressive tumours, so there's no real reason why you can't have a third class. Maybe call them COBOL tumours - they're not dangerous to keep but you might want to get rid of them at some point.

However, we live in an age of gene therapy and immunotherapy. Aggressive treatments are not necessarily where the future lies. If, in ten year's time, the biopsy for identifying the prostate cancer results in you being given some jabs three weeks later that clears the whole thing up, there's no need to fret about people being stupid right now. It's not a problem that'll remain with us for any meaningful length of time.

Comment ADHD (Score 1) 70

I've been provisionally diagnosed with ADHD. It's provisional because although I have severe symptoms and they massively impact work and private life, the experts don't consider it severe enough and repeatedly reject referrals.

It's unclear if a diagnosis would help, there's a world shortage of ADHD medication and there's far too little research on what is clearly (to anyone who bothers to look) a range of unrelated conditions that share the ADHD label and a bunch of the outward symptoms.

Psychiatric medication is not prescribed on any sane or rational basis, they hand it out and see if things improve or your brain/body starts to die. Been through this with the bipolar.

Nobody actually looks to see what is actually going wrong or where, with the result that there's no cumulative understanding of what to use or when, with the result that doctors don't want to look to see what's going on.

I've done all I can on that front, I've personally paid for whole genome sequencing and authorised the lab to provide that data to scientists, but I can't fight this level of stupidity singlehanded. Doctors are just going to have to learn on their own that you treat mechanisms, not symptoms, and therefore must know what mechanisms apply before deciding on treatment.

Comment I disagree with Europol (Score 1) 80

Anonymity IS a fundamental right and it has to be that way. The nature of encryption is such that you cannot weaken it without giving rogue nations and criminals total unfettered access to the entire banking system, commerce, healthcare, and critical infastructure such as energy supplies and the water supply.

That's just how it us, and there's no way to avoid it. Your choice us a simple one - either allow people to be anonymous, or provide North Korean hacker groups like Lazarus unrestricted control over everything.

You cannot make encryption that can only be broken by good guys. As soon as a tech company can break the encryption, the bad actors will be able to do the same. And when that can amount to hundreds of billions of US dollars or the capacity to hold a nation to ransom, damn right the bad actors will find out how - and fast.

But it's worse. There is a reason that those in the military communicate classified data using secure telephony units, where there is a prohibition on chitchat. Any chat beforehand provides attackers with information that weakens the security. In other words, context weakens security.

You want as little context as you possibly can, preferably none. And that's why you need not just security but anonymity as well. You must prevent bad actors from causing harm.

Now we get to the second half of the equation - do they need the messages at all? Well, it's cheaper than having field agents, but field agents can intercept all lines of communication AND provide useful context.

So, the answer is "no they don't, and using just wiretaps gives vastly poorer intelligence, but it looks better to the accounts who don't have to worry about the consequences of botching things".

Comment Intriguing. (Score 2) 88

Our models would allow for the possibility that Dark Matter arose after the Big Bang, possibly a long time after, and that Dark Energy arose long after the CMBR.

  Physicists have considered these as possible explanations for anomalies in the distribution of Dark Matter, and the existence of the Hubble Crisis.

If Dark Energy appears late, then you would indeed have two different values for the Hubble Constant. And our models of Dark Energy certainly allow that to be a possible explanation.

You'd have to explain the physics behind it appearing, and that may well end up an impossible hypothesis, but, for now, it would allow the universe to have different expansion epochs, played under different rules.

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