Means that they are not physically connected to the other systems, that there should be no possible way to reach the avionics from e.g. the in-flight entertainment system.
1,291 karma · joined February 12, 2012
The defense sector is mostly about providing welfare to the already rich and privileged.
I'm sure there is a sizable number of "amateur" mathematicians who work on problems in their free time, but it is hard to know what to work on and where to look.
> In this case, though, I’ll indulge just a little because, although a newcomer to the country, I am an old-comer to the culture: my mother-in-law, still with us at ninety-five, is as Icelandic as could be and, although Canadian Icelanders are not exactly the same as the homespun kind, they are still almost indistinguishable from the natives.
So many non-essential dependent clauses. Every other sentence is like this: fifty sentences and over one hundred commas. Who thinks this is good style?
Tumblr, as an example, is not a place where you can admit moderate views about feminism or identity politics without getting shouted down. This results in moderates self-censoring and refusing to talk about their views publicly online, resulting in a hateful echo chamber completely lacking in subtlety.
The media we use influence the way we think, the way we act, the political narrative of our times, etc. by placing limits and incentives on the messages we convey through those media. As an easy example, consider Twitter: you cannot have a coherent and intellectually involved conversation on Twitter. If Twitter were our only method, or main method, of communication, that property would drastically shape public discourse.
As technologists, we are developing the communications media of the future; it is imperative that we take on this task responsibly by first reflecting on the design and effects of media from the past.
Some people are Platonists and think that mathematics exists as a sort of idealized mental realm (similar to Plato's theory of forms, but more reasonable in this context). If this is the case, we would say that mathematics is mind-independent and trans-universal; mathematical truths are true regardless of whether we exist to observe them, and they are true in all possible worlds.
Others think mathematics is a linguistic "game" played by man, that it is mind-dependent and completely of our creation. Still others think mathematics is a set of derivations within a "formal system" (or formal language); this is sort of a middle ground, as it implies that mathematics is a construct of man but that it has a weaker mind-independence/trans-universal property, namely that any entity in any universe examining the same formal system comes to the same conclusions.
But as I said, how you feel about this question has no effect on the real-world practice of mathematics. Most mathematicians you ask will have some opinion on the matter, but it's not like you can say "I'm a Formalist so I don't believe in that theorem." The human process of doing mathematics and the validity of theorems with respect to their assumptions has no relation to the questions of the ontological or metaphysical status of mathematics as a whole.
Take military drones, for instance. People are not concerned about drones because they can be used to kill each other; we have been killing each other for millennia. What makes drones concerning is the relative ease and safety with which they allow us to kill each other. We no longer have to risk the lives of our sons and daughters to wage war in far-off lands; we can do the same from the comfort and safety of a bunker.
What does this mean? We are risking less when we wage war. Waging war is easier. This makes us much more likely to be warlike. What we previously may not have seen as a worthy cause for risking the lives of our troops may yet be seen as a worthy cause for risking our money, in the form of UAVs, robotics, ammunition, etc. On the side of the attacker, war becomes more about spending money than risking lives. That is a big difference.
Moreover, these changes have consequences for the people war is waged against as well as innocent bystanders. An occupying soldier is less likely to target and execute a civilian than a soldier piloting a drone from far away. Innocents are much easier to mistake for insurgents on a computer screen.
The psychic distance between two people is far larger when they are separated by digital rather than physical space, meaning less empathy is involved. A reduction in empathy makes it easier to risk the lives of the people you intend to ignore or protect. This is the same reason people are so mean to each other on the Internet.
I believe the core CPI figures leave out food and energy, since their prices are sometimes more volatile. So, the CPI does include healthcare and education, but I suppose those price increases must be outweighed by price decreases in other sectors.
[edit] In addition, there are "weights" for goods in different categories. Ex. in the document I found from 2013[1], the weights add up to 100, with housing-related items having a total weight of ~41.4. Healthcare is 7.5 and education 7.0.
So, the actual CPI numbers are somewhat manufactured. The weights correspond to what the BLS predicts the average family spends, proportionally, on those different goods. If your expenditures don't match those proportions, you will "feel" inflation at a different level in your own purchasing.
If you're not using TrueCrypt for full-disk or full-volume encryption, you'd be better off using basically anything else. There are plenty of cross-platform tools for doing that kind of thing.