I don't know. It stands to reason that the planet we'd pay the most attention to if we were out exploring would be the one with a big ring of clearly artificial space debris. Any spacefaring civilization is extremely likely to understand the benefits of satellite technology, even if they may have moved beyond it.
More importantly, in space, we can easily inspect things without touching them - Gravity Probe B for example, isn't actually orbiting the Earth. The gyroscopic sphere inside it is orbiting Earth, and the rest of the space craft is maintaining position away from the surface of the gyroscope. You could zip on up to this thing and do a very thorough analysis without touching it.
RightSaidFred chose his words carelessly. You are all correct but talking about different things.
Yes, there is "communication" in the sense of "spooky action at a distance". No, you cannot transmit classical information that way.
Except what we do know is that currently you're simply forbidden from transmitting information faster then light this way. There's nothing that would forbid "spooky action at a distance" from transmitting information at or below light speed, provided some means could be found to allow it to do that.
This would still be a huge discovery in a world where electromagnetic spectrum is highly limited and interceptible, and it's why I find these weak measurement experiments so interesting. You could imagine for example, that you have a big collection of spin-entangled electrons in a device, that you push around weakly, and then transmit a synchronization signal at light speed to indicate to a receiver that it's safe to read off the state of their entangled electrons. You wouldn't be able to talk faster then light, but you'd have wireless communications with effectively infinite bandwidth.
The original point of the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment was to highlight an absurdity of quantum mechanics: that if we chained enough causality to a quantum state, the mathematics showed that we ended up with conclusions like a living organism being both alive and dead at the same time (and then as time goes on, both alive and hungry, and dead and decaying, at the same time).
The obvious problem of this becomes more apparent when you consider the proposition that the cat has agency, or could be a physicist instead. If the experiment is collapsed by observation, what is observation, given as if we also locked a physicist in the box with the cat he too would be alive and dead at the same time.
However we already know that this isn't really how modern cryptography works. There would be enormous forewarning in the literature that a practical attack of some sort was coming - these things aren't made out of whole cloth by lone geniuses, they're developed, analysed and slowly implemented over time.
There are some theoretical attacks against AES for example, but nothing practical has been implemented yet, and by the time it is we'll most certainly have moved on to a newer cryptography standard.
You do understand the concept of crumple zones right?
The force of any impact is momentum divided by distance. There's a reason all modern cars switched away from hardwood interiors to the soft vinyl - those few extra millimeters of cushioning when your head hits the dash in an accident saves lives.
Which doesn't invalidate his point: the helmet is designed to provide protection under certain conditions. In most cases, severe head injury is likely to come from whiplash at the end of a crash - i.e. after you've already decelerated significantly from falling/having other parts of your body hit the ground.
The one time I had a helmet save my head while cycling was a relatively minor accident - I fell over essentially in slow motion while going down a hill, but couldn't stop the momentum from slapping my head into the pavement. It probably wouldn't have been particularly bad, but it was a hard enough hit it could've done a fair amount of damage.
Where I live (US), it's certainly less popular. When I was a kid, people, and mostly other kids, would cycle everywhere. Every kid I knew had a bicycle, and it was their primary form of transportation. Now, I rarely see someone cycling, and when I do, it's usually an adult, and usually on a designated bike trail, not on the streets or sidewalks.
That's not just an anecdotal observation on my part either. I no longer see bike racks installed for parking bikes near schools or stores anymore, they used to be common. If you watch any old children's TV shows from the '50s or '60s, you can see how ingrained the bicycle was in the culture (almost as common as smoking!).
Of course, in those days when you wanted to ride your bike, you just jumped on it and off you went. If we'd had to dress up like quarterbacks every time we wanted to run to the store or a friend's house, we probably would have lost our taste for bicycling, too.
When I was a kid we cycled everywhere, and helmets were mandatory. People seemed to ride bikes everywhere, because we all kids and legally allowed to ride on the footpath. The exact day I stopped cycling was at the age this became illegal - 12.
This helmet thing is complete stupidity being perpetrated by people who should know better. What we need is good, separated cycling infrastructure - the sidewalk felt safe. Being on the road has never felt safe.
In my experience in an academic environment the only people who care about LaTeX are the mathematicians and physicists, since they routinely want to write out a ton of math.
Everyone else wants to be able to copy+paste things from ChemDraw and drag drop place images - and unfortunately since you generally pick up your writing implements right as you need them, LyX still has too many ideosyncracies to be a practical alternative.
Still you'd think that with so many stars to choose from, we'd expect to get more then a few vaguely human-like alien species.
I rather prefer the explanation that the radio-age doesn't last long enough - less then 200 years into it and we're already heading out of it. If there's a breakthrough or new physics around the corner, then it might be over completely if you can do things with entangled particles - and as you say, all the leaky intelligible stuff is being replaced with tight-beam radio and encryption.
My forlorn hope is that we'll subspace radio or something, switch on the first receiver and suddenly find thousands of stars broadcasting nearby.
Plenty of people have legitimate reasons to use quite a bit of energy. The mechanics and logistics of enforcing or compensating these people would be enormously burdensome to them, and thus very unfair to a great many people. They also likely would not take into account individual circumstances or limitations.
You don't think a producer, who actually just has an enormous but finite stockpile of helium and is selling it at infinite quantity for whatever price the market wants is going to effect the market?
Because that's what the US government is presently doing, and you the allegedly econonomically savvy tax payer should be outraged about it because they used your tax dollars to buy all that helium and are now pissing it away by not trying to control the market for it to ensure they make a profit. They could easily restrict supply, let the price rise then sell at the falling margin - and then all that tax money would not just be a free subsidy to any idiot who wants to have a balloon that rises to the ceiling.
You do realize the rate of loss to space is actually negligible compared to human extraction and consumption?
That the reason helium is so cheap right now is because we've been storing huge quantities of it for years, and then the US congress suddenly decided to sell it all off at whatever price the market offered?
The whole idea here is that we can land softly from this by regulating it. That we can decree that we'll release helium from the strategic reserve such that the price stays at 20x the current rate, and thus our reserves will last that much longer and give us time to either open up alternate sources (the space mining people seem likely to stumble across a fairly efficient way to get it) or find alternate cooling solutions.
As in, your entire diatribe is completely ignorant bullshit because the reason helium is currently so cheap is that the vast majority of the world supply is owned by the US government which can effectively control the entire market, and has been artificially deflating the price since 2007.
The price has been artificially deflated, since the US stockpiled helium in the National Helium Reserve. The whole thing has been declared too expensive and Congress ordered it sold off in 2007 at any price so of course the price of helium has plummeted and usage shot up like it'll last forever. Of course it won't, and one day we'll be back to collecting it from gas fields and it'll be worth 50x to 100x what it currently is.
This is oddly reassuring, seeing as how, after reading about the shortage of helium (ironically from pondering where exactly it comes from and then reading about the shortages) I've been wondering how safe it would be to fill my remote control airship with hydrogen instead.
The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.
The legitimate users of helium would have no problems going through the necessary actions to prove they have a need to buy it - after all buying an MRI is an enormous expense. But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.
We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.
There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.
PulseAudio is IMO a great idea which has suffered from implementation problems and a bad UI design.
The idea is spectacular since it's so fundamental - applications emit sound, PulseAudio sends it to sound renderers, and these things can be anywhere you want.
The problem at the moment is we lack any fully-feature userspace applications to truly make that happen and seem obviously beneficial, so all we perceive is the downside (implementation problems).
So are you saying that nothing should ever change about the iPhone connector? Once god-awful 30-pin, always god-awful 30-pin? So that nobody ever has to buy new peripherals?
Or are you saying that it's okay if they change it (and force everybody to buy new peripherals) but only if they change it to something "compatible"? Note that micro USB isn't doesn't support the functionality the iPhone needs.
Apple dropped analog video output so all they actually need is to put all the ports next to one another on the bottom of the phone; stereo mini or micro plug, uHDMI, and uUSB. "Docks" can implement as many connectors as necessary for their functionality. Done and done. Instead they have invented a new proprietary connector so that they can make more money.
This.
There is no reason other then vendor lock in to invent yet another proprietary connector.
On my shopping list for a new phone is very much the existence of standardized interfaces - the proprietary cables to my iPhone have been a constant nuisance.
Some of these modernized areas internet access is not fast enough, even for the home user.
When it matters, I still can't depend on my wi-fi connection via my cellphone - which, to my mind, means until someone tells me the entangled particles in said device are good anywhere in the universe or my money back, then "the cloud" is not something I want to rely on having.
I was talking from the point of view of people who already have an iPhone. They already have "a nice bit of kit that works extremely well at what it does". There is very little reason to upgrade to the new version. The best reason someone has given so far is for a better camera.
For people who actually care about picture quality though, I think even the cheapest point and shoot cameras do things better, from my own experience..
Wrong metric: the point of phone cameras has always been that you always have them with you. Obviously given prep time I can always get a better quality camera somewhere, but it's (a) potentially very expensive and (b) I need to know in advance what I'm doing.
Whereas I always have my cellphone, and it has internet connectivity as much as possible. Making that cellphone camera as good as possible is important purely because when something important does happen, chances are it's all I'll have on me.
Seriously, NAT was a problem 10 years ago in the IRC age. My first exposure to it was trying to figure out why the hell I could chat to people but not send/receive files. I can only dream of how much better the general experience of using the internet might get for people if P2P would "just work".
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I don't know. It stands to reason that the planet we'd pay the most attention to if we were out exploring would be the one with a big ring of clearly artificial space debris. Any spacefaring civilization is extremely likely to understand the benefits of satellite technology, even if they may have moved beyond it.
More importantly, in space, we can easily inspect things without touching them - Gravity Probe B for example, isn't actually orbiting the Earth. The gyroscopic sphere inside it is orbiting Earth, and the rest of the space craft is maintaining position away from the surface of the gyroscope. You could zip on up to this thing and do a very thorough analysis without touching it.
That was always the biggest piece of unnecessary technobabble. There's nothing "quantum" about the demands of the reassembling ordinary matter.
RightSaidFred chose his words carelessly. You are all correct but talking about different things.
Yes, there is "communication" in the sense of "spooky action at a distance". No, you cannot transmit classical information that way.
Except what we do know is that currently you're simply forbidden from transmitting information faster then light this way. There's nothing that would forbid "spooky action at a distance" from transmitting information at or below light speed, provided some means could be found to allow it to do that.
This would still be a huge discovery in a world where electromagnetic spectrum is highly limited and interceptible, and it's why I find these weak measurement experiments so interesting. You could imagine for example, that you have a big collection of spin-entangled electrons in a device, that you push around weakly, and then transmit a synchronization signal at light speed to indicate to a receiver that it's safe to read off the state of their entangled electrons. You wouldn't be able to talk faster then light, but you'd have wireless communications with effectively infinite bandwidth.
That misses the point too though.
The original point of the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment was to highlight an absurdity of quantum mechanics: that if we chained enough causality to a quantum state, the mathematics showed that we ended up with conclusions like a living organism being both alive and dead at the same time (and then as time goes on, both alive and hungry, and dead and decaying, at the same time).
The obvious problem of this becomes more apparent when you consider the proposition that the cat has agency, or could be a physicist instead. If the experiment is collapsed by observation, what is observation, given as if we also locked a physicist in the box with the cat he too would be alive and dead at the same time.
However we already know that this isn't really how modern cryptography works. There would be enormous forewarning in the literature that a practical attack of some sort was coming - these things aren't made out of whole cloth by lone geniuses, they're developed, analysed and slowly implemented over time.
There are some theoretical attacks against AES for example, but nothing practical has been implemented yet, and by the time it is we'll most certainly have moved on to a newer cryptography standard.
You do understand the concept of crumple zones right?
The force of any impact is momentum divided by distance. There's a reason all modern cars switched away from hardwood interiors to the soft vinyl - those few extra millimeters of cushioning when your head hits the dash in an accident saves lives.
Which doesn't invalidate his point: the helmet is designed to provide protection under certain conditions. In most cases, severe head injury is likely to come from whiplash at the end of a crash - i.e. after you've already decelerated significantly from falling/having other parts of your body hit the ground.
The one time I had a helmet save my head while cycling was a relatively minor accident - I fell over essentially in slow motion while going down a hill, but couldn't stop the momentum from slapping my head into the pavement. It probably wouldn't have been particularly bad, but it was a hard enough hit it could've done a fair amount of damage.
Fortunately, I was wearing a helmet.
Where I live (US), it's certainly less popular. When I was a kid, people, and mostly other kids, would cycle everywhere. Every kid I knew had a bicycle, and it was their primary form of transportation. Now, I rarely see someone cycling, and when I do, it's usually an adult, and usually on a designated bike trail, not on the streets or sidewalks.
That's not just an anecdotal observation on my part either. I no longer see bike racks installed for parking bikes near schools or stores anymore, they used to be common. If you watch any old children's TV shows from the '50s or '60s, you can see how ingrained the bicycle was in the culture (almost as common as smoking!).
Of course, in those days when you wanted to ride your bike, you just jumped on it and off you went. If we'd had to dress up like quarterbacks every time we wanted to run to the store or a friend's house, we probably would have lost our taste for bicycling, too.
When I was a kid we cycled everywhere, and helmets were mandatory. People seemed to ride bikes everywhere, because we all kids and legally allowed to ride on the footpath. The exact day I stopped cycling was at the age this became illegal - 12.
This helmet thing is complete stupidity being perpetrated by people who should know better. What we need is good, separated cycling infrastructure - the sidewalk felt safe. Being on the road has never felt safe.
In my experience in an academic environment the only people who care about LaTeX are the mathematicians and physicists, since they routinely want to write out a ton of math.
Everyone else wants to be able to copy+paste things from ChemDraw and drag drop place images - and unfortunately since you generally pick up your writing implements right as you need them, LyX still has too many ideosyncracies to be a practical alternative.
Still you'd think that with so many stars to choose from, we'd expect to get more then a few vaguely human-like alien species.
I rather prefer the explanation that the radio-age doesn't last long enough - less then 200 years into it and we're already heading out of it. If there's a breakthrough or new physics around the corner, then it might be over completely if you can do things with entangled particles - and as you say, all the leaky intelligible stuff is being replaced with tight-beam radio and encryption.
My forlorn hope is that we'll subspace radio or something, switch on the first receiver and suddenly find thousands of stars broadcasting nearby.
You know you don't have to put them in the trash right? They can be recycled.
No it wouldn't.
Plenty of people have legitimate reasons to use quite a bit of energy. The mechanics and logistics of enforcing or compensating these people would be enormously burdensome to them, and thus very unfair to a great many people. They also likely would not take into account individual circumstances or limitations.
You don't think a producer, who actually just has an enormous but finite stockpile of helium and is selling it at infinite quantity for whatever price the market wants is going to effect the market?
Because that's what the US government is presently doing, and you the allegedly econonomically savvy tax payer should be outraged about it because they used your tax dollars to buy all that helium and are now pissing it away by not trying to control the market for it to ensure they make a profit. They could easily restrict supply, let the price rise then sell at the falling margin - and then all that tax money would not just be a free subsidy to any idiot who wants to have a balloon that rises to the ceiling.
You do realize the rate of loss to space is actually negligible compared to human extraction and consumption?
That the reason helium is so cheap right now is because we've been storing huge quantities of it for years, and then the US congress suddenly decided to sell it all off at whatever price the market offered?
The whole idea here is that we can land softly from this by regulating it. That we can decree that we'll release helium from the strategic reserve such that the price stays at 20x the current rate, and thus our reserves will last that much longer and give us time to either open up alternate sources (the space mining people seem likely to stumble across a fairly efficient way to get it) or find alternate cooling solutions.
As in, your entire diatribe is completely ignorant bullshit because the reason helium is currently so cheap is that the vast majority of the world supply is owned by the US government which can effectively control the entire market, and has been artificially deflating the price since 2007.
The price has been artificially deflated, since the US stockpiled helium in the National Helium Reserve. The whole thing has been declared too expensive and Congress ordered it sold off in 2007 at any price so of course the price of helium has plummeted and usage shot up like it'll last forever. Of course it won't, and one day we'll be back to collecting it from gas fields and it'll be worth 50x to 100x what it currently is.
This is oddly reassuring, seeing as how, after reading about the shortage of helium (ironically from pondering where exactly it comes from and then reading about the shortages) I've been wondering how safe it would be to fill my remote control airship with hydrogen instead.
The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.
The legitimate users of helium would have no problems going through the necessary actions to prove they have a need to buy it - after all buying an MRI is an enormous expense. But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.
We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.
There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.
PulseAudio is IMO a great idea which has suffered from implementation problems and a bad UI design.
The idea is spectacular since it's so fundamental - applications emit sound, PulseAudio sends it to sound renderers, and these things can be anywhere you want.
The problem at the moment is we lack any fully-feature userspace applications to truly make that happen and seem obviously beneficial, so all we perceive is the downside (implementation problems).
+1 - Cinnamon is great. MATE is what I install on a server or system not capable of running Cinnamon.
So are you saying that nothing should ever change about the iPhone connector? Once god-awful 30-pin, always god-awful 30-pin? So that nobody ever has to buy new peripherals?
Or are you saying that it's okay if they change it (and force everybody to buy new peripherals) but only if they change it to something "compatible"? Note that micro USB isn't doesn't support the functionality the iPhone needs.
Apple dropped analog video output so all they actually need is to put all the ports next to one another on the bottom of the phone; stereo mini or micro plug, uHDMI, and uUSB. "Docks" can implement as many connectors as necessary for their functionality. Done and done. Instead they have invented a new proprietary connector so that they can make more money.
This.
There is no reason other then vendor lock in to invent yet another proprietary connector.
On my shopping list for a new phone is very much the existence of standardized interfaces - the proprietary cables to my iPhone have been a constant nuisance.
My house (and business) use Neato's, but I'd hardly begrudge the Roomba for making people think "robot vacuum cleaners should be in my house now".
Some of these modernized areas internet access is not fast enough, even for the home user.
When it matters, I still can't depend on my wi-fi connection via my cellphone - which, to my mind, means until someone tells me the entangled particles in said device are good anywhere in the universe or my money back, then "the cloud" is not something I want to rely on having.
I was talking from the point of view of people who already have an iPhone. They already have "a nice bit of kit that works extremely well at what it does". There is very little reason to upgrade to the new version. The best reason someone has given so far is for a better camera.
For people who actually care about picture quality though, I think even the cheapest point and shoot cameras do things better, from my own experience..
Wrong metric: the point of phone cameras has always been that you always have them with you. Obviously given prep time I can always get a better quality camera somewhere, but it's (a) potentially very expensive and (b) I need to know in advance what I'm doing.
Whereas I always have my cellphone, and it has internet connectivity as much as possible. Making that cellphone camera as good as possible is important purely because when something important does happen, chances are it's all I'll have on me.
And not a complicated one either. There is no reason SOHO routers couldn't default to firewall settings that mimic current NAT behaviour.
Seriously, NAT was a problem 10 years ago in the IRC age. My first exposure to it was trying to figure out why the hell I could chat to people but not send/receive files. I can only dream of how much better the general experience of using the internet might get for people if P2P would "just work".