Prove that the person who's name is on the account was the same person doing the downloading.
This is not the question that ISP was asked - and obviously no ISP can, using technical means, answer that question.
Once the computer is identified then the investigation can proceed (as appropriate) to further narrow down the list of possible users. A 95 y/o grandma is probably not the one downloading rap, but a 14 y/o grandson might be.
The best you can say is that the potential of the capacitors in the ram is too low to be measured with the equipment you're using to do it. Are you willing to bet that the NSA doesn't have better equipment?
No, the NSA doesn't have the better equipment, simply because the measuring equipment is built into the DRAM chip and can't be replaced with anything. So you are stuck with a device that is intentionally designed to return 0 or 1, and to switch from 1 to 0 takes a couple of missing refreshes.
But even if those capacitors are somehow connected to external pins (impossible - not enough pins) you still have the problem of the thermal noise. Once the bit charge sufficiently dissipates all you are measuring is the noise. Since we know that the decision threshold is reached in, say, 100 ms the thermal noise level will be reached in 10 or 20 seconds. This time is too short to open the chip up and connect super-sensitive probes to the chip's internal wiring.
There are tricks like chunking and mnemonic devices that can increase that amount, but not by a statistically significant number.
Top terrorists can afford to be exceptions. OBL could have used a serial number of his foot warmer as a password, for all I care; or a 2,000 characters long quote from Koran (or worse, from some other religious text.) That's what spies often used; a shelf full of books is not a crime, and a tiny mark on a page is not a crime either... but multiply day and month together, add the checksum of the author's name of the first page article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, count that many words from that point, and here is your key for the day. Easy to handle but very hard to discover without knowing the secret algorithm.
Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.
When I become the Evil Overlord I will make sure that spies with great difficulty can get into my inner sanctum and copy unencrypted plans of my conquests.
Of course those plans will be a deception. The real plans will not be in a computer to begin with; but if they must be, I will keep them encrypted on an SD card that I will put into the birdcage of my parrot. The spies will not have time to search for it, and even if they find it the filesystem on the card is empty. Good luck trying to rebuild a file out of a million sectors, all filled with random bytes. But it's easy for me to do because the key to that is a certain very long quotation from my Sacred Book that I just remember where it starts.
The paradigm that's coming is no more mouse, and keyboard and UI are all part of one unified bit of hardware - "point" with your finger to drag sliders, click buttons and such.
It's not so, and it's easy to prove. Your fingers are too big, and the font is too small, and the display surface is limited. That means that a touch-only interface has to use large, well separated controls - and that leaves less space on the screen for the information.
Another thing to consider is ergonomics. Try to paint something with your finger for a few minutes on a mirror in your bathroom. Your arm muscles will be in pain after a minute. This is less of a problem on a portable device, but it will be a big deal on any "desktop" computer unless it is a pure tabletop; then your arms will be OK at the expense of your eyesight (due to varying distance to different elements of the picture.) To make it reasonable you need to float in the air above the table, with your arms down. Or you need to do it in space.
When I get the urge to throw stuff out, I can always go through the older stuff with a different standard and find stuff worth tossing. The older it gets, the more easily it can be tossed.
Just make sure you don't violate a patent on that very invention.
Being able to fully analyze not just the CPU, but also ethernet, PCI, USB and other peripherals should be a welcome addition for all those that are writing drivers or debugging a strange hardware behaviour.
I did my share of that in FPGAs (Xilinx EDK) and I don't want to even hear about it. You buy a COTS MCU, solder it, and it works. You have reference designs that work, and they are done by the vendor.
What you are talking about is a completely new can of fresh worms. Making a working ASIC is hard; if you want as few bugs as possible then it's even harder. A buggy ASIC with an open-source RTL is a disaster. Yes, you can simulate it if you are crazy enough, but it takes lots of effort, and you can't simulate an odd timing error that occurs only now and then. ModelSim is not that fast, and you need to write lots of testbenches. In the end you will invest a lot of time into this debugging, and nobody knows if you can actually find a workaround. Your competitor, who picked a closed source MCU, would be already selling his product while you are busy explaining to the management why exactly your pick of the MCU was not so good.
In other words, there is no practical reason to select this chip over any other - unless you fear that on some unfortunate date all supplies of commercial MCUs stop. This is not possible, too much in this world depends on little 8-, 16- and 32-bit embedded systems, and you can always build your own computer out of them and run Linux on it. Your freedom of computing will be preserved, unless some laws make that, like owning a debugger, a crime.
I know about relativity effects. However you know perfectly well that these effects require a good fraction of light speed to become significant. So there are two problems. First, we don't have the technology to accelerate anywhere near light speed, or even to 1% of it. The record, I believe, is about 0.03% of c, and it used gravity assist that would be impractical (and likely deadly) for live people. There are no relativistic effects at that speed that would be of practical interest to anyone except physicists. Second, as you say, we are limited by the acceleration. Our native acceleration is about 10 m/s per second, so if you want to get to c you need about 1 year of constant acceleration. We are still talking about some serious time, even if we have an engine that can work for a year non-stop (and for another year to slow down.) We can overcome both problems with the right technology - just as I said in one of earlier messages. But launching chemical rockets at great cost will not get us any closer to that goal; it will only waste money that could be better spent on science.
Why do you want to bother astronauts? You can always ask on Slashdot and get mostly correct answers. For example:
Does the space station have any instruments that can "see" radiation in the air on Earth?
No, because air is not radioactive. If you ask about the radioactive dust in air (or on ground) you need a gamma ray telescope for that, and it doesn't need to be on the ISS. However from every point of view it's far more practical to use airplanes to take samples of air; this will pick up alpha and beta radiation too, and the resolution will be greater. Also it is important to know how high certain air streams with dust are because that tells you how far the dust is likely to spread. Observation from above won't tell you that.
Could the space station being used to launch/release material for cloud-seeding following a nuclear accident?
No. It's very expensive to launch any useful amount of materials. If, however, you do launch them and then release they don't fall onto the surface but continue orbiting the planet.
The discussion about Iodine is not a question. However if you want to form clouds, for any reason, the technology to do that exists already.
As matter of fact, we are communicating using magical fairy dust precisely sprinkled onto the surface of amazingly pure silicon. Any educated gentleman in 1900's would say so.
European colonists coming to the Americas never expected to return. Colonists heading west across the Great Plains of the USA never expected to return.
But they could if they wanted to. The ships from Europe weren't burned once they reach American shores. They were instead loaded with local products and sent back; anyone willing to catch a ride could do that (for a fee, presumably.) Similarly I may move from Toronto to Edmonton and never expect to return. The important fact is that neither me moving to Edmonton, nor colonists coming to America, are facing imminent death if just one thing out of a million goes wrong. But colonists leaving on a one-way voyage to Proxima Centauri will not be able to return regardless of anything; in principle. Even communications with Earth won't be effective (or interesting.) They swim or sink. Given probabilities of finding an Earth-like planet, the "sink" option is far more likely statistically.
But you have to build that first spaceship anyway, because if you don't, then you never develop the technology to build the second, faster one.
We never built a home PC out of vacuum tubes. The technology was there, but it was so ridiculous to even attempt that it was never done. We didn't even have transistor-based home PCs. It took a specialized integrated circuit - a microprocessor - to make this step. Right now our chemical rockets are very much like earlier tube-based computers - huge, expensive and inefficient. We just can't afford to use them more than we do already.
The development of a transistor (or an IC) wasn't really tied to how many tube-based computers were in use. Scientists seldom care about such things. Scientists are driven by science, by the challenge of it. For them the very knowledge that $a works was sufficient to start working on $b, and then on $c. A technologist will be glad to base his new nuclear rocket engine on some existing designs, but even that is limited in scope - Orion-style ships can't reuse much from the STS, for example. This means that spending a trillion dollars on sending a huge chemical rocket to Mars will not help in development of a nuclear engine for a similar trip. It only means that the new engine project will be a trillion dollar in the red, and won't get anywhere.
I already mentioned what happens then. I fully understand that impossibility of FTL is what current theories imply. Basically these things happen:
Don't try to listen to radio communications of other civilizations, and don't transmit on your own. Nobody who lives on our time scale will be using these methods to communicate (see the end of this post for more on the time scale.) Absence of signals will only demoralize you.
Since FTL is impossible, effective interstellar communication is also impossible.
Your best bet is to send colonists - either in generation ships or in state of hibernation - to other stars, in attempt to colonize their planets. Chances of their success are nearly zero, since they don't have fuel for changing the course or returning.
In essence, impossibility of FTL in this Universe makes many things impossible. The humanity still may spread to the stars, eventually and with great losses, but we will not know about it in any reasonable time. For all practical reasons they would be completely cut off from Earth, forever. Other posters mentioned colonies in the New World - they were very different because you could send a letter, you could invite your relatives, and you could return (ships that came from Europe returned back to Europe, they weren't a one-way things.)
With regard to the losses: we will have to send a ship to each interesting star, even though we can't guarantee that it has planets that we can live on (and that those planets are not already inhabited.) ETs will be in the same boat - they can develop their science for millions of years but if FTL is not possible to us it is equally impossible to them. We have people (more than we need) to send, and maybe there will be volunteers for such a suicidal mission. But we don't have ships; and those ships require new engines - nuclear, perhaps, for high impulse mode and ion for low impulse. There is a lot of work that must be done before we can send one ship to one nearest star. We plain don't have such a ship today, even for a robot, let alone for a number of people and for a number of years.
So again everything points at the science (and technology) as necessary components in us making the next step, regardless of availability of FTL in this Universe. When we can ride across the Solar system with relative ease then we can start considering farther voyages. Of course if we get lucky and FTL transportation is available then we can do both at the same time.
But ultimately, FTL or not, we will have to move on and at some point abandon the wetware that our code is currently running on. It is slow and fragile. Once transfer of consciousness into an external piece of hardware becomes possible, dying people will be first to try it out. The medical advances, however great, will be still limited by the physical viability of the brain, so there *will* be volunteers. And once we are running on neural nets, have backups and can operate any machinery we want (depending on what we need to do) then we will be on the next stage of development, when time is not that essential and willing individuals can travel in space for thousands of years. If they slow the clock down on their neural nets they can see this as an instant in time - and since everyone is immortal they will not lose any of their friends or relatives.
Travel to another star system within your lifetime is definitely possible. Unfortunately your friends and family back on earth will be long gone by the time you get back.
As I said, such things are not politically possible in a society of mortals. Besides, what about stars that are away a bit longer than your lifetime? Are they forever closed to us, or we need to spend centuries on every hop? That just doesn't make sense. Kon-Tiki crossed the ocean, but how many passengers would you find for it today? That's because most people want to live a meaningful life. Living in a tin can for decades is not meaningful, and is likely to make the man crazy.
so we should dump our money on every wormhole theorist we can find? hell no....
We (or the government) are dumping our money in so many hopeless black holes, a few measly millions per theorist won't even register.
But if you insist on your approach... ok, let's starve our brightest minds, force them out of scientific work - someone has to serve food at McDonalds, after all, to people who *really* advance the society - insurance agents, traders, bankers, advertisers, politicians...
You talk as though meat-based intelligence is the stable outcome. The intelligence to come after us will look back on meat-based computation as a flash in the evolutionary pan.
No, I actually would prefer the transition - it would mean eternal life, among other things. The problem is that FTL looks like child's play compared to converting everything that we are into ethereal beings.
And there is yet another problem that is related to the main thread. If most civilizations cast away their biological framework and converted themselves into something else, it would only make it more difficult for us to communicate with them. Bacteria may try to talk to us, but we don't listen - on our scale of things they are nothing. A galaxy-sized sentient being will not pay much attention to our transmissions, and any transmissions of that being will be seen by us as white noise (UWB) if even we are capable of tapping into the carrier - and the carrier could be something that we haven't discovered yet. Radio is utterly useless in space, just like shouting across the Pacific ocean.
A habitable world in another star system say 20 years travel away is hardly too far to "know what happened".
I'm not sure if we can develop a machine that can be sent for a 20 years (one way) trip and do all the research completely independently and efficiently. It actually is a job for an AI - we need better robots; another science problem right here. The main problem, however, is not technical - the trip will take 40-45 years, and youngsters who paid for it will be senior citizens when the probe returns. Politically, in a democracy, the majority of population will not buy into this project. You need an enlightened dictator to do this.
The return of the probe is another problem. Our technology requires the probe to carry the fuel for the return trip. This is likely impossible mathematically. Most of our probes are one-way designs. But this one has to return, or at least come close to Earth to upload data. Probably it will not be allowed to enter LEO, it will stay in orbit around the Sun about 10 degrees away from Earth. So again we need new physics, new engines, new propulsion methods.
And even if the probe reports that a planet out there is another Earth... what can we do about it? Only one thing: send a manned expedition. And since the people can't take acceleration that a robot is comfortable with, the round trip will take another 50-60 years. If we send kids they will return old and wrinkled, if even they return. And psychology tells us that they won't return - not a chance; they'd all kill each other before they are even half way there.
But even if miraculously we spent 100-120 years and tons of money sending these expeditions, even then what do we do next? Do we expect to send colonists on a one-way trip that takes most of their lifetime? Forget that, unless a stasis field or some anabiosis is invented (but then many other problems are gone too.) Here we also need advances in science.
And don't forget another effect: a spaceship launched later, but developed with better technology, can overtake a spaceship that flew earlier and slower. It would be pretty sad for a crew of an earlier ship to arrive and find a colony that is established by humans decades ago. Who wants to waste their entire life on an experiment? (If someone says "I do" he is not qualified to fly; he is insane.)
If you really want to do something in space, I say planets of our star system are good for that. Our existing technology, if pushed here and pulled there, can do it. Of course you need nuclear propulsion of some sort, to get some decent impulse. The Moon can be a very attractive place if only we can build a city underground.
This is not new in human history. The first stories about flight (Icarus etc.) are 2,000 years earlier than the actual powered flight, and we still don't have personal flight packs. We are now in position of Daedalus, trying to cobble together what we have to fly in the sky. But what we have is not good enough. We have a proof of the principle (and Daedalus could have his with a paraglider, if only he knew) but that proof is just as useful (not at all) as a paraglider is useful for breaking the speed of sound. We need new physics to make the next step.
This step is simple: invent an FTL method of communication.
The reasoning is also simple. If we can have FTL then it is a given that all developed civilizations are using it. Radio is simply too slow. We don't use pigeons anymore to send messages, do we? So why do we expect an alien civilization to spend terawatts of energy and thousands of years to blast radio signals into space?
But if we can't have FTL then pretty much we are prisoners of our star system. Perhaps generation ships can export our genes to other stars, but that is unlikely, and we will never [in practical terms] know how they fared. Ping times of thousands of years are simply out of our time scale, until we all become cyborgs or beings of pure energy.
So that's why FTL is the only possible solution. Anything less is just a waste of money and effort. This effort should be invested into science, in every way possible. Even if FTL is absolutely impossible in our Universe, perhaps we will find a neighboring Universe with physical laws that are more to our liking.
Do the greedy morons suing have a clue what a GPS device is generally expected, by its users, to do?
A GPS device tells you where you are, and may keep a record of your movements if you enable it. If such a recording function is provided, there is a way to browse tracks, upload them to a PC and to delete them. GPS devices don't log your movements forever, until police decides to check where you have been and looks into that file. iPhone does that.
I can't work out why that would raise property prices; it's not like you have to take your Prius to the nearest power plant to pick up a jug of fresh-squeezed eco-energy, after all.
Proximity to a harmless power plant actually improves your supply of power. Long transmission lines have a higher chance of failure.
In part this matches the original idea about solar panels. The cost of energy is expected to rise (or you can say that the value of currency is expected to continue dropping.) This means that the value of each kWh that you get for free is increasing, unlike your salary. If $0.30/kWh from PG&E is expensive today, the $3/kWh would be a disaster - and PG&E certainly can get there; the government works tirelessly, day and night, to make the dollar worthless - and they do a great job at that, just ask S&P.
Yes, that's why so many Mexican crops are destroyed by cold, and that's why rains can't stop in California. Last few years were much colder than average.
Slashdot Mirror
Prove that the person who's name is on the account was the same person doing the downloading.
This is not the question that ISP was asked - and obviously no ISP can, using technical means, answer that question.
Once the computer is identified then the investigation can proceed (as appropriate) to further narrow down the list of possible users. A 95 y/o grandma is probably not the one downloading rap, but a 14 y/o grandson might be.
The best you can say is that the potential of the capacitors in the ram is too low to be measured with the equipment you're using to do it. Are you willing to bet that the NSA doesn't have better equipment?
No, the NSA doesn't have the better equipment, simply because the measuring equipment is built into the DRAM chip and can't be replaced with anything. So you are stuck with a device that is intentionally designed to return 0 or 1, and to switch from 1 to 0 takes a couple of missing refreshes.
But even if those capacitors are somehow connected to external pins (impossible - not enough pins) you still have the problem of the thermal noise. Once the bit charge sufficiently dissipates all you are measuring is the noise. Since we know that the decision threshold is reached in, say, 100 ms the thermal noise level will be reached in 10 or 20 seconds. This time is too short to open the chip up and connect super-sensitive probes to the chip's internal wiring.
There are tricks like chunking and mnemonic devices that can increase that amount, but not by a statistically significant number.
Top terrorists can afford to be exceptions. OBL could have used a serial number of his foot warmer as a password, for all I care; or a 2,000 characters long quote from Koran (or worse, from some other religious text.) That's what spies often used; a shelf full of books is not a crime, and a tiny mark on a page is not a crime either ... but multiply day and month together, add the checksum of the author's name of the first page article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, count that many words from that point, and here is your key for the day. Easy to handle but very hard to discover without knowing the secret algorithm.
Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.
When I become the Evil Overlord I will make sure that spies with great difficulty can get into my inner sanctum and copy unencrypted plans of my conquests.
Of course those plans will be a deception. The real plans will not be in a computer to begin with; but if they must be, I will keep them encrypted on an SD card that I will put into the birdcage of my parrot. The spies will not have time to search for it, and even if they find it the filesystem on the card is empty. Good luck trying to rebuild a file out of a million sectors, all filled with random bytes. But it's easy for me to do because the key to that is a certain very long quotation from my Sacred Book that I just remember where it starts.
The paradigm that's coming is no more mouse, and keyboard and UI are all part of one unified bit of hardware - "point" with your finger to drag sliders, click buttons and such.
It's not so, and it's easy to prove. Your fingers are too big, and the font is too small, and the display surface is limited. That means that a touch-only interface has to use large, well separated controls - and that leaves less space on the screen for the information.
Another thing to consider is ergonomics. Try to paint something with your finger for a few minutes on a mirror in your bathroom. Your arm muscles will be in pain after a minute. This is less of a problem on a portable device, but it will be a big deal on any "desktop" computer unless it is a pure tabletop; then your arms will be OK at the expense of your eyesight (due to varying distance to different elements of the picture.) To make it reasonable you need to float in the air above the table, with your arms down. Or you need to do it in space.
Bush never had Obama's charisma, which just shot up even more.
In a contest between the charisma and the daily piece of bread (jobs, gas price, inflation) charisma is a sure loser.
When I get the urge to throw stuff out, I can always go through the older stuff with a different standard and find stuff worth tossing. The older it gets, the more easily it can be tossed.
Just make sure you don't violate a patent on that very invention.
what's the statute of limitations of the worst thing you've ever done? :)
It doesn't matter what he did. The only thing that matters is what other people think he did.
Being able to fully analyze not just the CPU, but also ethernet, PCI, USB and other peripherals should be a welcome addition for all those that are writing drivers or debugging a strange hardware behaviour.
I did my share of that in FPGAs (Xilinx EDK) and I don't want to even hear about it. You buy a COTS MCU, solder it, and it works. You have reference designs that work, and they are done by the vendor.
What you are talking about is a completely new can of fresh worms. Making a working ASIC is hard; if you want as few bugs as possible then it's even harder. A buggy ASIC with an open-source RTL is a disaster. Yes, you can simulate it if you are crazy enough, but it takes lots of effort, and you can't simulate an odd timing error that occurs only now and then. ModelSim is not that fast, and you need to write lots of testbenches. In the end you will invest a lot of time into this debugging, and nobody knows if you can actually find a workaround. Your competitor, who picked a closed source MCU, would be already selling his product while you are busy explaining to the management why exactly your pick of the MCU was not so good.
In other words, there is no practical reason to select this chip over any other - unless you fear that on some unfortunate date all supplies of commercial MCUs stop. This is not possible, too much in this world depends on little 8-, 16- and 32-bit embedded systems, and you can always build your own computer out of them and run Linux on it. Your freedom of computing will be preserved, unless some laws make that, like owning a debugger, a crime.
I know about relativity effects. However you know perfectly well that these effects require a good fraction of light speed to become significant. So there are two problems. First, we don't have the technology to accelerate anywhere near light speed, or even to 1% of it. The record, I believe, is about 0.03% of c, and it used gravity assist that would be impractical (and likely deadly) for live people. There are no relativistic effects at that speed that would be of practical interest to anyone except physicists. Second, as you say, we are limited by the acceleration. Our native acceleration is about 10 m/s per second, so if you want to get to c you need about 1 year of constant acceleration. We are still talking about some serious time, even if we have an engine that can work for a year non-stop (and for another year to slow down.) We can overcome both problems with the right technology - just as I said in one of earlier messages. But launching chemical rockets at great cost will not get us any closer to that goal; it will only waste money that could be better spent on science.
Why do you want to bother astronauts? You can always ask on Slashdot and get mostly correct answers. For example:
Does the space station have any instruments that can "see" radiation in the air on Earth?
No, because air is not radioactive. If you ask about the radioactive dust in air (or on ground) you need a gamma ray telescope for that, and it doesn't need to be on the ISS. However from every point of view it's far more practical to use airplanes to take samples of air; this will pick up alpha and beta radiation too, and the resolution will be greater. Also it is important to know how high certain air streams with dust are because that tells you how far the dust is likely to spread. Observation from above won't tell you that.
Could the space station being used to launch/release material for cloud-seeding following a nuclear accident?
No. It's very expensive to launch any useful amount of materials. If, however, you do launch them and then release they don't fall onto the surface but continue orbiting the planet.
The discussion about Iodine is not a question. However if you want to form clouds, for any reason, the technology to do that exists already.
This step is simple: invent magical fairy dust.
As matter of fact, we are communicating using magical fairy dust precisely sprinkled onto the surface of amazingly pure silicon. Any educated gentleman in 1900's would say so.
European colonists coming to the Americas never expected to return. Colonists heading west across the Great Plains of the USA never expected to return.
But they could if they wanted to. The ships from Europe weren't burned once they reach American shores. They were instead loaded with local products and sent back; anyone willing to catch a ride could do that (for a fee, presumably.) Similarly I may move from Toronto to Edmonton and never expect to return. The important fact is that neither me moving to Edmonton, nor colonists coming to America, are facing imminent death if just one thing out of a million goes wrong. But colonists leaving on a one-way voyage to Proxima Centauri will not be able to return regardless of anything; in principle. Even communications with Earth won't be effective (or interesting.) They swim or sink. Given probabilities of finding an Earth-like planet, the "sink" option is far more likely statistically.
But you have to build that first spaceship anyway, because if you don't, then you never develop the technology to build the second, faster one.
We never built a home PC out of vacuum tubes. The technology was there, but it was so ridiculous to even attempt that it was never done. We didn't even have transistor-based home PCs. It took a specialized integrated circuit - a microprocessor - to make this step. Right now our chemical rockets are very much like earlier tube-based computers - huge, expensive and inefficient. We just can't afford to use them more than we do already.
The development of a transistor (or an IC) wasn't really tied to how many tube-based computers were in use. Scientists seldom care about such things. Scientists are driven by science, by the challenge of it. For them the very knowledge that $a works was sufficient to start working on $b, and then on $c. A technologist will be glad to base his new nuclear rocket engine on some existing designs, but even that is limited in scope - Orion-style ships can't reuse much from the STS, for example. This means that spending a trillion dollars on sending a huge chemical rocket to Mars will not help in development of a nuclear engine for a similar trip. It only means that the new engine project will be a trillion dollar in the red, and won't get anywhere.
What if FTL communication doesn't exist?
I already mentioned what happens then. I fully understand that impossibility of FTL is what current theories imply. Basically these things happen:
In essence, impossibility of FTL in this Universe makes many things impossible. The humanity still may spread to the stars, eventually and with great losses, but we will not know about it in any reasonable time. For all practical reasons they would be completely cut off from Earth, forever. Other posters mentioned colonies in the New World - they were very different because you could send a letter, you could invite your relatives, and you could return (ships that came from Europe returned back to Europe, they weren't a one-way things.)
With regard to the losses: we will have to send a ship to each interesting star, even though we can't guarantee that it has planets that we can live on (and that those planets are not already inhabited.) ETs will be in the same boat - they can develop their science for millions of years but if FTL is not possible to us it is equally impossible to them. We have people (more than we need) to send, and maybe there will be volunteers for such a suicidal mission. But we don't have ships; and those ships require new engines - nuclear, perhaps, for high impulse mode and ion for low impulse. There is a lot of work that must be done before we can send one ship to one nearest star. We plain don't have such a ship today, even for a robot, let alone for a number of people and for a number of years.
So again everything points at the science (and technology) as necessary components in us making the next step, regardless of availability of FTL in this Universe. When we can ride across the Solar system with relative ease then we can start considering farther voyages. Of course if we get lucky and FTL transportation is available then we can do both at the same time.
But ultimately, FTL or not, we will have to move on and at some point abandon the wetware that our code is currently running on. It is slow and fragile. Once transfer of consciousness into an external piece of hardware becomes possible, dying people will be first to try it out. The medical advances, however great, will be still limited by the physical viability of the brain, so there *will* be volunteers. And once we are running on neural nets, have backups and can operate any machinery we want (depending on what we need to do) then we will be on the next stage of development, when time is not that essential and willing individuals can travel in space for thousands of years. If they slow the clock down on their neural nets they can see this as an instant in time - and since everyone is immortal they will not lose any of their friends or relatives.
Travel to another star system within your lifetime is definitely possible. Unfortunately your friends and family back on earth will be long gone by the time you get back.
As I said, such things are not politically possible in a society of mortals. Besides, what about stars that are away a bit longer than your lifetime? Are they forever closed to us, or we need to spend centuries on every hop? That just doesn't make sense. Kon-Tiki crossed the ocean, but how many passengers would you find for it today? That's because most people want to live a meaningful life. Living in a tin can for decades is not meaningful, and is likely to make the man crazy.
so we should dump our money on every wormhole theorist we can find? hell no....
We (or the government) are dumping our money in so many hopeless black holes, a few measly millions per theorist won't even register.
But if you insist on your approach ... ok, let's starve our brightest minds, force them out of scientific work - someone has to serve food at McDonalds, after all, to people who *really* advance the society - insurance agents, traders, bankers, advertisers, politicians...
You talk as though meat-based intelligence is the stable outcome. The intelligence to come after us will look back on meat-based computation as a flash in the evolutionary pan.
No, I actually would prefer the transition - it would mean eternal life, among other things. The problem is that FTL looks like child's play compared to converting everything that we are into ethereal beings.
And there is yet another problem that is related to the main thread. If most civilizations cast away their biological framework and converted themselves into something else, it would only make it more difficult for us to communicate with them. Bacteria may try to talk to us, but we don't listen - on our scale of things they are nothing. A galaxy-sized sentient being will not pay much attention to our transmissions, and any transmissions of that being will be seen by us as white noise (UWB) if even we are capable of tapping into the carrier - and the carrier could be something that we haven't discovered yet. Radio is utterly useless in space, just like shouting across the Pacific ocean.
A habitable world in another star system say 20 years travel away is hardly too far to "know what happened".
I'm not sure if we can develop a machine that can be sent for a 20 years (one way) trip and do all the research completely independently and efficiently. It actually is a job for an AI - we need better robots; another science problem right here. The main problem, however, is not technical - the trip will take 40-45 years, and youngsters who paid for it will be senior citizens when the probe returns. Politically, in a democracy, the majority of population will not buy into this project. You need an enlightened dictator to do this.
The return of the probe is another problem. Our technology requires the probe to carry the fuel for the return trip. This is likely impossible mathematically. Most of our probes are one-way designs. But this one has to return, or at least come close to Earth to upload data. Probably it will not be allowed to enter LEO, it will stay in orbit around the Sun about 10 degrees away from Earth. So again we need new physics, new engines, new propulsion methods.
And even if the probe reports that a planet out there is another Earth ... what can we do about it? Only one thing: send a manned expedition. And since the people can't take acceleration that a robot is comfortable with, the round trip will take another 50-60 years. If we send kids they will return old and wrinkled, if even they return. And psychology tells us that they won't return - not a chance; they'd all kill each other before they are even half way there.
But even if miraculously we spent 100-120 years and tons of money sending these expeditions, even then what do we do next? Do we expect to send colonists on a one-way trip that takes most of their lifetime? Forget that, unless a stasis field or some anabiosis is invented (but then many other problems are gone too.) Here we also need advances in science.
And don't forget another effect: a spaceship launched later, but developed with better technology, can overtake a spaceship that flew earlier and slower. It would be pretty sad for a crew of an earlier ship to arrive and find a colony that is established by humans decades ago. Who wants to waste their entire life on an experiment? (If someone says "I do" he is not qualified to fly; he is insane.)
If you really want to do something in space, I say planets of our star system are good for that. Our existing technology, if pushed here and pulled there, can do it. Of course you need nuclear propulsion of some sort, to get some decent impulse. The Moon can be a very attractive place if only we can build a city underground.
This is not new in human history. The first stories about flight (Icarus etc.) are 2,000 years earlier than the actual powered flight, and we still don't have personal flight packs. We are now in position of Daedalus, trying to cobble together what we have to fly in the sky. But what we have is not good enough. We have a proof of the principle (and Daedalus could have his with a paraglider, if only he knew) but that proof is just as useful (not at all) as a paraglider is useful for breaking the speed of sound. We need new physics to make the next step.
This step is simple: invent an FTL method of communication.
The reasoning is also simple. If we can have FTL then it is a given that all developed civilizations are using it. Radio is simply too slow. We don't use pigeons anymore to send messages, do we? So why do we expect an alien civilization to spend terawatts of energy and thousands of years to blast radio signals into space?
But if we can't have FTL then pretty much we are prisoners of our star system. Perhaps generation ships can export our genes to other stars, but that is unlikely, and we will never [in practical terms] know how they fared. Ping times of thousands of years are simply out of our time scale, until we all become cyborgs or beings of pure energy.
So that's why FTL is the only possible solution. Anything less is just a waste of money and effort. This effort should be invested into science, in every way possible. Even if FTL is absolutely impossible in our Universe, perhaps we will find a neighboring Universe with physical laws that are more to our liking.
Do the greedy morons suing have a clue what a GPS device is generally expected, by its users, to do?
A GPS device tells you where you are, and may keep a record of your movements if you enable it. If such a recording function is provided, there is a way to browse tracks, upload them to a PC and to delete them. GPS devices don't log your movements forever, until police decides to check where you have been and looks into that file. iPhone does that.
Well, so much for that theory then. Maybe the original findings are incorrect.
Your debate is invalid to begin with. You were guilty then, and you are guilty now :-)
"Asked and answered" (link)
I can't work out why that would raise property prices; it's not like you have to take your Prius to the nearest power plant to pick up a jug of fresh-squeezed eco-energy, after all.
Proximity to a harmless power plant actually improves your supply of power. Long transmission lines have a higher chance of failure.
In part this matches the original idea about solar panels. The cost of energy is expected to rise (or you can say that the value of currency is expected to continue dropping.) This means that the value of each kWh that you get for free is increasing, unlike your salary. If $0.30/kWh from PG&E is expensive today, the $3/kWh would be a disaster - and PG&E certainly can get there; the government works tirelessly, day and night, to make the dollar worthless - and they do a great job at that, just ask S&P.
The world is getting hotter.
Yes, that's why so many Mexican crops are destroyed by cold, and that's why rains can't stop in California. Last few years were much colder than average.