Here's a couple of reasons to be very wary of human cloning:
It is physically hazardous, and the risk is bourn by the clone, not by the person who decided to have a clone. Risks include many pre-birth failures to mature, deformity, possibly abnormal aging.
A child should be free to discover their own talents and weaknesses. This is much harder when someone else has taken your genes along the same path 40 years before. It is bad enough trying to live up to an illustrious parent without having identical genes. Imagine the angst of achieving little with the same genes as your famous clone parent. Note that this is different from identical twins, as they are the same age.
Why should any such risks be taken by the clone for the benefit (ego or whatever) of another person? What valid reasons can there be to inflict such risks, when a normal conception can always be done more safely and easily?
(One possibly valid reason could be if the individual has no viable germ cells - but still then only if the clone would be expected to be reproductively normal.)
(I'm not some unreasoning technophobe, but there were no highly moderated comments giving the anti-cloning viewpoint, so I am posting to increase balance.)
I have contemplated exactly this scenario several times in the past - I just hadn't expected it in reality so soon.
If such works do not lead people to commit child abuse, there is no reason to make them illegal. (OK, I can think of one - see below.) I will therefore assume such abuse is increased by simulated pornography, as it is the interesting case.
Argument 1: The benefit to society of allowing this is the pleasure/entertainment of some people. The benefit of banning is the prevention of child abuse cases. Child abuse is so horrendous and crippling that the benefit of banning greatly outweighs the benefit of allowing it, so it should be banned. This is the utilitarian argument.
Argument 2: While it is (hypothetically) true that a person exposed to simulated pornography is more likely to commit child abuse, it is still a free decision by them to do so. The blame lies in the person, not the pornography, and it is they who should be banned/punished, not the pornographer. Many view the pornography and don't abuse - why should they be denied this because a few do abuse? This is the free will argument.
Personally, I tend towards utilitarianism. I am surprised at the near unanimity to allowing such pornography shown in these posts (at least, in those moderated high enought that I read them.) I would have expected this to be much more controversial.
(P.S. The promised extra reason for banning simulated porn: If it were allowed, it would make it harder to control real child pornography and prosecute pornographers, because there would be an extra requirement to determine that the images were 'natural' rather than computer generated.)
Yes, this is my 'lots of small pixels' solution. It is not ideal however:
The dynamic range is poor. If you have 100 'subpixels' of blue in the area that would normally be a pixel on an LCD display, you can only get 100 levels of blue intensity in that pixel.
There are also brightness problems. To make 'white', you need every pixel on, and alternating colour in red, green and blue. This means that each pixel is reflecting only on colour, so only about 1/3 of the light falling on the display is reflected - this will be a very grey 'white'.
A possible solution to the colour purity (and perhaps dynamic range) problem has occured to me. The second movable mirror could be made reflecting at only one wavelength, via thin-film technology. Then by moving this relative to the front reflector, you can control the combined reflectivity at this particular colour. I expect it would be technically challenging to put different thin-film reflectors on adjacent small mirrors, however.
This still leaves the low reflectivity problem. Possibly this coudl be solved by some clever side-lighting method.
Anyhow, the technology has significant problems that are not addressed in the article. We can't tell from the article if the inventors have solutions for them. I predict problems of poor colour reproduction, poor contrast and low brightness.
As described, the system is purely reflective - unlike a CRT or a backlit LCD, which actually produce light.
The colours will not be very pure. Each pixel is effectively a coloured mirror. It will have maximum reflectivity at one wavelength (say, red) slowly falling to zero reflectivity at twice that wavelength (infrared) and at 2/3 the peak wavelength (yellow perhaps?) then reaching a maximum again at half the peak wavelength (blueish).
While you can change the colour that a given pixel reflects, you can't change the intensity with which it reflects it - i.e. they are on or off, not half-on.
The colour purity problem might be solvable with coloured filters in front of the pixels - but this would make the display much dimmer, and unless you use a remarkable filter, would restrict each pixel to just one colour 9according to the colour of the filter in front of it)
Some possible solutions to the on-or-off problem are to use many very small pixels so you can control intensity according to how many are on, or to use an LCD in front of the pixels to control intensity (at which point, why not just use a colour LCD display?)
It will never happen because the Judaism-decended religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have a thing about every seventh day. It is every seventh day, not every seventh day except once a year you wait an extra day for the sabbath. There are hundreds of millions of people who would stick rigidly to this pattern, so that their sabbath day would change relative to the calendar once a year, which would cause havoc.
(I'm not one of those hundreds of millions.)
Re:How About A User's EULA?
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EULA In Games
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I think the company I work for's software license pretty much satisfies these conditions. Probably not the 'friends and family' bit. However, we charge significant (I think >$100K, >$1M in many cases) annual fees and it won't do you much good unless you are an energy retail company...
"Here's to hoping that it won't blaspheme the legacy of Frank."
Too late - the legacy of Dune has already been blasphemed by a bunch of books with names like "God Emperor of Dune" and "Chapterhouse Dune."
The Dune series spans a greater range of quality than any other series I know. (Although Anne McCaffery's Dragon series might give it a run for the money.)
Re:Spammers cheat, this will not work
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Spambot Poisoner
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· Score: 1
Perhaps you could provide examples? I have searched wired.com unsuccesfully for any mention of this incident, web page or the company or person alledged to be spamming.
I am not the AC above, and I am agnostic on whether this tale is true (but interested to know.) (OK, so technically if I was agnostic I'd believe it was impossible to know.)
For some years I've been hoping something like this would come along for a quite different purpose: recycling. Recycling is unpopular with consumers because of the trouble in separating classes of recyclables, and I expect that separation is expensive at the receiving end also.
The uses of recycled plastic are fairly limited - I expect this is largely because the different types of plastic can't easily be separated, so only low quality products that can withstand an unknown mix of types can be manufactured.
If every plastic bottle, cardboard box, whatever, had a very cheap RF id tag like this that identified what it was made of, the separation process could be much cheaper and the output much more homogenious and high quality.
No, there is real science in visual wavelengths too.
Yes, much of the 'real science' doesn't produce pretty pictures.
Yes, some Hubble pictures are for PR rather than science. I doubt the time spent on PR pictures a significant percentage of total observing time.
No, Hubble has a mirror, not a lens.
Hubble does a lot of valuable science. One could debate whether the same amount of money spent on Earth would produce more/better science, but it isn't just job security for aerospace engineers.
Although universal expansion dominates over large distances, over short distances velocities are dominated by local gravitational effects - e.g. our galaxy and Andromeda are converging due to mutual gravitational attraction and may eventually merge.
Galactic collisions or similar interactions are very common. Galaxies are large compared to the distances between them - e.g. Andromeda is about 750kpc away, and is on the order of 100kpc in radius (this is a bit fuzzy) so intergalactic distances are only a few times galactic sizes. In comparison, stars are tiny compared to separations, so stellar collisions are very rare indeed.
The Arp catalog of unusual galaxies contains many interacting/colliding galaxies. Two famous nearby examples are M51 and Centaurus A.
(If anyone cares, I do have a doctorate in astrophysics, although I'm not working in astronomy.)
Here is a related but pessimistic prediction: before I die, there will be no living person who has walked on the moon. This seems incredibly sad to me.
Anyway, the whole point of the Census-- the reason it is in the constitution-- is to give government agencies, especially Congress, the information they need to determine the effects of different public policies.
No, I don't think so - there is no reason to include it in the constitution if this is all it is for. It is there because votes in the electoral college, and perhaps state contributions to federal government, depend on the populations of the states. I.e. the US constitution is unworkable without knowing the populations of the states.
1Å = 10^-10m, (or 0.1 nm), an old unit most often used in measuring wavelengths of light.
Physicists, especially in relativity or particle physics, often use factors of c (speed of light) and sometimes G (gravitational constant) and h-bar (Plank's constant) to change the units of quantities. A common example is to say that the rest mass of an electron is 511,000 electron volts - measuring mass in units of energy. This appears to be such a case.
We can convert length (Å) to time by dividing by the speed of light. The speed of light in Å/hr is 1.07x10^22, hence 1Å hours is 9.3x10^-23 hours.
I'm off topic here, but so is the message I'm replying to. I will at least be brief.
"Government's primary function is protection of property rights." I am very, very glad I am not being governed by you. I would say "Government's primary function is to protect the welfare of its citizens."
Which is more important: the rights of fair use etc. on sound recordings that are cause celebre on slashdot, or the right not to starve to death in a country with sufficient food?
I have heard (disclaimer: so far as I know this is hearsay) that Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine - because of the property rights of the absentee English landlords.
Either I'm not as brilliant as I believe, or this is too subtle for the moderators. As I can confidently eliminate one of these possibilities, I shall explain the above in plain English.
"Litho" = rock. "Lithobraking" = slowing down by hitting rock. "Maintained in a non-free-fall orbit by electrostatic forces..." = sitting on the ground.
This system allows a satellite to enter low altitude stationary orbit over any point of any planetry, moon or asteroid object except the gas giant planets.
The satellite is maintained in a non-free-fall orbit by electrostatic forces generated in the interior of the celestial body.
This method shares the advantage of aerobreaking in that this orbit can be achieved with no expenditure of rocket propellent. It will generally be required to structurally strengthen the satellite to withstand the stress of the lithobraking manouver. The lithobraking stress can be reduced by applying conventional rocket thrust prior to the manouver to reduce the lithobraking delta-v.
This method is also applicable for the Earth, allowing precise location of low altitude geostationary communications satellites almost anywhere in the world, although line-of-sight restrictions may limit the useful range of such satellites.
If the sail is reflective, you effectively get outwards thrust by intercepting solar photons and tangential thrust from 'emitting' the reflected photons.
I had remembered that a black sail would work as well, but after a few minutes of drawing vector diagrams, I can't see how.
Replying to someone else's point about using several bubbles tethered together: I can get some tangential thrust if one is 'shaded' by the other, so the rear one receives solar wind only on one side. There is also a torque that will tend to spin the tethered bubbles, but this can probably be counteracted by clever uses of magnetic fields reacting against the solar magnetic field. This isn't very efficient in terms of sail area to useful thrust ratio, however.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that you don't know when you are five that everyone fully expects you to be a world class cricket player (or whatever.)
It is physically hazardous, and the risk is bourn by the clone, not by the person who decided to have a clone. Risks include many pre-birth failures to mature, deformity, possibly abnormal aging.
A child should be free to discover their own talents and weaknesses. This is much harder when someone else has taken your genes along the same path 40 years before. It is bad enough trying to live up to an illustrious parent without having identical genes. Imagine the angst of achieving little with the same genes as your famous clone parent. Note that this is different from identical twins, as they are the same age.
Why should any such risks be taken by the clone for the benefit (ego or whatever) of another person? What valid reasons can there be to inflict such risks, when a normal conception can always be done more safely and easily?
(One possibly valid reason could be if the individual has no viable germ cells - but still then only if the clone would be expected to be reproductively normal.)
(I'm not some unreasoning technophobe, but there were no highly moderated comments giving the anti-cloning viewpoint, so I am posting to increase balance.)
If such works do not lead people to commit child abuse, there is no reason to make them illegal. (OK, I can think of one - see below.) I will therefore assume such abuse is increased by simulated pornography, as it is the interesting case.
Argument 1: The benefit to society of allowing this is the pleasure/entertainment of some people. The benefit of banning is the prevention of child abuse cases. Child abuse is so horrendous and crippling that the benefit of banning greatly outweighs the benefit of allowing it, so it should be banned. This is the utilitarian argument.
Argument 2: While it is (hypothetically) true that a person exposed to simulated pornography is more likely to commit child abuse, it is still a free decision by them to do so. The blame lies in the person, not the pornography, and it is they who should be banned/punished, not the pornographer. Many view the pornography and don't abuse - why should they be denied this because a few do abuse? This is the free will argument.
Personally, I tend towards utilitarianism. I am surprised at the near unanimity to allowing such pornography shown in these posts (at least, in those moderated high enought that I read them.) I would have expected this to be much more controversial.
(P.S. The promised extra reason for banning simulated porn: If it were allowed, it would make it harder to control real child pornography and prosecute pornographers, because there would be an extra requirement to determine that the images were 'natural' rather than computer generated.)
The dynamic range is poor. If you have 100 'subpixels' of blue in the area that would normally be a pixel on an LCD display, you can only get 100 levels of blue intensity in that pixel.
There are also brightness problems. To make 'white', you need every pixel on, and alternating colour in red, green and blue. This means that each pixel is reflecting only on colour, so only about 1/3 of the light falling on the display is reflected - this will be a very grey 'white'.
A possible solution to the colour purity (and perhaps dynamic range) problem has occured to me. The second movable mirror could be made reflecting at only one wavelength, via thin-film technology. Then by moving this relative to the front reflector, you can control the combined reflectivity at this particular colour. I expect it would be technically challenging to put different thin-film reflectors on adjacent small mirrors, however.
This still leaves the low reflectivity problem. Possibly this coudl be solved by some clever side-lighting method.
Anyhow, the technology has significant problems that are not addressed in the article. We can't tell from the article if the inventors have solutions for them. I predict problems of poor colour reproduction, poor contrast and low brightness.
As described, the system is purely reflective - unlike a CRT or a backlit LCD, which actually produce light.
The colours will not be very pure. Each pixel is effectively a coloured mirror. It will have maximum reflectivity at one wavelength (say, red) slowly falling to zero reflectivity at twice that wavelength (infrared) and at 2/3 the peak wavelength (yellow perhaps?) then reaching a maximum again at half the peak wavelength (blueish).
While you can change the colour that a given pixel reflects, you can't change the intensity with which it reflects it - i.e. they are on or off, not half-on.
The colour purity problem might be solvable with coloured filters in front of the pixels - but this would make the display much dimmer, and unless you use a remarkable filter, would restrict each pixel to just one colour 9according to the colour of the filter in front of it)
Some possible solutions to the on-or-off problem are to use many very small pixels so you can control intensity according to how many are on, or to use an LCD in front of the pixels to control intensity (at which point, why not just use a colour LCD display?)
(I'm not one of those hundreds of millions.)
Yes, I quietly changed 'legacy of Frank' to 'legacy of Dune' so I could make my point.
You are, of course, entitled to like the later Dune books. After all, nobody except me has good taste all the time.
I haven't read the new Dune books. A friend recommended one, however.
Too late - the legacy of Dune has already been blasphemed by a bunch of books with names like "God Emperor of Dune" and "Chapterhouse Dune."
The Dune series spans a greater range of quality than any other series I know. (Although Anne McCaffery's Dragon series might give it a run for the money.)
I am not the AC above, and I am agnostic on whether this tale is true (but interested to know.) (OK, so technically if I was agnostic I'd believe it was impossible to know.)
It has been done. You can now write perl in Latin.
One day, there could be people who get paid to surf the web for porn.
(OK, so plenty of people surf for porn while being paid now, but it isn't quite the same thing.)
The uses of recycled plastic are fairly limited - I expect this is largely because the different types of plastic can't easily be separated, so only low quality products that can withstand an unknown mix of types can be manufactured.
If every plastic bottle, cardboard box, whatever, had a very cheap RF id tag like this that identified what it was made of, the separation process could be much cheaper and the output much more homogenious and high quality.
No, there is real science in visual wavelengths too.
Yes, much of the 'real science' doesn't produce pretty pictures.
Yes, some Hubble pictures are for PR rather than science. I doubt the time spent on PR pictures a significant percentage of total observing time.
No, Hubble has a mirror, not a lens.
Hubble does a lot of valuable science. One could debate whether the same amount of money spent on Earth would produce more/better science, but it isn't just job security for aerospace engineers.
Galactic collisions or similar interactions are very common. Galaxies are large compared to the distances between them - e.g. Andromeda is about 750kpc away, and is on the order of 100kpc in radius (this is a bit fuzzy) so intergalactic distances are only a few times galactic sizes. In comparison, stars are tiny compared to separations, so stellar collisions are very rare indeed.
The Arp catalog of unusual galaxies contains many interacting/colliding galaxies. Two famous nearby examples are M51 and Centaurus A.
(If anyone cares, I do have a doctorate in astrophysics, although I'm not working in astronomy.)
This could go some way to explaining the disappointing nature of my social life.
Here is a related but pessimistic prediction: before I die, there will be no living person who has walked on the moon. This seems incredibly sad to me.
And a year earlier to see unstable releases included with Red Hat? :-)
No, I don't think so - there is no reason to include it in the constitution if this is all it is for. It is there because votes in the electoral college, and perhaps state contributions to federal government, depend on the populations of the states. I.e. the US constitution is unworkable without knowing the populations of the states.
I considered the non-technical source, and interpreted '1Å hours' as '1Å expressed in hours'. I accept your interpretation as equally valid.
1Å = 10^-10m, (or 0.1 nm), an old unit most often used in measuring wavelengths of light.
Physicists, especially in relativity or particle physics, often use factors of c (speed of light) and sometimes G (gravitational constant) and h-bar (Plank's constant) to change the units of quantities. A common example is to say that the rest mass of an electron is 511,000 electron volts - measuring mass in units of energy. This appears to be such a case.
We can convert length (Å) to time by dividing by the speed of light. The speed of light in Å/hr is 1.07x10^22, hence 1Å hours is 9.3x10^-23 hours.
"Government's primary function is protection of property rights." I am very, very glad I am not being governed by you. I would say "Government's primary function is to protect the welfare of its citizens."
Which is more important: the rights of fair use etc. on sound recordings that are cause celebre on slashdot, or the right not to starve to death in a country with sufficient food?
I have heard (disclaimer: so far as I know this is hearsay) that Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine - because of the property rights of the absentee English landlords.
"Litho" = rock. "Lithobraking" = slowing down by hitting rock. "Maintained in a non-free-fall orbit by electrostatic forces..." = sitting on the ground.
This method shares the advantage of aerobreaking in that this orbit can be achieved with no expenditure of rocket propellent. It will generally be required to structurally strengthen the satellite to withstand the stress of the lithobraking manouver. The lithobraking stress can be reduced by applying conventional rocket thrust prior to the manouver to reduce the lithobraking delta-v.
This method is also applicable for the Earth, allowing precise location of low altitude geostationary communications satellites almost anywhere in the world, although line-of-sight restrictions may limit the useful range of such satellites.
I had remembered that a black sail would work as well, but after a few minutes of drawing vector diagrams, I can't see how.
Replying to someone else's point about using several bubbles tethered together: I can get some tangential thrust if one is 'shaded' by the other, so the rear one receives solar wind only on one side. There is also a torque that will tend to spin the tethered bubbles, but this can probably be counteracted by clever uses of magnetic fields reacting against the solar magnetic field. This isn't very efficient in terms of sail area to useful thrust ratio, however.