When 90+% of the population is engaging in an activity, maybe it shouldn't be illegal, especially when very few of the perpetrators are being caught and tried. Think about targeted enforcement, anyone the RIAA doesn't like can have their life torn out from under them by sending a single letter and file some court papers, and if not them then their friends and family.
It's the same thing on the criminal side of the law. Let's pretend that I did something to piss off a member of Obama's staff. That guy calls up the FBI, the FBI starts digging into my life and inevitably finds at least a handful of felonies that I've committed over the course of my life (statistically, it's practically guaranteed that I have, even though I don't even realize it). Taken drugs? A good investigation can probably uncover it. Browsed porn online? It's highly likely that you've got some kiddie porn (or something that looks like kiddie porn anyway) in your browser cache. Lied on a job resume? That's felony fraud is some places.
The point is, it is far, far too easy in our law and judicial systems to destroy someone's life simply because everyone has done something wrong at some point. All the government would have to do is precisely enforce the laws that are already in place and we would indeed be living in a full on police state
It's not as though supreme court justices need to be reelected every few years. Once they're in they're pretty much in for as long as they want to be. So, unless the record companies are remodeling their houses or sending personal 'gifts' for the holidays, I see it as less likely than usual that this a case of corruption. Now, the actual laws that the justices are interpreting... there you have a point.
I think we have a winner here. The article you linked mentions that she expects to see results over the next several months and was written slightly more than a year ago. That gives enough time to get results, tweak the experiment, analyze the results, even completely re-run the experiment if you think the results are ground breaking enough. The time span seems right, the other speakers are in related fields, it has direct influence on astrobiology. Specifically, it makes Titan a very interesting place to start looking for microbial, extra-terrestrial life.
'Antibacterial' soap kills almost no bacteria that regular old soap doesn't. It is a marketing term that means nothing in the world of reality because soap itself destroys most strains of bacteria on contact. Therefore, this is something more going on here than just "not enough germs weakens immune system". The actual article is about possible negative effects that some chemicals, including Triclosan which is one ingredient used to make 'antibacterial' soap, have on the immune system.
When more than 5% of the population understands that you can't effectively stop terrorism by spending money. Any screening procedure is going to catch order of magnitude more false positives than true positives and is still going to cost orders of magnitude more than getting around it will. Not to mention: what the hell is the point of spending millions of dollars to prevent someone bringing a knife onto a plane, and then giving any passenger who orders steak a 6" steak knife?
Even if the source is from bacteria instead of peat moss (not dinosaurs), that still doesn't address the rate problem. So far as we know, oil is basically stable at the levels we drill for it, it doesn't decompose into something else over time. If that's true, that means that the deposits that we have access to took millions and millions of years to become as large as they are; in other words, oil still isn't a renewing resource, even ignoring the other long term problems involved in burning hydrocarbons for our energy production.
I think the closest plain English definition would be: has an interaction with something. More accurate, but more confusing might be: things are undefined until something happens that requires them to be defined in order for that something to happen. An electron doesn't have a position or a momentum until something occurs which require the electrons position and momentum to be known in order to determine the outcome. That might be a human being with an incredibly complex apparatus measuring the properties of an individual electron, or it might be a chemical reaction that is sweeping through the entire sample of whatever the electron is a part of.
Yeah, but it made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee; you know, the committee that is charged with upholding the constitution. The idea that something that should be a very contentious topic makes it through a committee who's primary responsibility is supposed to be safeguarding our constitutional rights without a single vote against it is, at the very least, concerning.
A) Power plants are much more efficient than ICE engines in automobiles. Even with losses due to transmission, charging, discharging, and inefficiencies in the motor, an electric vehicle still requires less energy to run.
B) As fuel prices change and legislation changes, it will be much easier to upgrade the electrical grid to 'green', renewable sources than it would be to upgrade the millions of cars on American streets.
C) Energy is largely fungible. It doesn't matter where the specific electricity you use comes from, because you using energy or not indirectly affects the price of energy all over the country (and to a lesser extent, the world). This would be even more true if our electrical grid were smarter, but even as it is today if you're pulling dozens of kilowatts of power from your local wind farm, you're hurting the environment at least as much as someone pulling a fewer kilowatts from a coal power plant. If the total demand were less, the renewables would be used in favor of the consumables, since the operating costs are proportionally smaller.
And what about non-emergency, but still important calls? See a piece of debris on the freeway? You can either call 911 (and they're not going to be to happy about that) or pull off the road, come to a complete stop, and make the call (which no one will do). Or you could just, for example, have your passenger call the local non-emergency line.
There are a multitude of situations where it makes more sense to allow the passenger to make phone calls than it does to mindlessly disable all cellphones in the car. As someone who regularly drives 5+ hours to visit family, it would piss me and my family off not to be able to get a hold of each other during that trip. Just enforce the distracted driving laws that are already on the books (not even the cell phone specific ones) and leave it at that.
I wonder... could you run Android in a virtual machine for use as a tablet and Windows 7 or Ubuntu for when you're using it as a laptop? Trying to combine the two form factors is always going to be tricky, given how unwieldy either UI is going to be when using it in the opposite mode. Unless someone comes out with a way to easily switch between the different UI styles as well as the hardware styles I think this is a non-starter.
There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe (I believe current understand says that if it were there our tools are powerful enough to see it) so it would seem that the part of the universe we live in is all matter. I suppose it's possible that the interface lies somewhere outside of our visible universe though.
Yes, capturing anti-ions is relatively easy (still quite hard though) since you can just use magnetic fields to confine the anti-matter without it coming into contact with the walls of the container. Getting the anti-protons and anti-electrons to combine into a single atom that stays at a low enough energy level that it can be contained for a significant amount of time is hard, especially since it is neutral and can't be contained with magnetic fields. They managed it here by producing very, very cold anti-hydrogen so that the energy levels were low enough that they didn't immediately annihilate with the regular matter that made up the container.
Absolute worst case scenario is a grey goo outbreak being treated basically like a fire (which, when you think about it is the ultimate grey goo machine). There's a limit to how much energy is available for replication, and there's a limit on how efficient you can make your replication (at some level, the replicating nanobots will be literally tearing apart and putting back together materials). Fighting the grey goo only involves tearing about the replicators, not necessarily wasting energy putting the pieces back together into something useful.
In other words, it should be trivial to design a nanobot that tears apart the self-replicators but doesn't waste energy by making copies of itself. This nanobot would be manufactured a head of time and stored for future use, or manufactured in specialist facilities (even in a mobile truck if necessary) that provide the energy input necessary for their production. As long as your facilities have more energy available than the self-replicators do, you'll win out eventually. And the replicators will only have about as much energy available as a fire can produce.
I understand the science journalist not understanding, but does the qualified physicist really not understand the difference between an 'observer' in the traditional sense and an observer in the quantum sense? All of the things that we detect with our advanced technology effect things throughout the universe whether we are looking at them or not, the things that they effect are observers. A grain of dust around a star that is given an every so slightly different orbit because of quantum effects is just as much an 'observer' as a human being looking through a telescope is.
Maybe he wanted a proof of concept without having to spend lots of money doing it? So he can crack a bunch of 6 character passwords in an hour or so, extrapolating up, and estimating a 100 fold increase in the search space for each extra character, you might end up spending several hundred years cracking a 10 character password. Now, what's handy is that you're just renting the equipment, I don't know how many GPU setups that Amazon has available, but it doesn't seem unlikely that you could rent several hundred, possibly even several thousand, of them at a time, cutting the time to crack a significant password down to under a year, which still seems pretty secure, especially given the cost of renting that many platforms.
But what happens in 5-10 years, after the performance per price ratio has doubled a few more times? Now you're down to maybe a single month for a wealthy individual to be able to crack a significant, real-world password. Give it another few generations of hardware and you're not even talking about a wealthy individual any more. Good luck convincing the average Joe that he needs to start remembering 15+ character passwords, especially if you're going to enforce truly random ones that aren't susceptible to more direct attacks.
I won't disagree with you, but only because they are overrated in the same way that Tolkien is overrated. That is, if you look at him compared to contemporary sources, he appears unimaginative, derivative, and even predictable. And then you take a big step back and you suddenly realize that there was nothing before it to be a derivative of. The started something new, something that took on a life of it's own, and they were so iconic that you can still hear their sounds in music today, 50 years later.
To know there is a rise you would need to have some kind of baseline on the current situation.
You do? If it rains for a week straight I can make a prediction that the river level will rise over the course of that week without knowing what the level of the river was before it started raining. It could be a dry creek bed or it could be an inch from bursting it's banks, that information doesn't necessarily factor into my prediction of a rise.
I'm no neurologist, but if I were to guess I'd say it's because flashbacks are primarily visual, with a bit of audio thrown in. Playing tetris occupies the visual, and to a lesser extent audio portions of the brain, preventing those pathways being used to lay down the upsetting memories over and over again. The quiz game however, uses the critical thinking parts of the brain and verbal memory retrieval (very few people remember the answers to quiz game type questions audio-visually). This leaves the audiovisual pathways open to lay down the unpleasant memories, which makes it ineffective at blocking the flashbacks. If I had to guess why the quiz game made the flashbacks worse, maybe the quiz questions were associating those memories with a lot of other random topics (the question topics being asked).
Yeah... because watching disturbing videos on the internet is exactly as difficult to get over as getting shot at, and shooting other people in combat. Why, it's practically the same thing. [/sarcasm]
Ever actually see someone suffer a real, honest to goodness war flashback? It took 20 minutes to get one of my co-workers out from underneath a table after a helicopter flew overhead once. Given the choice between learning to deal with that kind of intense flashback and not having that flashback at all, I guarantee every soldier out there would rather numb it away and be able to think back on that time without having the more irrational parts of their brains getting in the way.
Don't forget the real reason that they wanted to change the definition in the first place: current theory predicts that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of bodies in the outer solar system with basically the same composition and orbit as pluto, and only slightly smaller. There would be no logical reason to exclude those hundreds of bodies from the list of planets without also excluding Pluto, since there is little qualitative difference between them.
It's perfectly simple: Humans are not animals, Humans are fucking special. Ask just about anyone religious and my age, they'll tell you so: "No, humans aren't animals, now stop trying to change things".
So wait... you accidentally walked up to the front door, accidentally defeated the lock somehow, and then accidentally walked through the front door. And in this case, changed the lock so the original owner couldn't get it and invited all your friends over for a party at your new place. Intent is pretty well established here, and I highly doubt that you could gain entrance to a strangers email unintentionally. Well, maybe if you found their account logged in on some public machine, but in that case you'd have a very, very good case and wouldn't be doing jail time.
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When 90+% of the population is engaging in an activity, maybe it shouldn't be illegal, especially when very few of the perpetrators are being caught and tried. Think about targeted enforcement, anyone the RIAA doesn't like can have their life torn out from under them by sending a single letter and file some court papers, and if not them then their friends and family.
It's the same thing on the criminal side of the law. Let's pretend that I did something to piss off a member of Obama's staff. That guy calls up the FBI, the FBI starts digging into my life and inevitably finds at least a handful of felonies that I've committed over the course of my life (statistically, it's practically guaranteed that I have, even though I don't even realize it). Taken drugs? A good investigation can probably uncover it. Browsed porn online? It's highly likely that you've got some kiddie porn (or something that looks like kiddie porn anyway) in your browser cache. Lied on a job resume? That's felony fraud is some places.
The point is, it is far, far too easy in our law and judicial systems to destroy someone's life simply because everyone has done something wrong at some point. All the government would have to do is precisely enforce the laws that are already in place and we would indeed be living in a full on police state
It's not as though supreme court justices need to be reelected every few years. Once they're in they're pretty much in for as long as they want to be. So, unless the record companies are remodeling their houses or sending personal 'gifts' for the holidays, I see it as less likely than usual that this a case of corruption. Now, the actual laws that the justices are interpreting... there you have a point.
I think we have a winner here. The article you linked mentions that she expects to see results over the next several months and was written slightly more than a year ago. That gives enough time to get results, tweak the experiment, analyze the results, even completely re-run the experiment if you think the results are ground breaking enough. The time span seems right, the other speakers are in related fields, it has direct influence on astrobiology. Specifically, it makes Titan a very interesting place to start looking for microbial, extra-terrestrial life.
'Antibacterial' soap kills almost no bacteria that regular old soap doesn't. It is a marketing term that means nothing in the world of reality because soap itself destroys most strains of bacteria on contact. Therefore, this is something more going on here than just "not enough germs weakens immune system". The actual article is about possible negative effects that some chemicals, including Triclosan which is one ingredient used to make 'antibacterial' soap, have on the immune system.
When more than 5% of the population understands that you can't effectively stop terrorism by spending money. Any screening procedure is going to catch order of magnitude more false positives than true positives and is still going to cost orders of magnitude more than getting around it will. Not to mention: what the hell is the point of spending millions of dollars to prevent someone bringing a knife onto a plane, and then giving any passenger who orders steak a 6" steak knife?
Did the CEO get paid millions and millions of dollars and told not to come in tomorrow^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W fired?
Even if the source is from bacteria instead of peat moss (not dinosaurs), that still doesn't address the rate problem. So far as we know, oil is basically stable at the levels we drill for it, it doesn't decompose into something else over time. If that's true, that means that the deposits that we have access to took millions and millions of years to become as large as they are; in other words, oil still isn't a renewing resource, even ignoring the other long term problems involved in burning hydrocarbons for our energy production.
Wow, an analogy that is not only comically entertaining, but also shockingly accurate. I tip my hat to you good sir. *tips imaginary hat*
I think the closest plain English definition would be: has an interaction with something. More accurate, but more confusing might be: things are undefined until something happens that requires them to be defined in order for that something to happen. An electron doesn't have a position or a momentum until something occurs which require the electrons position and momentum to be known in order to determine the outcome. That might be a human being with an incredibly complex apparatus measuring the properties of an individual electron, or it might be a chemical reaction that is sweeping through the entire sample of whatever the electron is a part of.
Yeah, but it made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee; you know, the committee that is charged with upholding the constitution. The idea that something that should be a very contentious topic makes it through a committee who's primary responsibility is supposed to be safeguarding our constitutional rights without a single vote against it is, at the very least, concerning.
A) Power plants are much more efficient than ICE engines in automobiles. Even with losses due to transmission, charging, discharging, and inefficiencies in the motor, an electric vehicle still requires less energy to run.
B) As fuel prices change and legislation changes, it will be much easier to upgrade the electrical grid to 'green', renewable sources than it would be to upgrade the millions of cars on American streets.
C) Energy is largely fungible. It doesn't matter where the specific electricity you use comes from, because you using energy or not indirectly affects the price of energy all over the country (and to a lesser extent, the world). This would be even more true if our electrical grid were smarter, but even as it is today if you're pulling dozens of kilowatts of power from your local wind farm, you're hurting the environment at least as much as someone pulling a fewer kilowatts from a coal power plant. If the total demand were less, the renewables would be used in favor of the consumables, since the operating costs are proportionally smaller.
And what about non-emergency, but still important calls? See a piece of debris on the freeway? You can either call 911 (and they're not going to be to happy about that) or pull off the road, come to a complete stop, and make the call (which no one will do). Or you could just, for example, have your passenger call the local non-emergency line.
There are a multitude of situations where it makes more sense to allow the passenger to make phone calls than it does to mindlessly disable all cellphones in the car. As someone who regularly drives 5+ hours to visit family, it would piss me and my family off not to be able to get a hold of each other during that trip. Just enforce the distracted driving laws that are already on the books (not even the cell phone specific ones) and leave it at that.
I wonder... could you run Android in a virtual machine for use as a tablet and Windows 7 or Ubuntu for when you're using it as a laptop? Trying to combine the two form factors is always going to be tricky, given how unwieldy either UI is going to be when using it in the opposite mode. Unless someone comes out with a way to easily switch between the different UI styles as well as the hardware styles I think this is a non-starter.
There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe (I believe current understand says that if it were there our tools are powerful enough to see it) so it would seem that the part of the universe we live in is all matter. I suppose it's possible that the interface lies somewhere outside of our visible universe though.
Yes, capturing anti-ions is relatively easy (still quite hard though) since you can just use magnetic fields to confine the anti-matter without it coming into contact with the walls of the container. Getting the anti-protons and anti-electrons to combine into a single atom that stays at a low enough energy level that it can be contained for a significant amount of time is hard, especially since it is neutral and can't be contained with magnetic fields. They managed it here by producing very, very cold anti-hydrogen so that the energy levels were low enough that they didn't immediately annihilate with the regular matter that made up the container.
Absolute worst case scenario is a grey goo outbreak being treated basically like a fire (which, when you think about it is the ultimate grey goo machine). There's a limit to how much energy is available for replication, and there's a limit on how efficient you can make your replication (at some level, the replicating nanobots will be literally tearing apart and putting back together materials). Fighting the grey goo only involves tearing about the replicators, not necessarily wasting energy putting the pieces back together into something useful.
In other words, it should be trivial to design a nanobot that tears apart the self-replicators but doesn't waste energy by making copies of itself. This nanobot would be manufactured a head of time and stored for future use, or manufactured in specialist facilities (even in a mobile truck if necessary) that provide the energy input necessary for their production. As long as your facilities have more energy available than the self-replicators do, you'll win out eventually. And the replicators will only have about as much energy available as a fire can produce.
I understand the science journalist not understanding, but does the qualified physicist really not understand the difference between an 'observer' in the traditional sense and an observer in the quantum sense? All of the things that we detect with our advanced technology effect things throughout the universe whether we are looking at them or not, the things that they effect are observers. A grain of dust around a star that is given an every so slightly different orbit because of quantum effects is just as much an 'observer' as a human being looking through a telescope is.
Maybe he wanted a proof of concept without having to spend lots of money doing it? So he can crack a bunch of 6 character passwords in an hour or so, extrapolating up, and estimating a 100 fold increase in the search space for each extra character, you might end up spending several hundred years cracking a 10 character password. Now, what's handy is that you're just renting the equipment, I don't know how many GPU setups that Amazon has available, but it doesn't seem unlikely that you could rent several hundred, possibly even several thousand, of them at a time, cutting the time to crack a significant password down to under a year, which still seems pretty secure, especially given the cost of renting that many platforms.
But what happens in 5-10 years, after the performance per price ratio has doubled a few more times? Now you're down to maybe a single month for a wealthy individual to be able to crack a significant, real-world password. Give it another few generations of hardware and you're not even talking about a wealthy individual any more. Good luck convincing the average Joe that he needs to start remembering 15+ character passwords, especially if you're going to enforce truly random ones that aren't susceptible to more direct attacks.
I won't disagree with you, but only because they are overrated in the same way that Tolkien is overrated. That is, if you look at him compared to contemporary sources, he appears unimaginative, derivative, and even predictable. And then you take a big step back and you suddenly realize that there was nothing before it to be a derivative of. The started something new, something that took on a life of it's own, and they were so iconic that you can still hear their sounds in music today, 50 years later.
To know there is a rise you would need to have some kind of baseline on the current situation.
You do? If it rains for a week straight I can make a prediction that the river level will rise over the course of that week without knowing what the level of the river was before it started raining. It could be a dry creek bed or it could be an inch from bursting it's banks, that information doesn't necessarily factor into my prediction of a rise.
I'm no neurologist, but if I were to guess I'd say it's because flashbacks are primarily visual, with a bit of audio thrown in. Playing tetris occupies the visual, and to a lesser extent audio portions of the brain, preventing those pathways being used to lay down the upsetting memories over and over again. The quiz game however, uses the critical thinking parts of the brain and verbal memory retrieval (very few people remember the answers to quiz game type questions audio-visually). This leaves the audiovisual pathways open to lay down the unpleasant memories, which makes it ineffective at blocking the flashbacks. If I had to guess why the quiz game made the flashbacks worse, maybe the quiz questions were associating those memories with a lot of other random topics (the question topics being asked).
Yeah... because watching disturbing videos on the internet is exactly as difficult to get over as getting shot at, and shooting other people in combat. Why, it's practically the same thing. [/sarcasm]
Ever actually see someone suffer a real, honest to goodness war flashback? It took 20 minutes to get one of my co-workers out from underneath a table after a helicopter flew overhead once. Given the choice between learning to deal with that kind of intense flashback and not having that flashback at all, I guarantee every soldier out there would rather numb it away and be able to think back on that time without having the more irrational parts of their brains getting in the way.
Don't forget the real reason that they wanted to change the definition in the first place: current theory predicts that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of bodies in the outer solar system with basically the same composition and orbit as pluto, and only slightly smaller. There would be no logical reason to exclude those hundreds of bodies from the list of planets without also excluding Pluto, since there is little qualitative difference between them.
It's perfectly simple: Humans are not animals, Humans are fucking special. Ask just about anyone religious and my age, they'll tell you so: "No, humans aren't animals, now stop trying to change things".
See how ridiculous your non-argument sounds?
So wait... you accidentally walked up to the front door, accidentally defeated the lock somehow, and then accidentally walked through the front door. And in this case, changed the lock so the original owner couldn't get it and invited all your friends over for a party at your new place. Intent is pretty well established here, and I highly doubt that you could gain entrance to a strangers email unintentionally. Well, maybe if you found their account logged in on some public machine, but in that case you'd have a very, very good case and wouldn't be doing jail time.