I guess the short answer to your question is: not in your lifetime.
You are assuming that a better eye necessitates better resolution; but even with the same resolution, digital eyes can be much better than biological ones. For example, imagine having a 200x zoom lens inside it that you can control be squinting the right way (or using a remote if that is too far fetched.) Imagine being able to feed other data into it, like television data. Imagine having a whole computer interface that can put a transparent HUD over everything and supply you with additional information and even interaction.
Wow, this is making be really wish I was born 500 years from now, this'll all be so cool. Not that what we have now isn't cool, but you know, the grass is always greener. At least we still have a breathable atmosphere. Take that you crummy future cyborgs that have all this cool stuff.
That is an idiotic idea. Then the lobbies just attempt to give donations to lawmakers that would otherwise -oppose- the bill they want passed. The politician takes the money, and has effectively legally sold away his against vote. How would that help anything?
The idea of a lobby is to identify politicians they think support their position and try to help them get into office. This idea is alright, but it has been taken too far. Politicians are now willing to alter their positions in order garner lobby support. Furthermore, due to the monetary nature of the support, lobbies are dominated by corporate interests instead of citizens interest. What we need to do is either take the money out of getting elected or create a more integrated method of getting voter's money to the politician.
I think it is impossible to take the money aspect out of elections. No matter how many rules and regulations we throw up, there will always be a way to turn cash into exposure. What I suggest instead is some type of system which gets voters distributing more money to a wider variety of candidates. I'm not sure what form this system would take, but here is a suggestion: tax everyone something like $10 a year to be set aside for campaigning funds. Set up a system, probably online, which lets each person choose who their $10 goes to. Require that some percentage (maybe 50%) goes to smaller races so that the presidential/senate races don't get it all. Also require that some percentage (maybe 30%) goes to races outside of your voting district so that there is a national consequence to politicians actions besides the lobbies. With a system like this we could all put Joel Anderson in our 'morons I'd like to see out of office' list, and when election time come we could all give $.30 to whomever he is running against (assuming they are alright). This way, politicians would have to weigh lobbies support with an actually pertinent public support. So why can't we all just give $.30 now, anyway? Well there isn't much incentive to, and it isn't likely to make a difference if I do it all by myself. What this system would do is provide intensive, you've already had the money taken from you, so you may as well decide who it goes to. You will also know that tens of millions of other people will be doing the same thing and that together you will be reshaping the face of politics. That is a lot more motivation.
This is so ironic -- we just found Hubble in our old exoplanet image. You little humans have come so far. You should be proud, at least for the next 40 hours...
We sent a robot to look for water on Mars. It lands in an icy puddle, and gets covered in mud and tiny droplets (that behave just like water). But we can't tell if it's water or not.
Your tax dollars at work!
This is why sending manned missions is so important. I know a lot of people think that manned missions are a waste of resources -- but probes have a limited function and cannot react in ways they weren't initially designed for.
A human can wipe a solar panel or go check on the dripping liquids. A human can fix things, change things, build things and so on. Maybe one day we'll have a probe/robot sophisticated enough to be some fraction as useful as a human, but in the meantime, man is our best probe.
i've always wondered how they know the size and distance of these objects. short of running a tape measure out, how the hell do you calculate the size of something an unknown distance away?
The chain of logic is vast and complex, but I'll try to summarize:
1) First, we used radar and the speed of light to figure out the distances of things in our solar system. These calculations helped us figure out the diameter of the Earth's orbit, which is used in the next step, parallax.
2) Once we know the diameter of Earth's orbit, we used parallax to determine the distance to nearby stars. Parallax is a process of triangulation, where we use the earth at two extremes and the star we are looking at as the three points of a triangle. Knowing two angles and one side lets us solve for the distance to the star. But the resolution of our telescopes only lets us use this method with any accuracy for stars in our immediate vicinity.
3) Once we could figure our how far away nearby stars are, we began focusing in on types of stars that have fairly consistent outputs of energy in comparison to their other measurable traits, such as color. We call these consistent types of stars (and other astronomical objects) standard candles.
4) Once we are sure that these standard candles do indeed have consistently predictable outputs, we can guess how far away stars of these types are by noting that luminosity (total light output) and apparent brightness are related by a simple inverse distance squared relationship. This lets us estimate the distance to any type of star that has a fairly estimable luminosity.
5) After we have our standard candles mapped out in space, we can note the absorption lines in the light spectrum which indicates various types of dust and gasses. With this data we can make a rough map of where dust and gasses are floating around. This map will let us look at light from stars and objects that aren't standard candles and figure out how far away they should be to account for the absorption lines we see in their light spectrum.
6) After mapping out many of the nearby galaxies using supernovae as our key standard candle, we notices that is seems that there is a linear correlation between how far away an object is and how fast it is moving away from us (we can tell how fast an object is moving away from us using red-shift). This observation seems to show that the universe is expanding, but more important to the discussion at hand, it gives us another tool with which to estimate and map the distances of objects -- this time at any arbitrary distance.
Using the many of the above methods we can get estimates for how far away objects are, but the margin of error is huge because of all of the assumptions we've made. Plus of minus a magnitude or two is considered fairly precise in astronomical terms. This might have been more of an answer than you bargained for, but there you have it.
I'm afraid you're wrong. Theft requires an object to be taken from one person and given to another. Even if you ignore the "object" part of that definition, no one would call it "theft" when someone punctures your tire, taking away your ability to drive to the store. You wouldn't use the word theft because nothing was stolen. The puncturer doesn't now have the ability to drive to the store. He didn't "steal" that ability from you. No theft was committed.
Yet you are trying to use the word theft in the above incorrect context. You are claiming that the "thief" "stole" the ability to be the sole reproducer. But the "thief" doesn't now have the ability to be the sole reproducer, so how is it theft? Similar to puncturing a tire and taking the ability to drive to the store, copyright infringement is not theft. Not even the *IAA's try to charge people on theft. But I'm not talking about the law here, I'm taking about definitions. It is a fundamentally different situation when one steals something and when one copies something. And fundamentally different morals are involved.
If you want to argue that copyright infringement is wrong or immoral, go ahead -- that is your right and you might have a point. But if you are going to equate two things that are fundamentally different in the attempt to cast one of them in a bad light -- that is propaganda of the most manipulative sort.
Ah, good. I was thinking this whole discussion was quite one sided, and then you stepped up with ramblings about how the earth is getting warmer because God wants it to. Nice to see all side given some thought, even when they shouldn't be.
I'll just assume you're trolling, it makes me feel better.
As to the sun warming the earth (and mars), as stated above -- the solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
Face it, the actual cost to produce music CDs is pretty marginal these days. Most of the retail price of a CD is certainly not in manufacturing or shipping costs.
You're right, and if you look at my original estimates (GGP), we're about equal on manufacturing (in fact your estimate is higher). But you are forgetting about advertising, retail mark-up and a slew of miscellany.
Manufacturing is small change, and people forget to look at all the other costs.
You know, forget it. If pretending that the RIAA or evil record labels get all the money you pay for CDs is what gets you angry, then lets all pretend. I just wish we could be angry about the real issues.
Ridiculous estimates, and a perfect example of how people don't understand the costs of things. Being a business owner myself, I often am tearing my hair out in frustration because of people like you don't understanding the fundamental principles of economics that set my prices.
I'm with you against the RIAA and record labels, but these arguments which are factually untrue don't really help make our case. There are plenty of legitimate reason to be upset. Ignoring all of the record labels cost and saying that the labels are getting more than 80% or each CD's retail price is ridiculous.
... I can expect about $.25 is for the physical CD and case itself, about $.25 for printed meterials (or less), about $.50 going to the artist and the rest goes back to the RIAA.
Unfortunately your estimates are a little off. I'm assuming you are exaggerating, but the various cost stack up. Consumers have a tendency to look at something and go "that probably only costs $.50 to make and they're asking $4, I'm getting screwed." But they are never considering all the costs associated with getting the product to them. From the employee that stocked it to the parking lot they parked in, everything costs dearly. For a $10 CD, here is what you're more realistically looking at:
$.75 manufacturing (including damaged/returned items)
$1.50 shipping/packing/distribution
$1.50 advertising
$2.50 retail mark-up (for the store selling it)
$.75 effectively going to various taxes/fees
$1.50 to the record label
$1.50 to the artist
The record labels pays the RIAA, but even if they weren't, I doubt they would decrease their share. There are a lot of costs distributing physical goods that people don't think about.
The time dilation from moving at relativistic speeds makes it live longer. Just like in science fiction books -- people traveling from star to star at relativistic speeds can live for thousands of years (but it still feels like the normal amount of time to them).
Yes, but a crowd of humans is much more dense than a "crowd of atoms". Even the most dense materials look more like stars in a galaxy than humans in a crowd. Although, even that analogy is far too dense, especially near the center of a galaxy.
So imagine throwing a moon size object at a galaxy going about the speed of light. Will it hit a star? Maybe, but keep in mind that it is evaporating at a rate of one moon's volume a year. As you can see, it needs to hit a star within the first year. OK, lets say it hits something right away. Now it is two moons big (the star got compressed) and has two years to find it's next target, but that is hardly enough time to get to another star intentionally, let alone by chance.
As you can imagine, this object would evaporate long before it had any sort of stability accept in the rarest most unlikely case. Now realize that this analogy actually simulates something magnitudes more dense then the center of our planet and hawking radiation magnitudes smaller than in reality. Then you'll begin to understand what you're talking about.
There is a reason that in order to form a stable black hole in nature requires the collapse of a star so gigantic in size that we can hardy imagine the scale. It just takes that much material collapsing all at once. We don't have that much material on earth. We don't have that much material withing 10 light years of us.
The LHC simply is not going to create a world ending black hole. Period.
Wow, whoosh. Here, let be break it down for you. If they're wrong about the LHS -- and it can it fact create a black hole that will swallow the earth -- then the economic crisis, unemployment, conflict in the Middle East and world hunger will all be "solved".
Of course by "solved" we mean that the particles that once composed the atoms that used to form what used to be those problems will be smashed together into an object smaller than a grain of sand.
So you see, technology can help "solve" those problems, even in the sort term.
Slashdot Mirror
You do remember that Hitler ate breakfast too, right?
I guess the short answer to your question is: not in your lifetime.
You are assuming that a better eye necessitates better resolution; but even with the same resolution, digital eyes can be much better than biological ones. For example, imagine having a 200x zoom lens inside it that you can control be squinting the right way (or using a remote if that is too far fetched.) Imagine being able to feed other data into it, like television data. Imagine having a whole computer interface that can put a transparent HUD over everything and supply you with additional information and even interaction.
Wow, this is making be really wish I was born 500 years from now, this'll all be so cool. Not that what we have now isn't cool, but you know, the grass is always greener. At least we still have a breathable atmosphere. Take that you crummy future cyborgs that have all this cool stuff.
That is an idiotic idea. Then the lobbies just attempt to give donations to lawmakers that would otherwise -oppose- the bill they want passed. The politician takes the money, and has effectively legally sold away his against vote. How would that help anything?
The idea of a lobby is to identify politicians they think support their position and try to help them get into office. This idea is alright, but it has been taken too far. Politicians are now willing to alter their positions in order garner lobby support. Furthermore, due to the monetary nature of the support, lobbies are dominated by corporate interests instead of citizens interest. What we need to do is either take the money out of getting elected or create a more integrated method of getting voter's money to the politician.
I think it is impossible to take the money aspect out of elections. No matter how many rules and regulations we throw up, there will always be a way to turn cash into exposure. What I suggest instead is some type of system which gets voters distributing more money to a wider variety of candidates. I'm not sure what form this system would take, but here is a suggestion: tax everyone something like $10 a year to be set aside for campaigning funds. Set up a system, probably online, which lets each person choose who their $10 goes to. Require that some percentage (maybe 50%) goes to smaller races so that the presidential/senate races don't get it all. Also require that some percentage (maybe 30%) goes to races outside of your voting district so that there is a national consequence to politicians actions besides the lobbies. With a system like this we could all put Joel Anderson in our 'morons I'd like to see out of office' list, and when election time come we could all give $.30 to whomever he is running against (assuming they are alright). This way, politicians would have to weigh lobbies support with an actually pertinent public support. So why can't we all just give $.30 now, anyway? Well there isn't much incentive to, and it isn't likely to make a difference if I do it all by myself. What this system would do is provide intensive, you've already had the money taken from you, so you may as well decide who it goes to. You will also know that tens of millions of other people will be doing the same thing and that together you will be reshaping the face of politics. That is a lot more motivation.
His name isn't actually Joe Webber, do some research before bitching. You might also try giving the summery benefit of the doubt.
But grid-tie won't help at all when the grid goes down.
It will if it is daytime.
This is so ironic -- we just found Hubble in our old exoplanet image. You little humans have come so far. You should be proud, at least for the next 40 hours...
Sincerely,
The Hostile Aliens
Necessity, brilliant.
... In a few decades, we'll have a race of human-adverse crocs.
Either that or we'll have a race of bullet resistant, really pissed off crocs.
Also, fuck you? ... Did I do that right? Maybe a little more sass. Eh-hem, also, fuck you! No, no, this meme just isn't working for me.
No the worst are the people who passive aggressively bitch at other people's opinions on bitching about bitching.
No no, there are worse people.
We sent a robot to look for water on Mars. It lands in an icy puddle, and gets covered in mud and tiny droplets (that behave just like water). But we can't tell if it's water or not. Your tax dollars at work!
This is why sending manned missions is so important. I know a lot of people think that manned missions are a waste of resources -- but probes have a limited function and cannot react in ways they weren't initially designed for.
A human can wipe a solar panel or go check on the dripping liquids. A human can fix things, change things, build things and so on. Maybe one day we'll have a probe/robot sophisticated enough to be some fraction as useful as a human, but in the meantime, man is our best probe.
i've always wondered how they know the size and distance of these objects. short of running a tape measure out, how the hell do you calculate the size of something an unknown distance away?
The chain of logic is vast and complex, but I'll try to summarize:
1) First, we used radar and the speed of light to figure out the distances of things in our solar system. These calculations helped us figure out the diameter of the Earth's orbit, which is used in the next step, parallax.
2) Once we know the diameter of Earth's orbit, we used parallax to determine the distance to nearby stars. Parallax is a process of triangulation, where we use the earth at two extremes and the star we are looking at as the three points of a triangle. Knowing two angles and one side lets us solve for the distance to the star. But the resolution of our telescopes only lets us use this method with any accuracy for stars in our immediate vicinity.
3) Once we could figure our how far away nearby stars are, we began focusing in on types of stars that have fairly consistent outputs of energy in comparison to their other measurable traits, such as color. We call these consistent types of stars (and other astronomical objects) standard candles.
4) Once we are sure that these standard candles do indeed have consistently predictable outputs, we can guess how far away stars of these types are by noting that luminosity (total light output) and apparent brightness are related by a simple inverse distance squared relationship. This lets us estimate the distance to any type of star that has a fairly estimable luminosity.
5) After we have our standard candles mapped out in space, we can note the absorption lines in the light spectrum which indicates various types of dust and gasses. With this data we can make a rough map of where dust and gasses are floating around. This map will let us look at light from stars and objects that aren't standard candles and figure out how far away they should be to account for the absorption lines we see in their light spectrum.
6) After mapping out many of the nearby galaxies using supernovae as our key standard candle, we notices that is seems that there is a linear correlation between how far away an object is and how fast it is moving away from us (we can tell how fast an object is moving away from us using red-shift). This observation seems to show that the universe is expanding, but more important to the discussion at hand, it gives us another tool with which to estimate and map the distances of objects -- this time at any arbitrary distance.
Using the many of the above methods we can get estimates for how far away objects are, but the margin of error is huge because of all of the assumptions we've made. Plus of minus a magnitude or two is considered fairly precise in astronomical terms. This might have been more of an answer than you bargained for, but there you have it.
That is interesting, do you have some evidence for me? I'm not bashing you, I'd just like to read up.
Unvaccinated? Ah, I see, the firefox spell checker got you.
I'm afraid you're wrong. Theft requires an object to be taken from one person and given to another. Even if you ignore the "object" part of that definition, no one would call it "theft" when someone punctures your tire, taking away your ability to drive to the store. You wouldn't use the word theft because nothing was stolen. The puncturer doesn't now have the ability to drive to the store. He didn't "steal" that ability from you. No theft was committed.
Yet you are trying to use the word theft in the above incorrect context. You are claiming that the "thief" "stole" the ability to be the sole reproducer. But the "thief" doesn't now have the ability to be the sole reproducer, so how is it theft? Similar to puncturing a tire and taking the ability to drive to the store, copyright infringement is not theft. Not even the *IAA's try to charge people on theft. But I'm not talking about the law here, I'm taking about definitions. It is a fundamentally different situation when one steals something and when one copies something. And fundamentally different morals are involved.
If you want to argue that copyright infringement is wrong or immoral, go ahead -- that is your right and you might have a point. But if you are going to equate two things that are fundamentally different in the attempt to cast one of them in a bad light -- that is propaganda of the most manipulative sort.
Artificial light people, we've been using it for decades, you think it isn't good enough for plants?
There is always artificial light.
Ah, good. I was thinking this whole discussion was quite one sided, and then you stepped up with ramblings about how the earth is getting warmer because God wants it to. Nice to see all side given some thought, even when they shouldn't be.
I'll just assume you're trolling, it makes me feel better.
As to the sun warming the earth (and mars), as stated above -- the solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
Face it, the actual cost to produce music CDs is pretty marginal these days. Most of the retail price of a CD is certainly not in manufacturing or shipping costs.
You're right, and if you look at my original estimates (GGP), we're about equal on manufacturing (in fact your estimate is higher). But you are forgetting about advertising, retail mark-up and a slew of miscellany.
Manufacturing is small change, and people forget to look at all the other costs.
You know, forget it. If pretending that the RIAA or evil record labels get all the money you pay for CDs is what gets you angry, then lets all pretend. I just wish we could be angry about the real issues.
Ridiculous estimates, and a perfect example of how people don't understand the costs of things. Being a business owner myself, I often am tearing my hair out in frustration because of people like you don't understanding the fundamental principles of economics that set my prices.
I'm with you against the RIAA and record labels, but these arguments which are factually untrue don't really help make our case. There are plenty of legitimate reason to be upset. Ignoring all of the record labels cost and saying that the labels are getting more than 80% or each CD's retail price is ridiculous.
Unfortunately your estimates are a little off. I'm assuming you are exaggerating, but the various cost stack up. Consumers have a tendency to look at something and go "that probably only costs $.50 to make and they're asking $4, I'm getting screwed." But they are never considering all the costs associated with getting the product to them. From the employee that stocked it to the parking lot they parked in, everything costs dearly. For a $10 CD, here is what you're more realistically looking at:
$.75 manufacturing (including damaged/returned items)
$1.50 shipping/packing/distribution
$1.50 advertising
$2.50 retail mark-up (for the store selling it)
$.75 effectively going to various taxes/fees
$1.50 to the record label
$1.50 to the artist
The record labels pays the RIAA, but even if they weren't, I doubt they would decrease their share. There are a lot of costs distributing physical goods that people don't think about.
It is hard to tax something so easily grown at home.
Um... It's equally hard to tax something smuggled in/grown and sold illegally.
I believe overcoming the 4gb ram barrier will be reason enough to switch for gaming, assuming that performance is as good.
The time dilation from moving at relativistic speeds makes it live longer. Just like in science fiction books -- people traveling from star to star at relativistic speeds can live for thousands of years (but it still feels like the normal amount of time to them).
Yes, but a crowd of humans is much more dense than a "crowd of atoms". Even the most dense materials look more like stars in a galaxy than humans in a crowd. Although, even that analogy is far too dense, especially near the center of a galaxy.
So imagine throwing a moon size object at a galaxy going about the speed of light. Will it hit a star? Maybe, but keep in mind that it is evaporating at a rate of one moon's volume a year. As you can see, it needs to hit a star within the first year. OK, lets say it hits something right away. Now it is two moons big (the star got compressed) and has two years to find it's next target, but that is hardly enough time to get to another star intentionally, let alone by chance.
As you can imagine, this object would evaporate long before it had any sort of stability accept in the rarest most unlikely case. Now realize that this analogy actually simulates something magnitudes more dense then the center of our planet and hawking radiation magnitudes smaller than in reality. Then you'll begin to understand what you're talking about.
There is a reason that in order to form a stable black hole in nature requires the collapse of a star so gigantic in size that we can hardy imagine the scale. It just takes that much material collapsing all at once. We don't have that much material on earth. We don't have that much material withing 10 light years of us.
The LHC simply is not going to create a world ending black hole. Period.
Wow, whoosh. Here, let be break it down for you. If they're wrong about the LHS -- and it can it fact create a black hole that will swallow the earth -- then the economic crisis, unemployment, conflict in the Middle East and world hunger will all be "solved".
Of course by "solved" we mean that the particles that once composed the atoms that used to form what used to be those problems will be smashed together into an object smaller than a grain of sand.
So you see, technology can help "solve" those problems, even in the sort term.