The big problem is not now, but 20+ years from now as society will likely start to enter the replication age and 3d-printer/nano/bio technologies will eventually shift manufacturing away from the factory and back into the home. When this happens, some people will see this as a way to create tremendous wealth by offering creation related services. Unfortunately, others will see this as an opportunity to extract nearly infinite licensing royalities.
Within 20+ years, all current patents will have been expired anyway. That kind of patent only lasts 17 years. If you think that it's not okay for me to ask someone to pay for my invention in the 17 years after its use, just because they're the ones doing the manufacturing, then I don't know what to tell you; it's not as if the current manufacturers don't. With the shift in work burden comes also the shift in responsibility burden.
Do you think iTunes is okay? What about CDs made from your iTunes tracks? Do you get to sell those, or do you need to pay the musician?
The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
That's why the monopoly is temporary. As far as the rewards to inventors being dubious, hardly: none of my several businesses would have been possible if I had to fear some giant corporation swooping in and stealing my lunch the second I was done making it.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question.
Er. That's exactly what the current system does. The only time it goes to court is when some third party attempts to use your patent without rights. That you only ever see them going to court is a reflection of interest: the normal pay-a-fee-then-use process is fairly boring, and as such doesn't get reported upon.
Of course, under our current system we have something better: required disclosure. That means that everyone knows how it's done, and once the temporary protection is over, everyone can use it. It's much closer to the FOSS ideal than the replacement you describe, with a 20-year admission to economics to make the hard work of development and the harder work of protection feasable for the people taking the risk.
There is an alternate system for if you want to not disclose, called "Trade Secrets," which more closely mimics what you're suggesting; however, as it's largely useless, it's very rarely used except in situations like food and perfume formulas.
You taxation ideas are about 150 years behind the times. Please read up on economics before purporting to be able to replace them; valuing all objects equally means that the valueless ones still don't get bought, and the valuable ones aren't developed since the rewards wouldn't be compensatory. All your suggestions would do was prevent lots of inventions from happening in the first place.
There's a very good reason that in the three years after this system was adopted, the rate of US technical development increased by almost 400%. Perhaps you should wait until you've tried to structure a business before complaining about business structure rules?
If I actually believed that lawmakers had my best interests at heart, then I'd be a fucking ignorant sheeple like you are.
This attitude is one of the hallmarks of psychopathy, as is lashing out when criticised. You've displayed your hand, and are now marginalized. Thanks for doing my footwork for me.
And you can't claim that FreeNode's dependence on insecure auth isn't a flaw in FreeNode. It is.
Yes, I most certainly can claim that a correct implementation of a protocol with a flaw is the fault of the protocol, not the implementation. That's why FTP servers' insecurities aren't their faults. This is a basic principle of network security.
s/psychotic/psychopathic/g . Though, going by your responses to date, I'm sure you'll pretend that a simple near-word slip up which was immediately corrected is in fact indicative that I don't know what I'm talking about, or some other transparent and shallow self serving nonsense.
It's a joke for people who have a basic understanding of physics. Also, no, objects are not all sound generators; a still object isn't generating sound (Air currents whacking off of it? It's the air that's the generator.)
The reason it's funny is that anyone who has sense knows that that kind of thing is way, way outside of our technology, and that it's only such an object on a technicality. To use your own example, if someone put a sign on a brick that said "sound generator," that would be essentially true too, but obviously a joke, because a brick isn't a real sound generator.
Please don't make the argument for ignorane. It's ugly. I promise I won't wound you by answering your questions in the future. Douche. I can't imagine why you'd ask for clarification if you're just going to talk back to the person who explained it to you, but I won't bother you again.
By the way, that frequency control? It was just a disconnected knob (something you should recognize as a like mind.) The Daleks had knobs which didn't actually do anything too. So did the set of the Enterprise. In the attempt to make a believable object, sometimes we give it pseudo-convincing controls. It wouldn't be a very funny gravity generator if it didn't even *try* to look like a scientific instrument, now, would it?
For someone with a physics related nick, you sure don't seem to know much about physics.
And, luckily, if that's talking on a cellular phone, in better states like California, you will go right the fuck to jail, where you deserve to be.
You're an idiot if you think that.
The law allows for it, and San Diego County has been doing it for a year and a half. If I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot backed up by fact. Think I'm wrong? Try driving up Aero Drive and yakking on a cellular. You won't make it halfway to the mall.
Maybe in SOME parts of California they actually write tickets for that, but not anywhere I've ever been.
So I'm an idiot for thinking something even if I'm right in some parts of the state? You, sir, need to learn to converse without insults. You're neither correct enough nor funny enough to pull it off.
Welcome to the real world: you don't get to do whatever you want just because you think you're smarter than the law. (By the by, you aren't.)
Which meaning of "law" are you using here? Because I think I just might be.
There's only one germane meaning of law in this context. Don't play douchebag fake semantics games.
Yes, that's what drunk drivers, pirates, NAMBLA members, burglars and politicians all say. You're just an antisocial psychopath like the rest. (Go look the clinical definition up. You're acting with complete disregard to the safety and practices of people around you based on arbitrary personal decision. That's the definition of psychopath.)
Oh, and by the way, the law is based on the will of several hundred million people, literally thousands of university and industrial studies, tens of thousands of hours of political debate and god only knows how many findings of fact in court.
Believe it or not, even though you're psychotic, you're just not smarter than all of that. That you refuse to follow the law isn't insight. It's conceit. You'll be a better man if you ever learn the difference.
I've never seen an enemy list as long as yours. I'd say the same about your friend list, but it appears to be mostly floods from other enemies.
Call me a jerk and wrong all you like, but your arguments are hollow, your information is false, and your list of relationships speaks for itself. I'd contend that you're essentially confusing yourself for me.
But, be sure to get the last word in. I won't be wasting my time on you again after this. I've been on slashdot for eight years, I have six people in my foe list, and I'm sure you'll still tell yourself you're not the jerk in the equation, then go back to your city of unadmirers.
The worst thing about people like you is that you're so unable to see your own problems that you'll never repair them. You're just stuck like that. I genuinely feel bad for you.
My methode of datastorage is much more secure. I have all my data written on the hand of God.
And that'll fail the second the next Neitsczhe comes around.
I have the only truly permanent backup mechanism: make your data into a Slashdot joke. It will be archived on roughly 1/4 of all blogs for the next eight years, and will be repeated ad nauseam in Slashdot for the rest of time.
Of course, you need some sort of steganography which is resistant to hot grits noise in your signal. Even with Russian prodigy hacker groups watching the machine, the high signal/noise ratio would cause capacitance effects in large metal grids, bringing the information in over powerlines and exposing people in homes to and large volumes of the evil bit. Since those go the last mile to the home, they get near our kids. Won't somebody please think of the hacker children? (Though, as established previously, in Soviet Russia, the hacker children think of you.)
And even then it might be vulnerable to some ^H^H^H^H^H^H, leading to media-delivered data FUD even if you're running the sampler on a Beowulf Cluster on all your base (in Japan!,) even though by then it's likely to be on Aibo, the family dog (in Japan!,) which is popular pretty much everywhere but Nebraska (and no, I didn't forget Poland.) If we get to wifi power distribution this might be handlable, which seems likely since only old people in Korea use power lines, and when I was your age we didn't need power besides - we made our own candles from tallow and abacus rods, and we liked it. The hardware requirements unfortunately would be huge; sooner or later, it wouldn't be a beowulf cluster - it'd be a space station.
[[ SIG Out of jokes.... Buffering... ]]
On a tangent: You kids and your powered light; we had to wear special glasses to see in the dark, because it built character (not Angband characters.) Now, you kids in your bright rooms don't even wear the goggles, because they do nothing. If the power grid ever gets terroristed, you'll be in the dark ages, unable to see, tripping over furniture, and I only hope and pray that no-one gets hurt by flying chairs. Also, it's going to fucking kill Google, and since Google leads to Wikipedia Syndrome, the source of all stupid, we're looking at a possible takeover by Grammar Nazis. If they take power, the only legitimate answer to "how many Libraries of Congress is that?" will be "none." (This is offensive to anyone who knows that the appropriate answer is 42.) Indeed, the Library of Congress will be book-burned down to zero: no wireless, less space than a nomad; lame.
[[ SIG Out of jokes. Buffering more offtopic nonsense. ]]
But, if everyone tries to use this backup, since we're all so afraid of losing our facebook in this post 9/11 world, it might crack under the strain, and by then, of course, the dog is on fire - except in Nebraska - and even if you think you need to control shift kill it (I find your lack of faith disturbing,) since it's a robot dog, it's not vulnerable to normal anti-FIDO-net technologies, you insensitive clod. And poisoning won't work, because you didn't offer chocolate for it (therefore you can take your chocolate bar and shove it up your ass; I'm watching TiVo, not FiDo AiBo.) In fact, you'll need some powered exoskeletons just to take it down. This would mean to preserve your data would need 1) excursion for great justice into the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 2) ???, 3) Exoskeleton!. (I urge you from Zimbabwe to prepare for this eventuality; please fill in you credit card number, social security number, date of birth, mother's maiden name and your password to all you most important information below.) The attack would mean eliminating about 1/4 of the blogosphere, at which a great disturbance would be felt in the Emo, as if a million blogtards cried out and then were silenced at once. Talk about NO CARRIER.
[[ SIG (You keep saying that word, Sig. I do not think it means what you think it m
Given that the flying spaghetti monster is the creator, I wish he'd create a new joke. This one's as old as time immemorial. You might as well dust off the hot grits jokes.
If every kilogram of extra weight costs a tonne of fuel, and the entire US fleet added the 100 kilos of equipment required, that would be 30,000 gallons of fuel times by 1600 aircraft that is 48,000,000 gallons of fuel per year, CO2 straight into the stratosphere, so you can get wifi?
And if every kilogram of extra weight costs eight tons of fuel, and the equipment required was 500 kilograms, then that would be two billion gallons of fuel.
The problem with made-up numbers is that they're made up. It doesn't cost a ton of fuel to move a kilogram; if it did, a 300-person plane with people at an average of 90 kg per person would need 27,000 tons of fuel. Planes actually get much better gas mileage per person than cars do. Back in reality, planes get about 1/5 mpg.
Also, if you really think a transponder weighs 400 pounds, I don't know what to tell you. They're more like 3 pounds, including the aiming assembly.
Think about it: if you have a laptop, PocketPC, or whatever and know you're going to be suck in a crowded cabin for anywhere from two to seven hours, wouldn't you pay $50 or $100 more for the ticket package in order to book a flight with internet access?
Not if their competition offers it as a value-add for $19. Surprisingly, some of us won't spend $100 extra to get a $20 option for free.
If the speed of gravity is greater than the speed of light, does that violate the general relativity?
Yes. It also violates special relativity and the laws of cause and effect.
Whereas I'm certainly not defending the grandparent post, as the poster was a huge douchebag, I should point out that in fact there are several things whose effects can cross a distance in a timeframe shorter than that which light would also take. Given that we're not entirely sure of the nature of gravity, we don't actually know that this would in fact violate relativity - sure, if it's something like the Higgs Boson or the Graviton at work it would, but there are several gravitational theories which aren't obviously wrong that rely on some form of entanglement, and entangled particles can co-react at distances and speeds which relativity would otherwise prevent (that bose-einstein condensate ansible they made six years ago comes to mind.)
A little realism: LIGO and its kin may teach us something new about gravity near neutron stars and black holes, but the most likely outcome is that it will simply serve as a telescope to probe astrophysical phenomena not detectable in visible light. It is very farfetched to think that it will lead to antigravity or any Star Trek type applications.
One is reminded of the reactions received by Faraday, Dyson, Vannevar Bush and Feynman. Whereas I'm inclined to agree that we're not likely to derive any low-power neato technologies from a better understanding of gravity, I don't think it's entirely reasnable to call it far-fetched. For example, once we better understood electromagnetism, we knew how to manipulate it to cause pulses (not that it's particularly reasonable, but a carefully vibrated quantum black hole might do the same for gravity.) Once we knew how to pulse magnetism, anodizing became relatively easy. The end result? Better cookware, mag-lites and more durable car engines.
Who knows what we'll learn to do in materials science when we learn how to manipulate gravity?
Sigh. This experiment has nothing to do with the speed of gravity, which nobody believes is anything other than the exact speed of light. What you're quoting was someone saying "wow, we've proven that our believed speed is correct within 20%, and the frame of proof is perfectly centered."
If the speed of gravity is greater than the speed of light, does that violate the general relativity?
No. But still, it isn't faster than light. Also, there are several things which are faster than light without violating relativity; we have experimentally verified particle entanglement with bose-einstein condensates for up to half a second now, for example. (For a more comprehensible explanation, look up the science fiction term "ansible" - the idea is similar enough that when you go back to read about the real thing, light bulbs should start going on.)
If this test is sucessful, what can be used with the information the scientists gain? It may become possible to predict future ripples, but the nature of such phenomena would suggest that they can't be avoided or blocked.
The issue is one of context. We have a whole bunch of data that we're not entirely sure how to interpret, and although we have a lot of very convincing extrapolations, we really can't work with them until we know some of the foundational material is correct. There are dozens of examples of where scientists have built large cloud castles on assumptions, only to have them ripped out from underneath; my personal favorite is the theory of phlogiston, which is really quite an elegant theory, up until you discover that oxidation is the adding of an element rather than the extraction of an element. A whole bunch of impressive work was lost because it was invalidated when that theory went away.
By comparison, what we're doing here is essentially akin to trying to find out what burning really does. We're attempting to confirm frame relativity. Once we have said confirmation, then we can say "okay, that means that this interpretation of this data is correct, and that interpretation of that data is correct, and that means some other thing." We are providing ourselves an attempt at a proof of context by which to confirm other beliefs and extrapolations.
What direct use will this have? None. But it's the foundation of a lot of different direct stuff. Recent examples of such a thing include the exploratory work done into phase duality and uncertainty locii, which eventually led to our understanding the charge field effect, and thusly to our being able to manufacture LEDs (and a whole bunch of other crap.)
As an aside, whoever marked this question off-topic is an asshole. It's not only on-topic, but a damned smart question for someone who isn't an expert in the field.
You'll find more contemporary examples - especially those that get covered on TV and Slashdot, like the solar neutrino problem and super kameo-kande - will get through more successfully to these "omg what's a history" noobs.
Wait, let me get this straight. Did you really just say that if we don't have an alternative theory, we shouldn't test the one we have?
You should read up on the history of physics. Pay particular attention to the phlogiston, Antoine Lavoisier and the solar neutrino problem; all three are cases where it wasn't until we had disproving experimental data that we had enough information to even begin to formulate alternate theories.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever marked this informative needs to be meta-moderated into the ground.
The big problem is not now, but 20+ years from now as society will likely start to enter the replication age and 3d-printer/nano/bio technologies will eventually shift manufacturing away from the factory and back into the home. When this happens, some people will see this as a way to create tremendous wealth by offering creation related services. Unfortunately, others will see this as an opportunity to extract nearly infinite licensing royalities.
Within 20+ years, all current patents will have been expired anyway. That kind of patent only lasts 17 years. If you think that it's not okay for me to ask someone to pay for my invention in the 17 years after its use, just because they're the ones doing the manufacturing, then I don't know what to tell you; it's not as if the current manufacturers don't. With the shift in work burden comes also the shift in responsibility burden.
Do you think iTunes is okay? What about CDs made from your iTunes tracks? Do you get to sell those, or do you need to pay the musician?
It's really the same thing.
The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
That's why the monopoly is temporary. As far as the rewards to inventors being dubious, hardly: none of my several businesses would have been possible if I had to fear some giant corporation swooping in and stealing my lunch the second I was done making it.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question.
Er. That's exactly what the current system does. The only time it goes to court is when some third party attempts to use your patent without rights. That you only ever see them going to court is a reflection of interest: the normal pay-a-fee-then-use process is fairly boring, and as such doesn't get reported upon.
Of course, under our current system we have something better: required disclosure. That means that everyone knows how it's done, and once the temporary protection is over, everyone can use it. It's much closer to the FOSS ideal than the replacement you describe, with a 20-year admission to economics to make the hard work of development and the harder work of protection feasable for the people taking the risk.
There is an alternate system for if you want to not disclose, called "Trade Secrets," which more closely mimics what you're suggesting; however, as it's largely useless, it's very rarely used except in situations like food and perfume formulas.
You taxation ideas are about 150 years behind the times. Please read up on economics before purporting to be able to replace them; valuing all objects equally means that the valueless ones still don't get bought, and the valuable ones aren't developed since the rewards wouldn't be compensatory. All your suggestions would do was prevent lots of inventions from happening in the first place.
There's a very good reason that in the three years after this system was adopted, the rate of US technical development increased by almost 400%. Perhaps you should wait until you've tried to structure a business before complaining about business structure rules?
If I actually believed that lawmakers had my best interests at heart, then I'd be a fucking ignorant sheeple like you are.
This attitude is one of the hallmarks of psychopathy, as is lashing out when criticised. You've displayed your hand, and are now marginalized. Thanks for doing my footwork for me.
On smaller ("regular size") tvs dvds and hddvds look pretty much the same at normal viewing distances.
You need glasses.
And you can't claim that FreeNode's dependence on insecure auth isn't a flaw in FreeNode. It is.
Yes, I most certainly can claim that a correct implementation of a protocol with a flaw is the fault of the protocol, not the implementation. That's why FTP servers' insecurities aren't their faults. This is a basic principle of network security.
s/psychotic/psychopathic/g . Though, going by your responses to date, I'm sure you'll pretend that a simple near-word slip up which was immediately corrected is in fact indicative that I don't know what I'm talking about, or some other transparent and shallow self serving nonsense.
It's a joke for people who have a basic understanding of physics. Also, no, objects are not all sound generators; a still object isn't generating sound (Air currents whacking off of it? It's the air that's the generator.)
The reason it's funny is that anyone who has sense knows that that kind of thing is way, way outside of our technology, and that it's only such an object on a technicality. To use your own example, if someone put a sign on a brick that said "sound generator," that would be essentially true too, but obviously a joke, because a brick isn't a real sound generator.
Please don't make the argument for ignorane. It's ugly. I promise I won't wound you by answering your questions in the future. Douche. I can't imagine why you'd ask for clarification if you're just going to talk back to the person who explained it to you, but I won't bother you again.
By the way, that frequency control? It was just a disconnected knob (something you should recognize as a like mind.) The Daleks had knobs which didn't actually do anything too. So did the set of the Enterprise. In the attempt to make a believable object, sometimes we give it pseudo-convincing controls. It wouldn't be a very funny gravity generator if it didn't even *try* to look like a scientific instrument, now, would it?
For someone with a physics related nick, you sure don't seem to know much about physics.
And, luckily, if that's talking on a cellular phone, in better states like California, you will go right the fuck to jail, where you deserve to be.
You're an idiot if you think that.
The law allows for it, and San Diego County has been doing it for a year and a half. If I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot backed up by fact. Think I'm wrong? Try driving up Aero Drive and yakking on a cellular. You won't make it halfway to the mall.
Maybe in SOME parts of California they actually write tickets for that, but not anywhere I've ever been.
So I'm an idiot for thinking something even if I'm right in some parts of the state? You, sir, need to learn to converse without insults. You're neither correct enough nor funny enough to pull it off.
Welcome to the real world: you don't get to do whatever you want just because you think you're smarter than the law. (By the by, you aren't.)
Which meaning of "law" are you using here? Because I think I just might be.
There's only one germane meaning of law in this context. Don't play douchebag fake semantics games.
Yes, that's what drunk drivers, pirates, NAMBLA members, burglars and politicians all say. You're just an antisocial psychopath like the rest. (Go look the clinical definition up. You're acting with complete disregard to the safety and practices of people around you based on arbitrary personal decision. That's the definition of psychopath.)
Oh, and by the way, the law is based on the will of several hundred million people, literally thousands of university and industrial studies, tens of thousands of hours of political debate and god only knows how many findings of fact in court.
Believe it or not, even though you're psychotic, you're just not smarter than all of that. That you refuse to follow the law isn't insight. It's conceit. You'll be a better man if you ever learn the difference.
I've never seen an enemy list as long as yours. I'd say the same about your friend list, but it appears to be mostly floods from other enemies.
Call me a jerk and wrong all you like, but your arguments are hollow, your information is false, and your list of relationships speaks for itself. I'd contend that you're essentially confusing yourself for me.
But, be sure to get the last word in. I won't be wasting my time on you again after this. I've been on slashdot for eight years, I have six people in my foe list, and I'm sure you'll still tell yourself you're not the jerk in the equation, then go back to your city of unadmirers.
The worst thing about people like you is that you're so unable to see your own problems that you'll never repair them. You're just stuck like that. I genuinely feel bad for you.
My methode of datastorage is much more secure. I have all my data written on the hand of God.
... Buffering ... ]]
And that'll fail the second the next Neitsczhe comes around.
I have the only truly permanent backup mechanism: make your data into a Slashdot joke. It will be archived on roughly 1/4 of all blogs for the next eight years, and will be repeated ad nauseam in Slashdot for the rest of time.
Of course, you need some sort of steganography which is resistant to hot grits noise in your signal. Even with Russian prodigy hacker groups watching the machine, the high signal/noise ratio would cause capacitance effects in large metal grids, bringing the information in over powerlines and exposing people in homes to and large volumes of the evil bit. Since those go the last mile to the home, they get near our kids. Won't somebody please think of the hacker children? (Though, as established previously, in Soviet Russia, the hacker children think of you.)
And even then it might be vulnerable to some ^H^H^H^H^H^H, leading to media-delivered data FUD even if you're running the sampler on a Beowulf Cluster on all your base (in Japan!,) even though by then it's likely to be on Aibo, the family dog (in Japan!,) which is popular pretty much everywhere but Nebraska (and no, I didn't forget Poland.) If we get to wifi power distribution this might be handlable, which seems likely since only old people in Korea use power lines, and when I was your age we didn't need power besides - we made our own candles from tallow and abacus rods, and we liked it. The hardware requirements unfortunately would be huge; sooner or later, it wouldn't be a beowulf cluster - it'd be a space station.
[[ SIG Out of jokes.
On a tangent: You kids and your powered light; we had to wear special glasses to see in the dark, because it built character (not Angband characters.) Now, you kids in your bright rooms don't even wear the goggles, because they do nothing. If the power grid ever gets terroristed, you'll be in the dark ages, unable to see, tripping over furniture, and I only hope and pray that no-one gets hurt by flying chairs. Also, it's going to fucking kill Google, and since Google leads to Wikipedia Syndrome, the source of all stupid, we're looking at a possible takeover by Grammar Nazis. If they take power, the only legitimate answer to "how many Libraries of Congress is that?" will be "none." (This is offensive to anyone who knows that the appropriate answer is 42.) Indeed, the Library of Congress will be book-burned down to zero: no wireless, less space than a nomad; lame.
[[ SIG Out of jokes. Buffering more offtopic nonsense. ]]
But, if everyone tries to use this backup, since we're all so afraid of losing our facebook in this post 9/11 world, it might crack under the strain, and by then, of course, the dog is on fire - except in Nebraska - and even if you think you need to control shift kill it (I find your lack of faith disturbing,) since it's a robot dog, it's not vulnerable to normal anti-FIDO-net technologies, you insensitive clod. And poisoning won't work, because you didn't offer chocolate for it (therefore you can take your chocolate bar and shove it up your ass; I'm watching TiVo, not FiDo AiBo.) In fact, you'll need some powered exoskeletons just to take it down. This would mean to preserve your data would need 1) excursion for great justice into the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 2) ???, 3) Exoskeleton!. (I urge you from Zimbabwe to prepare for this eventuality; please fill in you credit card number, social security number, date of birth, mother's maiden name and your password to all you most important information below.) The attack would mean eliminating about 1/4 of the blogosphere, at which a great disturbance would be felt in the Emo, as if a million blogtards cried out and then were silenced at once. Talk about NO CARRIER.
[[ SIG (You keep saying that word, Sig. I do not think it means what you think it m
You know, it's been more than a year since I laughed at one of those. Lauhging at that almost made me feel dirty.
Me. I don't need wifi for the whole trip, but it'd be great to be able to connect and send some email.
Besides, lots of us have laptops that can make the whole trip, and lots of trips are only an hour or two.
Given that the flying spaghetti monster is the creator, I wish he'd create a new joke. This one's as old as time immemorial. You might as well dust off the hot grits jokes.
If every kilogram of extra weight costs a tonne of fuel, and the entire US fleet added the 100 kilos of equipment required, that would be 30,000 gallons of fuel times by 1600 aircraft that is 48,000,000 gallons of fuel per year, CO2 straight into the stratosphere, so you can get wifi?
And if every kilogram of extra weight costs eight tons of fuel, and the equipment required was 500 kilograms, then that would be two billion gallons of fuel.
The problem with made-up numbers is that they're made up. It doesn't cost a ton of fuel to move a kilogram; if it did, a 300-person plane with people at an average of 90 kg per person would need 27,000 tons of fuel. Planes actually get much better gas mileage per person than cars do. Back in reality, planes get about 1/5 mpg.
Also, if you really think a transponder weighs 400 pounds, I don't know what to tell you. They're more like 3 pounds, including the aiming assembly.
Think about it: if you have a laptop, PocketPC, or whatever and know you're going to be suck in a crowded cabin for anywhere from two to seven hours, wouldn't you pay $50 or $100 more for the ticket package in order to book a flight with internet access?
Not if their competition offers it as a value-add for $19. Surprisingly, some of us won't spend $100 extra to get a $20 option for free.
because we really have no, shall we say, "creativity" in our imagination about such fundamental physics.
If we had no creativity then we wouldn't have this test in the first place.
Surely it would be cheaper and easier to simply ensure that the inflight entertainment has a decent porn library.
Yeah, it's an internet connection. That's exactly what they're doing.
It was a joke. All physical objects are such generators.
If the speed of gravity is greater than the speed of light, does that violate the general relativity?
Yes. It also violates special relativity and the laws of cause and effect.
Whereas I'm certainly not defending the grandparent post, as the poster was a huge douchebag, I should point out that in fact there are several things whose effects can cross a distance in a timeframe shorter than that which light would also take. Given that we're not entirely sure of the nature of gravity, we don't actually know that this would in fact violate relativity - sure, if it's something like the Higgs Boson or the Graviton at work it would, but there are several gravitational theories which aren't obviously wrong that rely on some form of entanglement, and entangled particles can co-react at distances and speeds which relativity would otherwise prevent (that bose-einstein condensate ansible they made six years ago comes to mind.)
A little realism: LIGO and its kin may teach us something new about gravity near neutron stars and black holes, but the most likely outcome is that it will simply serve as a telescope to probe astrophysical phenomena not detectable in visible light. It is very farfetched to think that it will lead to antigravity or any Star Trek type applications.
One is reminded of the reactions received by Faraday, Dyson, Vannevar Bush and Feynman. Whereas I'm inclined to agree that we're not likely to derive any low-power neato technologies from a better understanding of gravity, I don't think it's entirely reasnable to call it far-fetched. For example, once we better understood electromagnetism, we knew how to manipulate it to cause pulses (not that it's particularly reasonable, but a carefully vibrated quantum black hole might do the same for gravity.) Once we knew how to pulse magnetism, anodizing became relatively easy. The end result? Better cookware, mag-lites and more durable car engines.
Who knows what we'll learn to do in materials science when we learn how to manipulate gravity?
Sigh. This experiment has nothing to do with the speed of gravity, which nobody believes is anything other than the exact speed of light. What you're quoting was someone saying "wow, we've proven that our believed speed is correct within 20%, and the frame of proof is perfectly centered."
If the speed of gravity is greater than the speed of light, does that violate the general relativity?
No. But still, it isn't faster than light. Also, there are several things which are faster than light without violating relativity; we have experimentally verified particle entanglement with bose-einstein condensates for up to half a second now, for example. (For a more comprehensible explanation, look up the science fiction term "ansible" - the idea is similar enough that when you go back to read about the real thing, light bulbs should start going on.)
If this test is sucessful, what can be used with the information the scientists gain? It may become possible to predict future ripples, but the nature of such phenomena would suggest that they can't be avoided or blocked.
The issue is one of context. We have a whole bunch of data that we're not entirely sure how to interpret, and although we have a lot of very convincing extrapolations, we really can't work with them until we know some of the foundational material is correct. There are dozens of examples of where scientists have built large cloud castles on assumptions, only to have them ripped out from underneath; my personal favorite is the theory of phlogiston, which is really quite an elegant theory, up until you discover that oxidation is the adding of an element rather than the extraction of an element. A whole bunch of impressive work was lost because it was invalidated when that theory went away.
By comparison, what we're doing here is essentially akin to trying to find out what burning really does. We're attempting to confirm frame relativity. Once we have said confirmation, then we can say "okay, that means that this interpretation of this data is correct, and that interpretation of that data is correct, and that means some other thing." We are providing ourselves an attempt at a proof of context by which to confirm other beliefs and extrapolations.
What direct use will this have? None. But it's the foundation of a lot of different direct stuff. Recent examples of such a thing include the exploratory work done into phase duality and uncertainty locii, which eventually led to our understanding the charge field effect, and thusly to our being able to manufacture LEDs (and a whole bunch of other crap.)
As an aside, whoever marked this question off-topic is an asshole. It's not only on-topic, but a damned smart question for someone who isn't an expert in the field.
Nothing in academia demands that tests be postponed pending alternatives. Grandparent was just waving his hands and trying to sound smart.
You'll find more contemporary examples - especially those that get covered on TV and Slashdot, like the solar neutrino problem and super kameo-kande - will get through more successfully to these "omg what's a history" noobs.
Wait, let me get this straight. Did you really just say that if we don't have an alternative theory, we shouldn't test the one we have?
You should read up on the history of physics. Pay particular attention to the phlogiston, Antoine Lavoisier and the solar neutrino problem; all three are cases where it wasn't until we had disproving experimental data that we had enough information to even begin to formulate alternate theories.