The bigger issue is probably the cool (at least as compared to Earth and Venus) Martian core, a majority of the original Martian atmosphere is probably still there, it has simply "sunk" into the planet without a hot core constantly ejecting it back to the surface.
Then just drill a big hole down to the center, throw in some nukes, fill up the hole and let the nukes go off. Problem solved. Try not to blow the planet apart, though. Maybe on second thought just throw loads of uranium in so it goes critical but not quite as violently.
It's not that the black hole doesn't change. It does change: it gets heavier and its spin and charge may change. No energy was lost. This is about entropy, not energy.
A better analogy than your F18 would be an extremely powerful garbage compactor. You put a bunch of documents in, together with a lot of other garbage, for a total of several cubic meters, and compact it to a cubic millimeter. Guess what, you can't read the documents anymore.
I do realise that this kind of comparisons is a bit silly, and you might still possibly retrieve the information by prying open the little compacted cube (or at least, every bit of ink would have made a tiny change in the final cubelet, which might be noticed in careful analysis) but maybe at some point, when atoms stop being atoms, you reach a point where information really is destroyed. Not energy, the mass of the cube will still be there, you just won't be able to tell anymore what the original garbage was made of. So what? I really fail to see why that would be a big deal.
I thought it just treated whatever echo it got as originating from its last sent pulse, determining the angle that way. An echo reveived shortly after sending a pulse forward, would indicate an object dead ahead. But apparently the sensor is revolving as well? Or is it a kind of camera that registers the location of the echos as well?
That is indeed a logical solution. But that's not really "encoding" or "encrypting" which the article seemed to suggest ("The pulses were not encoded or encrypted, which allowed him to simply replay them at a later point")
I think I agree. Making a car is hard. Joining the patent pool is a lot easier and just as lucrative. They may just be developing software and hardware to sell to actual automakers.
They still haven't gotten around to making TV sets either, just the little Apple TV box that sits underneath.
In the article they say that the pulses are not encoded or encrypted. Interesting, lidar works with very short pulses of laser light, how would one go about encoding or encrypting those? Is that even possible? Honest question, not saying it can't be done.
Yes, but you will be seen doing it. With this hack, you just need to be somewhere within eyesight, for example on the second floor of some building the car's driving by. You can stop any car you see if you can just target its lidar from a distance. You don't have to be in front of it to make it think there's something there.
I don't think he was being entirely serious, and I could have sworn I heard a whooshing sound when I read your comment. But just for the record, mammoths indeed were not dinosaurs and lived in a completely different time period together with early humans who hunted them.
But would destroying information violate causality? Would you be able to do something contradictory like the grandfather paradox or something like that by destroying information? I really don't see the problem.
Of course you are simplifying down to a ridiculous level, and I do understand that information is a pretty powerful concept in physics that carries a lot more weight than you would think, but still, I did not find anything useful in this article. The title of the Slashdot Summary was very promising: "why the black hole information paradox is such a problem", so I was hoping to finally see this question answered, but no, same old same old. Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
Why would it be such a problem if information did simply disappear? Oh my god, entropy might go down in an isolated system, it's the end of physics as we know it! No it's not. Entropy is just a trick that works because of the statistically enormously small probability of it going down in a large macroscopic system without spending energy on it, but isn't that really all it is? Why does it get treated like one of the most important truths in the universe?
Depends... suppose the Minecraft guy got divorced before he sold Minecraft. The wife can still say he started developing the game during their marriage and she's therefore entitled to some of the proceeds. Weirder judgements have heppened.
And what exactly did they "discover"? What's the "research"?
Meteorites from Mars have been known for a long time. The theory of panspermia was invented many decades ago. What did these researches add to the discussion that we didn't know already?
Are they just competing on price, or does quality get factored in somehow? Otherwise, I'd like to make a bid: for only a quarter of what the Met Office was charging, I will provide a forecast for England every day. Rain in the morning, followed by rain in the afternoon, then some more rain in the evening and during the night. Can't go wrong with that. Where do I apply?
Unemployed people already get paid (far too much) in most European countries. Like I said, you sometimes even lose money by accepting a job (minimum wage not far above unemployement, and having to pay for car and other expenses, for example). So if anything, it's the current system that's making people stay at home. With the new system, you can accept any job and increase your income right away. If you don't like the job, quit and look for a new one. With the current system, if you accept a temporary job which you don't really like and then quit afterwards, you have to go through a waiting period again. So people don't accept those jobs for fear of losing money instead of making more. With the new system, there's no such fear. Accept any job, quit if you don't like it, look for something new, no paperwork, no hassle, no risks. People will work more.
It's not as bad an idea as it might seem at first sight, at least if it's implemented correctly. If everybody gets a certain basic income and can then work to add more money to that income, that guarantees a difference between working and non-working people and therefore provides an incentive to work. Right now, in many European countries, you may actually make less money by working than by sitting at home unemployed. Certainly if you factor in daycare, transportation expenses, etc.
By just giving everyone the basic salary, then letting them earn as much as they like above that (paying tax on those earnings to pay for the basic salary, obviously), you greatly simplify the system. No need to check whether someone is really unemployed or not before sending them their unemployment benefits, just send the same basic salary to everyone. Apply a flat tax to all extra income, and this automatically emulates the older system of progressively rising taxes. Also, it becomes cheap for companies to hire people for smaller tasks, since there needn't be a minimum salary anymore. If someone wants to do some job for $200 a month (on top of his basic salary), no problem.
Of course I'm oversimplifying and there will be a few caveats, but still, it's not as stupid or communistic as it seems.
How about a double dome? The outer dome's translucency is changed so the amount of sunlight coming through is the same as on Mars, and the pressure, temperature and composition of the air between the domes is carefully maintained to resemble Mars as much as possible. Then the self-sufficient system has to recreate earth-like conditions inside the inner dome. You can use all sorts of tricks and as much energy as you like to maintain the Mars atmosphere between the domes, but the inner dome has to be self-sufficient. The only thing that doesn't match Mars conditions then, is gravity.
My first thought was exactly like that comic. If you only kill 99% of the bacteria in water from a contaminated African source, that still leaves an awful lot of bad stuff in there. In line with U.S. tap water? Ewww, I'm never drinking from an American faucet again.
I think a lot of people here got the problem the wrong way around. Google is not refusing to pay him because the video is in the public domain, quite the contrary: they are refusing to monetize the video UNLESS he proves it's in the public domain. So if he can prove it's public domain, they will pay him.
Well, maybe you could get funding for a research project that sets up such a system to see if it works, "setting up an alternative peer review system to screw the big leeching science journals" and try to get it published in a few major... errr... oh, wait.
Can't they set up some kind of peer to peer system between universities? Set up some central server keeping track of everything published at all those universities (or use some kind of distributed consensus system), host the articles themselves on the universities' own servers (must cost less than the millions they are currently paying Elsevier et al), and let researchers vote for each other's articles (score based on some formula taking into account how many people from different universities voted). And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.
I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger issue is probably the cool (at least as compared to Earth and Venus) Martian core, a majority of the original Martian atmosphere is probably still there, it has simply "sunk" into the planet without a hot core constantly ejecting it back to the surface.
Then just drill a big hole down to the center, throw in some nukes, fill up the hole and let the nukes go off. Problem solved. Try not to blow the planet apart, though. Maybe on second thought just throw loads of uranium in so it goes critical but not quite as violently.
Where do I apply to become a SpaceX engineer?
It's not that the black hole doesn't change. It does change: it gets heavier and its spin and charge may change. No energy was lost. This is about entropy, not energy.
A better analogy than your F18 would be an extremely powerful garbage compactor. You put a bunch of documents in, together with a lot of other garbage, for a total of several cubic meters, and compact it to a cubic millimeter. Guess what, you can't read the documents anymore.
I do realise that this kind of comparisons is a bit silly, and you might still possibly retrieve the information by prying open the little compacted cube (or at least, every bit of ink would have made a tiny change in the final cubelet, which might be noticed in careful analysis) but maybe at some point, when atoms stop being atoms, you reach a point where information really is destroyed. Not energy, the mass of the cube will still be there, you just won't be able to tell anymore what the original garbage was made of. So what? I really fail to see why that would be a big deal.
I thought it just treated whatever echo it got as originating from its last sent pulse, determining the angle that way. An echo reveived shortly after sending a pulse forward, would indicate an object dead ahead. But apparently the sensor is revolving as well? Or is it a kind of camera that registers the location of the echos as well?
That is indeed a logical solution. But that's not really "encoding" or "encrypting" which the article seemed to suggest ("The pulses were not encoded or encrypted, which allowed him to simply replay them at a later point")
I think I agree. Making a car is hard. Joining the patent pool is a lot easier and just as lucrative. They may just be developing software and hardware to sell to actual automakers.
They still haven't gotten around to making TV sets either, just the little Apple TV box that sits underneath.
In the article they say that the pulses are not encoded or encrypted. Interesting, lidar works with very short pulses of laser light, how would one go about encoding or encrypting those? Is that even possible? Honest question, not saying it can't be done.
Yes, but you will be seen doing it. With this hack, you just need to be somewhere within eyesight, for example on the second floor of some building the car's driving by. You can stop any car you see if you can just target its lidar from a distance. You don't have to be in front of it to make it think there's something there.
Apple is not mentioned in the article, only in the summary. I think it's quite an amusing little addition, made me chuckle.
However, within the next 10 years I suspect they will start finding galaxies older than the big bang.
What would be even better, would be blueshifted galaxies from a different big bang. That would raise some eyebrows...
First ET cartridges, now Ice Age props, I wonder what they'll dig up next.
I don't think he was being entirely serious, and I could have sworn I heard a whooshing sound when I read your comment. But just for the record, mammoths indeed were not dinosaurs and lived in a completely different time period together with early humans who hunted them.
But would destroying information violate causality? Would you be able to do something contradictory like the grandfather paradox or something like that by destroying information? I really don't see the problem.
Of course you are simplifying down to a ridiculous level, and I do understand that information is a pretty powerful concept in physics that carries a lot more weight than you would think, but still, I did not find anything useful in this article. The title of the Slashdot Summary was very promising: "why the black hole information paradox is such a problem", so I was hoping to finally see this question answered, but no, same old same old. Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
Why would it be such a problem if information did simply disappear? Oh my god, entropy might go down in an isolated system, it's the end of physics as we know it! No it's not. Entropy is just a trick that works because of the statistically enormously small probability of it going down in a large macroscopic system without spending energy on it, but isn't that really all it is? Why does it get treated like one of the most important truths in the universe?
Depends... suppose the Minecraft guy got divorced before he sold Minecraft. The wife can still say he started developing the game during their marriage and she's therefore entitled to some of the proceeds. Weirder judgements have heppened.
My reply to that is "" .
Yes, and there's a certain particular kind of emotion that can only be accurately expressed with a cucumber.
And what exactly did they "discover"? What's the "research"?
Meteorites from Mars have been known for a long time. The theory of panspermia was invented many decades ago. What did these researches add to the discussion that we didn't know already?
Are they just competing on price, or does quality get factored in somehow? Otherwise, I'd like to make a bid: for only a quarter of what the Met Office was charging, I will provide a forecast for England every day. Rain in the morning, followed by rain in the afternoon, then some more rain in the evening and during the night. Can't go wrong with that. Where do I apply?
Unemployed people already get paid (far too much) in most European countries. Like I said, you sometimes even lose money by accepting a job (minimum wage not far above unemployement, and having to pay for car and other expenses, for example). So if anything, it's the current system that's making people stay at home. With the new system, you can accept any job and increase your income right away. If you don't like the job, quit and look for a new one. With the current system, if you accept a temporary job which you don't really like and then quit afterwards, you have to go through a waiting period again. So people don't accept those jobs for fear of losing money instead of making more. With the new system, there's no such fear. Accept any job, quit if you don't like it, look for something new, no paperwork, no hassle, no risks. People will work more.
It's not as bad an idea as it might seem at first sight, at least if it's implemented correctly. If everybody gets a certain basic income and can then work to add more money to that income, that guarantees a difference between working and non-working people and therefore provides an incentive to work. Right now, in many European countries, you may actually make less money by working than by sitting at home unemployed. Certainly if you factor in daycare, transportation expenses, etc.
By just giving everyone the basic salary, then letting them earn as much as they like above that (paying tax on those earnings to pay for the basic salary, obviously), you greatly simplify the system. No need to check whether someone is really unemployed or not before sending them their unemployment benefits, just send the same basic salary to everyone. Apply a flat tax to all extra income, and this automatically emulates the older system of progressively rising taxes. Also, it becomes cheap for companies to hire people for smaller tasks, since there needn't be a minimum salary anymore. If someone wants to do some job for $200 a month (on top of his basic salary), no problem.
Of course I'm oversimplifying and there will be a few caveats, but still, it's not as stupid or communistic as it seems.
How about a double dome? The outer dome's translucency is changed so the amount of sunlight coming through is the same as on Mars, and the pressure, temperature and composition of the air between the domes is carefully maintained to resemble Mars as much as possible. Then the self-sufficient system has to recreate earth-like conditions inside the inner dome. You can use all sorts of tricks and as much energy as you like to maintain the Mars atmosphere between the domes, but the inner dome has to be self-sufficient. The only thing that doesn't match Mars conditions then, is gravity.
My first thought was exactly like that comic. If you only kill 99% of the bacteria in water from a contaminated African source, that still leaves an awful lot of bad stuff in there. In line with U.S. tap water? Ewww, I'm never drinking from an American faucet again.
I think a lot of people here got the problem the wrong way around. Google is not refusing to pay him because the video is in the public domain, quite the contrary: they are refusing to monetize the video UNLESS he proves it's in the public domain. So if he can prove it's public domain, they will pay him.
Well, maybe you could get funding for a research project that sets up such a system to see if it works, "setting up an alternative peer review system to screw the big leeching science journals" and try to get it published in a few major... errr... oh, wait.
Can't they set up some kind of peer to peer system between universities? Set up some central server keeping track of everything published at all those universities (or use some kind of distributed consensus system), host the articles themselves on the universities' own servers (must cost less than the millions they are currently paying Elsevier et al), and let researchers vote for each other's articles (score based on some formula taking into account how many people from different universities voted). And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.
I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.