It's not the speed of light at all, it's the speed of causality. Let's pretend that's what "c" stands for. That may or may not be exactly the speed of light in a vacuum, as our understanding of "vacuum" is incomplete (though I expect it's the same for enough significant digits not to matter in practice).
Also, the only meaningful system of measurement is the F-you system: Fortnight-Firkin-Furlong-Faraday-Farenheight.
We had steam engines for 2000 years before we used them for industry. We have the science and most of the technology today to do all that stuff (well, space elevators probably don't work at all, but the rest). I doubt we'll be motivated to spend a trillion dollars on such things any time soon, but I'm sure our distant decedents will wonder why we didn't, when the benefit was so obvious (in hindsight).
Perhaps. Perhaps not... Maybe this civilization takes a long view.
The primary objection I have is that it doesn't take much more advancement for a civilization to literally take a long view. Building a telescope with the resolution to see that Earth has life, and to get one pixel to show us lighting cities at night, seems easier than large interstellar probes. It would just be an economic challenge for us today to build a planet-sized telescope, no new science needed, and barely any new technology (presumably along the way we'd build an efficient system to put payloads in orbit).
Um, yeah... you do realize that the 'U' in UFO stands for Unknown... right?
Flying, I would take issue with since that would involve it using our atmosphere to gain lift...
Unidentified Floating Object works for space. However, this guy is accelerating, so maybe not. If it's not aliens, and is instead just a boring new mode of gaining thrust by boiling off the surface of a comet, then it can always be an Unidentified Flaming Object.
You you try a phone with his fancy new thing called a "headphone jack"! Apple and Samsung haven't gotten there yet, but some of the higher tech brands have this awesome feature. No separate battery, and lower battery drain on the phone in a noisy area.
I do miss my old pre-smart phone for calls though - 10 hours talk time, and could be charging one battery while using another, quicker to swap batteries than to boot a modern phone.
How common is it today to memorize every word in a book the length of the Iliad or the Odyssey? How many people can hear a detailed message once and repeat is accurately after a 3 day journey? There are few few people today that can perform feats of memory that were ordinary in cultures from ancient to medieval.
Do you think without calculators we could have navigated to the heavens
Yeah, so we put men on the \moon with slide rules. Just so you know. More then 3 significant digits in calculation would have been fairly pointless, given the precision of a lot of the input. That's why there were ~4 mid-course correction burns for each leg of the trip.
There was some electronic calculation for flight control, to be sure, mostly to do with timing the burns precisely, but it wasn't any more accurate, and wasn't strictly necessary. Almost all of the engineering was calculated with slide rules.
The example you want is GPS, but of course that wouldn't work without relativity, and calculators had nothing to do with its discovery.
Most polling agencies are part of one campaign or the other, or are part of the media-propaganda complex like MSDNC. And surely you've hear of Karl Rove's infamous push poll during W's primary, where southern voters were asked what they thought about McCain's black bastard son? Par for the course, though that was pretty sad.
Sound like you were surprised when Trump won. Sounds like you'll be surprised when he wins again. You know nothing of the history of the FBI if you don't think they meddle in politics: from the beginning they've been used for getting compromat on politicians.
The majority of the country still believes that the people working in the government - REGARDLESS OF THEIR POLITICAL BELIEFS - are there because they love the country
Hahahhahhaha. Funniest thing I've read all week. You can spot the conservatives working for the government easily enough, though, they wear uniforms.
The FBI wanted to destroy Trump since he was a candidate. They'll make up anything to do that. We know they colluded with Hillary's campaign (via Fusion PS) to produce a fake Russian dossier on Trump, and get the Russians to leak it to the press.
They took down Nixon, and apparently think they can get rid of any democratically elected president they don't like. Time to defund the FBI and bar all members from any future government job. Replace it with a new agency with the same charter. Maybe we'll get a generation or two before the new one becomes entirely corrupt.
While we are at it, the government can also decide what gets printed in the newspapers!
Shocking how many people on Slashdot advocate that.
"Corporations should not be able to run political ads." "What about the NYT?" "They're the press, that's different" "Who decides?" "The government will regulate that"
I can see no flaw in letting the president shut down "fake news", nope, that would never be abused by some egocentric asshole.
And it's not just online polls. Most polls are partisan efforts designed either to show their candidate in the lead, or to push misinformation to voters under the guise of polling.
He can go forever without being hurt by the government shutdown. Meanwhile, (almost) all the government employees who aren't getting a paycheck vote Democrat. And if something goes wrong with EBT payments? Yowza.
And the consequence of this election is that the government will remain shutdown for an extended time (something most on the right see as good to begin with), and then Trump will get his wall. Or do you actually believe congressional Democrats are going to best Trump in a challenge of petty childishness and ego? I mean, I have a very low opinion of them, but more ego-driving petty childishness than Trump? Not a chance.
IQ definitely doesn't measure "intelligence", because intelligence is way more multi-faceted than a simple rather silly number.
As I said, IQ is the part of intelligence that measurable. Much like the Standard Model of physics, thousands of alternatives have been proposed, but none were more predictive. Researchers in both fields will keep proposing new ideas, never doubt it, but your intuition that "there must be more" isn't worth much. What is that "more", and how can it be measured such that it successfully predicts what we expect intelligence to predict (and do so better than IQ alone).
it's a crutch to have some kinda number that can be correlated with other stuff.
Yeah, that's just how science works. Science works pretty well, so I'll stick to that approach. Predictive models have value, good stories are merely entertaining.
"intelligence, basically, is whatever the brain does".
Well, if you're using "intelligence" in a very broad sense to mean "self-awareness" or "sapience" then, sure, but that's not the "general intelligence" that most people are talking about in this context,
Intelligence is the ability to operate effectively in the world. IQ is the part of that that's measurable. No other idea about what should be included in "intelligence" stands up to scientific analysis - many have been proposed, but none were more predictive than IQ alone. It's a frustrating situation for research psychologists, unable to explain the rest of "intelligence". Perhaps they need higher IQs.
Phones and computer don't make anyone smarter, they just give you access to more information. Not necessarily real or accurate information at that....
The only useful definition of "smart is "able to operate effectively in the world". IQ is just a corner of that that's easy to measure (though one that's positive in the widest variety of circumstances). Easy access to useful information certainly makes you smarter, to the degree you chose to access it. False or misleading information can make you dumber, but there's amazingly little of that outside of politics.
If I need to fix a leaky faucet, YouTube makes me smarter, by any useful definiton of that word.
This is what negotiation looks like. You want them to lower their tariffs, you must provide sufficient carrots or sticks to incentivize that change. By raising tariffs on stuff they'd really like to sell here, we create that incentive. We tried asking nicely, now it's on to the next strategy.
Do you imagine Trump is against free trade? He's getting the Chinese to lower their barriers to free trade. Negotiation is not isolationism. Purely one-sided tariffs are not free trade.
The fact of the matter is people utilize typing in numbers maybe 1% or less of the time they are using a smartphone. Smartphones are desktop replacements, the phone functionality is used about as often as it is used on a desktop with a monitor.
I pretty much use my phone to make phone calls, or for apps where the screen isn't important. That's why I'd love real buttons. But like I say, that's not what they'll be making.
Now I am tired of the rectangle glass screen design for a phone. But I don't see the Razr as being an upgrade, because as you are pointing out, you will need the modern features on the phone, we can't go back to just having a number pad.
I'd love a number pad and a half-sized screen, but I doubt that's what they're making. At the price point it will be a foldable OLED, that is the usual glass rectangle when opened all the way. More's the pity.
Yes, there's always some asshole who thinks there's an equivalence between the US and China. No one needs that asshole, and he should probable move to Tumblr.
We're talking about 10^14 Watts. * Total solar irradiance is about 10^17 Watts. * Only about 10% of that is reasonably geographically accessible to wind or solar, so you've got about 10^16 Watts possible solar, 10^14 Watts wind, before efficiency losses. * Realistically, given the needs for storage and long-range transport for either of these, and the fact we're unlikely to tile every undeveloped area with panels or turbines, the best we're likely to do is 10^15 Watts solar, 10^13 Watts wind.
Solar can work, even with relatively inefficient solar thermal. Wind can only be a secondary source, at the scale of 10 B people at current US power levels. Of course, there's no reason to assume we'll stop there, nor that we should, but we're past that point we're definitely talking about orbital power (and quite probably orbital heavy industry).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the speed of light at all, it's the speed of causality. Let's pretend that's what "c" stands for. That may or may not be exactly the speed of light in a vacuum, as our understanding of "vacuum" is incomplete (though I expect it's the same for enough significant digits not to matter in practice).
Also, the only meaningful system of measurement is the F-you system: Fortnight-Firkin-Furlong-Faraday-Farenheight.
We had steam engines for 2000 years before we used them for industry. We have the science and most of the technology today to do all that stuff (well, space elevators probably don't work at all, but the rest). I doubt we'll be motivated to spend a trillion dollars on such things any time soon, but I'm sure our distant decedents will wonder why we didn't, when the benefit was so obvious (in hindsight).
Perhaps. Perhaps not... Maybe this civilization takes a long view.
The primary objection I have is that it doesn't take much more advancement for a civilization to literally take a long view. Building a telescope with the resolution to see that Earth has life, and to get one pixel to show us lighting cities at night, seems easier than large interstellar probes. It would just be an economic challenge for us today to build a planet-sized telescope, no new science needed, and barely any new technology (presumably along the way we'd build an efficient system to put payloads in orbit).
Um, yeah... you do realize that the 'U' in UFO stands for Unknown... right?
Flying, I would take issue with since that would involve it using our atmosphere to gain lift...
Unidentified Floating Object works for space. However, this guy is accelerating, so maybe not. If it's not aliens, and is instead just a boring new mode of gaining thrust by boiling off the surface of a comet, then it can always be an Unidentified Flaming Object.
You you try a phone with his fancy new thing called a "headphone jack"! Apple and Samsung haven't gotten there yet, but some of the higher tech brands have this awesome feature. No separate battery, and lower battery drain on the phone in a noisy area.
I do miss my old pre-smart phone for calls though - 10 hours talk time, and could be charging one battery while using another, quicker to swap batteries than to boot a modern phone.
How common is it today to memorize every word in a book the length of the Iliad or the Odyssey? How many people can hear a detailed message once and repeat is accurately after a 3 day journey? There are few few people today that can perform feats of memory that were ordinary in cultures from ancient to medieval.
Do you think without calculators we could have navigated to the heavens
Yeah, so we put men on the \moon with slide rules. Just so you know. More then 3 significant digits in calculation would have been fairly pointless, given the precision of a lot of the input. That's why there were ~4 mid-course correction burns for each leg of the trip.
There was some electronic calculation for flight control, to be sure, mostly to do with timing the burns precisely, but it wasn't any more accurate, and wasn't strictly necessary. Almost all of the engineering was calculated with slide rules.
The example you want is GPS, but of course that wouldn't work without relativity, and calculators had nothing to do with its discovery.
Most polling agencies are part of one campaign or the other, or are part of the media-propaganda complex like MSDNC. And surely you've hear of Karl Rove's infamous push poll during W's primary, where southern voters were asked what they thought about McCain's black bastard son? Par for the course, though that was pretty sad.
Sound like you were surprised when Trump won. Sounds like you'll be surprised when he wins again. You know nothing of the history of the FBI if you don't think they meddle in politics: from the beginning they've been used for getting compromat on politicians.
The majority of the country still believes that the people working in the government - REGARDLESS OF THEIR POLITICAL BELIEFS - are there because they love the country
Hahahhahhaha. Funniest thing I've read all week. You can spot the conservatives working for the government easily enough, though, they wear uniforms.
Hahahaha this is epic: https://twitter.com/PressSec/s... Leverage is where you find it.
The FBI wanted to destroy Trump since he was a candidate. They'll make up anything to do that. We know they colluded with Hillary's campaign (via Fusion PS) to produce a fake Russian dossier on Trump, and get the Russians to leak it to the press.
They took down Nixon, and apparently think they can get rid of any democratically elected president they don't like. Time to defund the FBI and bar all members from any future government job. Replace it with a new agency with the same charter. Maybe we'll get a generation or two before the new one becomes entirely corrupt.
While we are at it, the government can also decide what gets printed in the newspapers!
Shocking how many people on Slashdot advocate that.
"Corporations should not be able to run political ads."
"What about the NYT?"
"They're the press, that's different"
"Who decides?"
"The government will regulate that"
I can see no flaw in letting the president shut down "fake news", nope, that would never be abused by some egocentric asshole.
And it's not just online polls. Most polls are partisan efforts designed either to show their candidate in the lead, or to push misinformation to voters under the guise of polling.
He can go forever without being hurt by the government shutdown. Meanwhile, (almost) all the government employees who aren't getting a paycheck vote Democrat. And if something goes wrong with EBT payments? Yowza.
And the consequence of this election is that the government will remain shutdown for an extended time (something most on the right see as good to begin with), and then Trump will get his wall. Or do you actually believe congressional Democrats are going to best Trump in a challenge of petty childishness and ego? I mean, I have a very low opinion of them, but more ego-driving petty childishness than Trump? Not a chance.
IQ definitely doesn't measure "intelligence", because intelligence is way more multi-faceted than a simple rather silly number.
As I said, IQ is the part of intelligence that measurable. Much like the Standard Model of physics, thousands of alternatives have been proposed, but none were more predictive. Researchers in both fields will keep proposing new ideas, never doubt it, but your intuition that "there must be more" isn't worth much. What is that "more", and how can it be measured such that it successfully predicts what we expect intelligence to predict (and do so better than IQ alone).
it's a crutch to have some kinda number that can be correlated with other stuff.
Yeah, that's just how science works. Science works pretty well, so I'll stick to that approach. Predictive models have value, good stories are merely entertaining.
"intelligence, basically, is whatever the brain does".
Well, if you're using "intelligence" in a very broad sense to mean "self-awareness" or "sapience" then, sure, but that's not the "general intelligence" that most people are talking about in this context,
Intelligence is the ability to operate effectively in the world. IQ is the part of that that's measurable. No other idea about what should be included in "intelligence" stands up to scientific analysis - many have been proposed, but none were more predictive than IQ alone. It's a frustrating situation for research psychologists, unable to explain the rest of "intelligence". Perhaps they need higher IQs.
Who says you're not retaining it? Do you instantly forget everything you've ever read in a book?
People from mostly-illiterate cultures have vastly better memories. However, the rate of progress for literate cultures has been much higher.
Phones and computer don't make anyone smarter, they just give you access to more information. Not necessarily real or accurate information at that....
The only useful definition of "smart is "able to operate effectively in the world". IQ is just a corner of that that's easy to measure (though one that's positive in the widest variety of circumstances). Easy access to useful information certainly makes you smarter, to the degree you chose to access it. False or misleading information can make you dumber, but there's amazingly little of that outside of politics.
If I need to fix a leaky faucet, YouTube makes me smarter, by any useful definiton of that word.
This is what negotiation looks like. You want them to lower their tariffs, you must provide sufficient carrots or sticks to incentivize that change. By raising tariffs on stuff they'd really like to sell here, we create that incentive. We tried asking nicely, now it's on to the next strategy.
Do you imagine Trump is against free trade? He's getting the Chinese to lower their barriers to free trade. Negotiation is not isolationism. Purely one-sided tariffs are not free trade.
The fact of the matter is people utilize typing in numbers maybe 1% or less of the time they are using a smartphone. Smartphones are desktop replacements, the phone functionality is used about as often as it is used on a desktop with a monitor.
I pretty much use my phone to make phone calls, or for apps where the screen isn't important. That's why I'd love real buttons. But like I say, that's not what they'll be making.
Now I am tired of the rectangle glass screen design for a phone. But I don't see the Razr as being an upgrade, because as you are pointing out, you will need the modern features on the phone, we can't go back to just having a number pad.
I'd love a number pad and a half-sized screen, but I doubt that's what they're making. At the price point it will be a foldable OLED, that is the usual glass rectangle when opened all the way. More's the pity.
Yes, there's always some asshole who thinks there's an equivalence between the US and China. No one needs that asshole, and he should probable move to Tumblr.
We're talking about 10^14 Watts.
* Total solar irradiance is about 10^17 Watts.
* Only about 10% of that is reasonably geographically accessible to wind or solar, so you've got about 10^16 Watts possible solar, 10^14 Watts wind, before efficiency losses.
* Realistically, given the needs for storage and long-range transport for either of these, and the fact we're unlikely to tile every undeveloped area with panels or turbines, the best we're likely to do is 10^15 Watts solar, 10^13 Watts wind.
Solar can work, even with relatively inefficient solar thermal. Wind can only be a secondary source, at the scale of 10 B people at current US power levels. Of course, there's no reason to assume we'll stop there, nor that we should, but we're past that point we're definitely talking about orbital power (and quite probably orbital heavy industry).