The most scathing criticism came from Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who launched into a lengthy monologue in which he deemed Gorton "one of the most naive chairmen and CEOs I've ever run across," and accused his company of making the "skeleton keys" that grant access to material harmful to U.S. national security.
"I'd feel more than a shade of guilt at this point, having made the laptop a dangerous weapon against the security of the United States," Cooper said. "Mr. Gorton, you seem to lack imagination about how your product can be deliberately misused by evildoers against this country." (Cooper also, at one point, claimed that Gorton's own home computer was probably leaking sensitive documents.)
This is exactly the problem, not enough people understand technology... or really common sense. Limewire is not some default protocol available on any computer, it must be installed. It shouldn't be on any computer with sensitive information in the first place. Limewire didn't force it on those computers, so leave them alone, go after the idiots that installed it!! Of course, that would probably be themselves, and they're not going to put themselves in jail. And as far as deliberate misuse goes, I say we call in all baseball bat makers while we're at it; don't they realize how many felons they've aided by providing a product that can be used to assault people?
This reminds me of a classmate of mine that got a letter saying her information was possibly exposed to the internet through a website run by her high school. All I could think of was: "Why in the world was ANYONE's sensitive information anywhere near a computer with an apache server?".
It's hard to put a price and worth on that sort of thing. It's easy to criticize now, but what advances in materials research and robotics are they making now that 10-20 years down the road will be in every home, and we can't imagine life without it?
Actually, pretty much any research has this property. Things that seemed pointless or wrong 100 years ago, we suddenly find are useful to modern-day science and engineering.
It's a shame humanity is not better at predicting what will actually be useful.
Indeed. I'll even add this: I still have a few (somewhat vague) memories of middle school that consisted of my classmates throwing around more sexual phrases and profanity than any magazine has ever had on the front cover. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, but looking back on it, they were pretty vulgar!
You can hide all the magazines, not buy any movies with higher than a "G" rating, keep your kid away from the internet, etc., but unless they are home schooled and never ever leave your house, they *WILL* hear about it. And if you think "Fine, I'll home school!", well, they're going to eventually leave home for college or a job or whatever, and negate everything you did once on their own (and be incredibly socially awkward in the process). Not to mention "protecting" them from it seems to backfire a lot; I personally know several that were raised as far away from sex as possible (my classmates and I knew not to discuss it around her because she got embarrassed and thought it was wrong) that became pregnant within a few weeks of starting college and getting away from mom and dad. No exposure means they don't understand moderation or proper contexts.
Anyway, my point was I've learned a hell of a lot more about sex from listening to peers in middle school thru college than I ever did out of magazines or movies or video games. This "threat" is incredibly overblown.
Sex is an important part of human nature, you can't keep it hidden for very long... particularly once your children reach those chaotic years where your biological instinct is trying to get you to do things society says is still inappropriate for your age. They're going to find out somehow, so instead of fighting it just to ultimately loose, be sure your kids are well-informed for their age range -- that's really the best you can do, unless you plan on keeping your kids chained in a basement for their entire lives.
Because most are not educated how to use it properly yet. It's terrific, but I know firsthand from trying to introduce it to people that they ignore it, realize many of their websites are broken, then I say "Well, you can allow certain websites you visit with this little button" -- they then promptly pick "Enable Globally" (or simply whitelist every single site they ever visit), and it has no effect.
So instead of teaching people security, it just teaches them "Security is annoying and breaks everything, what's teh point?" and they want to use it less.
Without seeing diagrams and all, it's very hard for me to guess what is going on. It's entirely possible that it's not really a novel phenomenon, just a novel setup. We've had things like that happen before in the labs; its explainable with current physics, just too complicated to explain within the same day you discover it. I suspect you are correct in that this machine is not perpetual motion, but could very well be an interesting device for other purposes. I'm actually curious to see it work!
The text of the article really bugs me though. Almost no information is provided about anything except this guy's background, and it's very careful to point out that he lost his wife and his dog died and he lives under bridges and eats garbage and stuff. It almost seems like a sympathy article, like they want you to believe he's the underdog fighting for truth against the tyranny of scientists that are just out to destroy all inventions from the little guy that would help humanity.
Which of course is hardly the case; if more people knew just a little more about science, they would understand why most are skeptical.
This is really interesting after reading a recent/. story about dark matter, and getting some more information from another poster. If dark matter was needed to explain why galaxies look a certain way, but this one can exist without it, what does that say about dark matter? Even if dark matter is real, there's obviously something missing if we can't explain this.
Nature, you have once again awed me with your incredible weirdness.
Perhaps its a new reader trying to get involved with the community (and perhaps asked several places to try and get the most eyes)? It is true that these things have been discussed liked crazy on/., but largely only in terms of lawyers and copyright laws. I don't recall anyone recently posting how to interact with their bosses on the matter. I'm sure there needs to be some level of documentation, but what does that consist of exactly? You'd want to make sure its documented so that if it is open-sourced and becomes popular, no one can come back and say "I didn't authorize this! It's all ours!". But what sort of documentation? Was it a long process, or was it as easy as getting someone to sign one paper saying "Program X is hereby released under the GNU GPL -- signed, The Big Guy, Some Company" and so took all of 30 seconds? Someone here may have dealt with it and can offer some advice that may be more reasonable that someone on the GPL forums, whom only knows what the license says but has never actually bargained with a boss or CEO to get something released.
And if nothing else, its polite to give help when you can. Responses such as yours are a big reason people don't like to learn about Linux or technology in general; whenever they attempt to get involved and learn, they just get yelled at for being newbies and told to go elsewhere. The open source community may have lost a genius member just now because you decided to be a jerk and therefore put off the asker from even wanting to write open source software anymore.
Just remember this next time you have a question about anything (which is inevitable). I don't want to hear it when you're stuck with no answer because everyone yelled "Get lost! You should know the answer."
Ah! I realized I'm thinking of dark energy, not dark matter. I think. Maybe my memory is just screwed up. As I'm not a cosmologist, the line for me sometimes blurs and I am unsure what the difference is. Perhaps you know more about it than I and someone can clear up the difference. The man I saw may have been the first proposer of dark energy.
In any case, if our theories are beginning to predict particles with properties of dark matter, then I feel much better about it. But randomly throwing out ideas with no basis worries me greatly. Thanks for the heads up, I'll have to find some more recent literature to read about that, I wasn't aware particle physics was predicting it now.
Well hold on, anti-matter is real, as long as you mean in an anti-particles sense. Positrons (anti-electrons) have been observed and I want to say some team in Europe made anti-hydrogen atoms. I wish I had links, but I know I read about it.
As for the rest, I pretty much agree with you.
I had the wonderful opportunity to see a talk by one of the experts of (and I think original proposer of) dark matter. He said he was starting to feel dark matter is not real and that a possible better explanation of it can be made by modifying Newtonian/Relativistic mechanics. That seems more satisfactory to me, if for no other reason than we can use a correction in the equations to make predictions about other things, and see if we observe that effect.
That's much better than assuming something exists, but you don't know any of its properties except that it fixes this one problem in your other theory. That's pretty bogus. Science is all about observation, and seeing if our predictions based on current research are true. If you can't do either, it really doesn't qualify as science.
That's too far in the future for them to even fathom. The whole reason they're doing this is they want profits NOW. No delayed gratification, they want to be rich right now.
These organizations may not survive another generation if they keep bullying the younger kids, but it won't matter to current CEOs at all; by then, they'll be rich and retired and possibly even already passed away. It largely won't impact them if we aren't going to do anything about it for 20 years, so why should they care? They're getting away with it so far. They may not be all that stupid; actually, somewhat smart, just very near-sighted and not very ethical.
They'd stop this nonsense in a heartbeat if a couple judges made a stand and said they owed millions for making a stupid lawsuit; that threatens their retirement in the Bahamas, and they'd rather lay off the lawsuits than loose their riches.
I completely agree!
However, unfortunately, you're preaching to the choir. The question now is, what do we have to do to convince those that make the law that this is what needs to be done?
I've been thinking lately - I wonder if someone could get them (corrupt congressmen) at their own game. For instance, run for office and have a reasonable chance at becoming a senator or representative, and then create a bill with some catchy acronym like "The 2008 DON'T EAT BABIES Act" that gives money to orphans, and just so happens to also change patent law.
If anyone comes out against it, gather a list and send a letter to all the major news outlets saying "Senator So-And-So is against the DON'T EAT BABIES Act!" and invite them to ask him why he is against it. That'd get them to vote for it real quick, if they want to stay in office.
But nah, I think that sort of behavior would require me to give up certain virtues, which I won't do. Still, nice to dream.
I'm quite sorry the way my wording came out, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. I believe you when you say you are principled. I do not ever intend on such behavior myself.
However, in intensely emotional situations, sometimes even the most well-meaning of people can loose it. Again, not saying you would, but it happens. You just lost someone close, and there's that bit of denial that it can't be happening, that then shifts into "This wouldn't have happened if it weren't for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK". If a doctor mentions a new medicine was tried, suddenly, AHA! maybe that was related somehow, because how could your family member pass away if the doctors knew what they were doing and the medicine was good? If it later comes out that the medicine was too quickly approved and had all sorts of nasty side effects, what would be the next leap in thoughts?
Perhaps going as far as suing is a bit extreme for most people, but no doubt there would be anger and some thoughts of "YOU'RE A DOCTOR!!! You should have know what you were doing and SAVED HIM!!!" or "Stupid government!! THEY KILLED HIM BY NOT TESTING IT MORE and only acting in the interests of pharmaceutical CORPORATIONS and their PROFITS!!". Given the 300 million people in the United States, statistically there has to be a couple people distraught enough over it to sue for negligence or malpractice. And it only takes a couple people suing to put a few doctors out of work and/or get millions from the government, and ruin it for the rest of us.
That was what I was trying to say. It's quite complicated; as someone else pointed out, medicine is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Go slowly and carefully, then you're not helping fast enough and letting them die; speed up your work, then you rushed it and killed people by your negligence (or the profit motive). You can't win! I don't envy those jobs... or really any job in government. They all have that problem.
Oh come on; if one of your family members was given a vaccine and a weekly later developed some severe disease and died (even if they were already dying!), you would again go with the "deliberate malevolence" argument and probably sue someone.
Sorry, didn't mean to direct that toward you, this was actually meant to be a more general societal thing. Until people get over their sue-happy kick lately, all government entities are going to tread softly, I imagine, particularly those directly related to public health. People have sued for much less than rushing a medicine to market (coffee being hot comes to mind), so can you really blame them? Legal battles drain money from what could have funded more medicine research, etc.
However, a serious question to the parent especially: do you know how to sign up for the trials, is it too late? Someone somewhere has to be taking it or it wouldn't be a trial. I've never signed up for something like that, so I don't know what the process is and am partially asking out of curiosity myself.
Oh no!! Alzheimer's is becoming an epidemic! - They've already forgotten other people are working on helmets! They could really use a helmet to reverse Alzheimer's right now... I wonder if anyone has done that before...
I have no doubt that if gravity waves exist, LIGO will eventually pick one up. It's question of timing.
I visited one of the LIGO facilities once, it was fascinating. But I learned two things there about how sensitive it was:
(1) When my group and I came in, they showed us the real time data -- there was a gigantic spike in the middle of the screen. One technician pointed to it and said "That was from you guys rolling up to the facility, we knew when you were almost here.". I then got to hear complaints about all of the loggers in the area that interfere, a highway being close enough for big trucks passing to cause spikes, etc.
(2) While in the control room talking, the mirrors went out of alignment and you could hear an alarm. One of the scientists got on his computer and came back with the reason: "There's a small earthquake in Greenland, it should be over soon."
They told us of the plans to upgrade the facility. Most of it involved adding more shocks and counterweights and all to dampen the various effects we saw that day. They claimed it would be enough, and seeing as their first few test runs were almost right on the money, I'm sure they're correct. But I imagine a little bit of luck is involved as well: having some big cosmic event happen when there aren't a lot of truckers on the road or earthquakes, etc.
If I was an astronaut, I probably would have done something like this by now, just because its funny. The space station is rather small, and I imagine its novelty wears off quickly. What else are you supposed to do?
However, I'm curious if they have a plan to know whether or not it worked? An origami paper plane should be pretty tiny and can easily be lost somewhere between space station and the ground.
Unless it has some sort of microscopic transmitter on it, are going to track it with a telescope, or they're just going to declare victory no matter what, I'm not sure how you can easily tell whether this design and special paper made any sort of difference. Which is terrible because I'm really curious to know if it does!!
That may be true, I'll admit that. Lately its tough to know what news source (if any) to trust. But I recall even the BBC saying this, so I figured it had to have some truth to it.
This is true, but I was always under the impression you could cool down particles to low states, or otherwise set up an environment where one state was amazingly more probable than the other(s). Thus, my understanding was you could use it for things like sending information, there would just be a (hopefully small) percentage of errors in the message. By agreeing on some method of communication, you could have error correction techniques that would make it a small problem (like slight occasional static over a radio, for instance).
But, I am not working in the field so this could be my wrong attempt to understand something over my head. Any thoughts.
I would like to know what these 30 genes are, and how they programmed them. Perhaps someone put in a "lying" gene as recessive, and waited to see how long it took to surface? I guess my main confusion is whether or not lying was pre-planned or unintended.
I think it's also interesting that when lying surfaced, you also had heros surface. I wonder why that's the case?
(1) I've read several articles about socialized systems in Europe being severely in debt. If that's the case, even if its a good idea and works short term, its not sustainable. We would have to do things different that Europe, especially given the amount of debt we're in already.
(2) Purely making so much profit annoys me, but then we must remember that doctors start off with lots of debt, have to pay many bills, insurance (malpractice, etc.), not to mention the crazy expenses required to buy things like MRI machines. Do you plan on paying for your doctor to go to school? Feel like chipping in to buy an MRI? If not, then you have to pay something later on when you do need a doctor and an MRI. Oh, but the government will pay for it, right? Guess what, tax increases to offset the price (or simply more national debt). Someone has to pay for it somewhere, at least until we can reach Star Trek enlightenment and completely do away with the entire concept of money and debts (which humanity is nowhere near ready for).
Our system obviously needs improvement, but pretending that socializing medicine is going to solve all of our problems is just deluding yourself.
And if someone drives themselves into a ditch and goes to the hospital, will it be possible to steal my identity and affect my health score now too? How easy is it to fix mistakes like that?
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite part was this:
This is exactly the problem, not enough people understand technology... or really common sense. Limewire is not some default protocol available on any computer, it must be installed. It shouldn't be on any computer with sensitive information in the first place. Limewire didn't force it on those computers, so leave them alone, go after the idiots that installed it!! Of course, that would probably be themselves, and they're not going to put themselves in jail. And as far as deliberate misuse goes, I say we call in all baseball bat makers while we're at it; don't they realize how many felons they've aided by providing a product that can be used to assault people?
This reminds me of a classmate of mine that got a letter saying her information was possibly exposed to the internet through a website run by her high school. All I could think of was: "Why in the world was ANYONE's sensitive information anywhere near a computer with an apache server?".
It's hard to put a price and worth on that sort of thing. It's easy to criticize now, but what advances in materials research and robotics are they making now that 10-20 years down the road will be in every home, and we can't imagine life without it? Actually, pretty much any research has this property. Things that seemed pointless or wrong 100 years ago, we suddenly find are useful to modern-day science and engineering. It's a shame humanity is not better at predicting what will actually be useful.
Indeed. I'll even add this: I still have a few (somewhat vague) memories of middle school that consisted of my classmates throwing around more sexual phrases and profanity than any magazine has ever had on the front cover. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, but looking back on it, they were pretty vulgar!
You can hide all the magazines, not buy any movies with higher than a "G" rating, keep your kid away from the internet, etc., but unless they are home schooled and never ever leave your house, they *WILL* hear about it. And if you think "Fine, I'll home school!", well, they're going to eventually leave home for college or a job or whatever, and negate everything you did once on their own (and be incredibly socially awkward in the process). Not to mention "protecting" them from it seems to backfire a lot; I personally know several that were raised as far away from sex as possible (my classmates and I knew not to discuss it around her because she got embarrassed and thought it was wrong) that became pregnant within a few weeks of starting college and getting away from mom and dad. No exposure means they don't understand moderation or proper contexts.
Anyway, my point was I've learned a hell of a lot more about sex from listening to peers in middle school thru college than I ever did out of magazines or movies or video games. This "threat" is incredibly overblown.
Sex is an important part of human nature, you can't keep it hidden for very long... particularly once your children reach those chaotic years where your biological instinct is trying to get you to do things society says is still inappropriate for your age. They're going to find out somehow, so instead of fighting it just to ultimately loose, be sure your kids are well-informed for their age range -- that's really the best you can do, unless you plan on keeping your kids chained in a basement for their entire lives.
Because most are not educated how to use it properly yet. It's terrific, but I know firsthand from trying to introduce it to people that they ignore it, realize many of their websites are broken, then I say "Well, you can allow certain websites you visit with this little button" -- they then promptly pick "Enable Globally" (or simply whitelist every single site they ever visit), and it has no effect.
So instead of teaching people security, it just teaches them "Security is annoying and breaks everything, what's teh point?" and they want to use it less.
Without seeing diagrams and all, it's very hard for me to guess what is going on. It's entirely possible that it's not really a novel phenomenon, just a novel setup. We've had things like that happen before in the labs; its explainable with current physics, just too complicated to explain within the same day you discover it. I suspect you are correct in that this machine is not perpetual motion, but could very well be an interesting device for other purposes. I'm actually curious to see it work!
The text of the article really bugs me though. Almost no information is provided about anything except this guy's background, and it's very careful to point out that he lost his wife and his dog died and he lives under bridges and eats garbage and stuff. It almost seems like a sympathy article, like they want you to believe he's the underdog fighting for truth against the tyranny of scientists that are just out to destroy all inventions from the little guy that would help humanity.
Which of course is hardly the case; if more people knew just a little more about science, they would understand why most are skeptical.
This is really interesting after reading a recent /. story about dark matter, and getting some more information from another poster. If dark matter was needed to explain why galaxies look a certain way, but this one can exist without it, what does that say about dark matter? Even if dark matter is real, there's obviously something missing if we can't explain this.
Nature, you have once again awed me with your incredible weirdness.
Perhaps its a new reader trying to get involved with the community (and perhaps asked several places to try and get the most eyes)? It is true that these things have been discussed liked crazy on /., but largely only in terms of lawyers and copyright laws. I don't recall anyone recently posting how to interact with their bosses on the matter. I'm sure there needs to be some level of documentation, but what does that consist of exactly? You'd want to make sure its documented so that if it is open-sourced and becomes popular, no one can come back and say "I didn't authorize this! It's all ours!". But what sort of documentation? Was it a long process, or was it as easy as getting someone to sign one paper saying "Program X is hereby released under the GNU GPL -- signed, The Big Guy, Some Company" and so took all of 30 seconds? Someone here may have dealt with it and can offer some advice that may be more reasonable that someone on the GPL forums, whom only knows what the license says but has never actually bargained with a boss or CEO to get something released.
And if nothing else, its polite to give help when you can. Responses such as yours are a big reason people don't like to learn about Linux or technology in general; whenever they attempt to get involved and learn, they just get yelled at for being newbies and told to go elsewhere. The open source community may have lost a genius member just now because you decided to be a jerk and therefore put off the asker from even wanting to write open source software anymore.
Just remember this next time you have a question about anything (which is inevitable). I don't want to hear it when you're stuck with no answer because everyone yelled "Get lost! You should know the answer."
Ah! I realized I'm thinking of dark energy, not dark matter. I think. Maybe my memory is just screwed up. As I'm not a cosmologist, the line for me sometimes blurs and I am unsure what the difference is. Perhaps you know more about it than I and someone can clear up the difference. The man I saw may have been the first proposer of dark energy.
In any case, if our theories are beginning to predict particles with properties of dark matter, then I feel much better about it. But randomly throwing out ideas with no basis worries me greatly. Thanks for the heads up, I'll have to find some more recent literature to read about that, I wasn't aware particle physics was predicting it now.
I think that only works on telling the good object from the evil object.
What if they're both good?!??!?! (or both evil)
Well hold on, anti-matter is real, as long as you mean in an anti-particles sense. Positrons (anti-electrons) have been observed and I want to say some team in Europe made anti-hydrogen atoms. I wish I had links, but I know I read about it.
As for the rest, I pretty much agree with you.
I had the wonderful opportunity to see a talk by one of the experts of (and I think original proposer of) dark matter. He said he was starting to feel dark matter is not real and that a possible better explanation of it can be made by modifying Newtonian/Relativistic mechanics. That seems more satisfactory to me, if for no other reason than we can use a correction in the equations to make predictions about other things, and see if we observe that effect.
That's much better than assuming something exists, but you don't know any of its properties except that it fixes this one problem in your other theory. That's pretty bogus. Science is all about observation, and seeing if our predictions based on current research are true. If you can't do either, it really doesn't qualify as science.
That's too far in the future for them to even fathom. The whole reason they're doing this is they want profits NOW. No delayed gratification, they want to be rich right now.
These organizations may not survive another generation if they keep bullying the younger kids, but it won't matter to current CEOs at all; by then, they'll be rich and retired and possibly even already passed away. It largely won't impact them if we aren't going to do anything about it for 20 years, so why should they care? They're getting away with it so far. They may not be all that stupid; actually, somewhat smart, just very near-sighted and not very ethical.
They'd stop this nonsense in a heartbeat if a couple judges made a stand and said they owed millions for making a stupid lawsuit; that threatens their retirement in the Bahamas, and they'd rather lay off the lawsuits than loose their riches.
I completely agree! However, unfortunately, you're preaching to the choir. The question now is, what do we have to do to convince those that make the law that this is what needs to be done? I've been thinking lately - I wonder if someone could get them (corrupt congressmen) at their own game. For instance, run for office and have a reasonable chance at becoming a senator or representative, and then create a bill with some catchy acronym like "The 2008 DON'T EAT BABIES Act" that gives money to orphans, and just so happens to also change patent law. If anyone comes out against it, gather a list and send a letter to all the major news outlets saying "Senator So-And-So is against the DON'T EAT BABIES Act!" and invite them to ask him why he is against it. That'd get them to vote for it real quick, if they want to stay in office. But nah, I think that sort of behavior would require me to give up certain virtues, which I won't do. Still, nice to dream.
That's 103%. How does that work? Unless maybe its those voting machines...
I'm quite sorry the way my wording came out, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. I believe you when you say you are principled. I do not ever intend on such behavior myself.
However, in intensely emotional situations, sometimes even the most well-meaning of people can loose it. Again, not saying you would, but it happens. You just lost someone close, and there's that bit of denial that it can't be happening, that then shifts into "This wouldn't have happened if it weren't for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK". If a doctor mentions a new medicine was tried, suddenly, AHA! maybe that was related somehow, because how could your family member pass away if the doctors knew what they were doing and the medicine was good? If it later comes out that the medicine was too quickly approved and had all sorts of nasty side effects, what would be the next leap in thoughts?
Perhaps going as far as suing is a bit extreme for most people, but no doubt there would be anger and some thoughts of "YOU'RE A DOCTOR!!! You should have know what you were doing and SAVED HIM!!!" or "Stupid government!! THEY KILLED HIM BY NOT TESTING IT MORE and only acting in the interests of pharmaceutical CORPORATIONS and their PROFITS!!". Given the 300 million people in the United States, statistically there has to be a couple people distraught enough over it to sue for negligence or malpractice. And it only takes a couple people suing to put a few doctors out of work and/or get millions from the government, and ruin it for the rest of us.
That was what I was trying to say. It's quite complicated; as someone else pointed out, medicine is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Go slowly and carefully, then you're not helping fast enough and letting them die; speed up your work, then you rushed it and killed people by your negligence (or the profit motive). You can't win! I don't envy those jobs... or really any job in government. They all have that problem.
Oh come on; if one of your family members was given a vaccine and a weekly later developed some severe disease and died (even if they were already dying!), you would again go with the "deliberate malevolence" argument and probably sue someone.
Sorry, didn't mean to direct that toward you, this was actually meant to be a more general societal thing. Until people get over their sue-happy kick lately, all government entities are going to tread softly, I imagine, particularly those directly related to public health. People have sued for much less than rushing a medicine to market (coffee being hot comes to mind), so can you really blame them? Legal battles drain money from what could have funded more medicine research, etc.
However, a serious question to the parent especially: do you know how to sign up for the trials, is it too late? Someone somewhere has to be taking it or it wouldn't be a trial. I've never signed up for something like that, so I don't know what the process is and am partially asking out of curiosity myself.
Oh no!! Alzheimer's is becoming an epidemic! - They've already forgotten other people are working on helmets! They could really use a helmet to reverse Alzheimer's right now... I wonder if anyone has done that before...
Not just that, but JURASSIC PRE-PEOPLE!! Thanks for desecrating the remains of our (great x 10^45)-grand-parents, you jerks.
I have no doubt that if gravity waves exist, LIGO will eventually pick one up. It's question of timing.
I visited one of the LIGO facilities once, it was fascinating. But I learned two things there about how sensitive it was:
(1) When my group and I came in, they showed us the real time data -- there was a gigantic spike in the middle of the screen. One technician pointed to it and said "That was from you guys rolling up to the facility, we knew when you were almost here.". I then got to hear complaints about all of the loggers in the area that interfere, a highway being close enough for big trucks passing to cause spikes, etc.
(2) While in the control room talking, the mirrors went out of alignment and you could hear an alarm. One of the scientists got on his computer and came back with the reason: "There's a small earthquake in Greenland, it should be over soon."
They told us of the plans to upgrade the facility. Most of it involved adding more shocks and counterweights and all to dampen the various effects we saw that day. They claimed it would be enough, and seeing as their first few test runs were almost right on the money, I'm sure they're correct. But I imagine a little bit of luck is involved as well: having some big cosmic event happen when there aren't a lot of truckers on the road or earthquakes, etc.
If I was an astronaut, I probably would have done something like this by now, just because its funny. The space station is rather small, and I imagine its novelty wears off quickly. What else are you supposed to do?
However, I'm curious if they have a plan to know whether or not it worked? An origami paper plane should be pretty tiny and can easily be lost somewhere between space station and the ground.
Unless it has some sort of microscopic transmitter on it, are going to track it with a telescope, or they're just going to declare victory no matter what, I'm not sure how you can easily tell whether this design and special paper made any sort of difference. Which is terrible because I'm really curious to know if it does!!
It just lied that it could play Ms. Pac-Man so it could get more reward food.
That may be true, I'll admit that. Lately its tough to know what news source (if any) to trust. But I recall even the BBC saying this, so I figured it had to have some truth to it.
This is true, but I was always under the impression you could cool down particles to low states, or otherwise set up an environment where one state was amazingly more probable than the other(s). Thus, my understanding was you could use it for things like sending information, there would just be a (hopefully small) percentage of errors in the message. By agreeing on some method of communication, you could have error correction techniques that would make it a small problem (like slight occasional static over a radio, for instance).
But, I am not working in the field so this could be my wrong attempt to understand something over my head. Any thoughts.
I would like to know what these 30 genes are, and how they programmed them. Perhaps someone put in a "lying" gene as recessive, and waited to see how long it took to surface? I guess my main confusion is whether or not lying was pre-planned or unintended.
I think it's also interesting that when lying surfaced, you also had heros surface. I wonder why that's the case?
(1) I've read several articles about socialized systems in Europe being severely in debt. If that's the case, even if its a good idea and works short term, its not sustainable. We would have to do things different that Europe, especially given the amount of debt we're in already. (2) Purely making so much profit annoys me, but then we must remember that doctors start off with lots of debt, have to pay many bills, insurance (malpractice, etc.), not to mention the crazy expenses required to buy things like MRI machines. Do you plan on paying for your doctor to go to school? Feel like chipping in to buy an MRI? If not, then you have to pay something later on when you do need a doctor and an MRI. Oh, but the government will pay for it, right? Guess what, tax increases to offset the price (or simply more national debt). Someone has to pay for it somewhere, at least until we can reach Star Trek enlightenment and completely do away with the entire concept of money and debts (which humanity is nowhere near ready for). Our system obviously needs improvement, but pretending that socializing medicine is going to solve all of our problems is just deluding yourself.
And if someone drives themselves into a ditch and goes to the hospital, will it be possible to steal my identity and affect my health score now too? How easy is it to fix mistakes like that?