As I'm a GPL author, you might at least have the grace to say that the GPL prevents people from using my code to make money in ways that I don't approve of, like stealing it and then selling it back to me for money. I'm sure that that annoys people who want to take other people's code, dress it up a bit, and then resell it for cash -- or even re-copyright it and then prevent the original author him or herself from using it -- but it is hard to argue that the authors, including me, don't have every right to grant conditional/contingent licenses that prohibit this.
Is there a difference? Acting on negative feedback from a customer base is "appeasing" the stock holders, unless the stockholders are eager to lose their investment.
If only they were as responsive in the two other areas where they get negative feedback -- from me, at least:
* Lack of a (proprietary or not) functional linux client.
* Lack of clear progress towards making the DVD rental business moot by putting all of their movies up for streaming viewing.
The one I fully understand is a dicey proposition to them, however technically simple it is. All of those copyright owners get nervous about movies playing on a system without ironclad DRM. Unfortunately they don't understand that there is no such thing as an "ironclad" movie player on any system wherein the DRM cannot easily be circumvented by anyone that really wants to, and that China is a land filled with "entrepreneurs" who both want to and long, long since have. Great job of locking a barn door that cannot, really, be locked, a door in a two dimensional false front, a "hollywood wall" straight out of Blazing Saddles, the kind anybody can just walk around.
In the meantime, they are shooting themselves in the head as far as the derivable revenue stream that they might expect from the thousands of long-tail movies out there is concerned. There are thousands of old TV shows and movies I would be happy to watch, but not if I have to mess with DVD shipping even as easy as they have made it. It is a PITA and wasteful and expensive and requires that I decide today what I want to watch three days from now, if I have time to watch anything at all.
I'd be willing to pay more to Netflix if they simply got everything online. It's easily worth it to me to pay a nickel or a dime for every hour I view over a month to NOT have to wait for shipping, not NOT have to try to crack and store all of the movies and shows in existence and to have a halfway decent interface to them on both my computers and my TV. If they simply shared this revenue with the movies' distributors, it would spin straw into gold, easily matching their revenue from the handful of DVDs Netflix has to maintain for the older/slower titles.
It ain't happen', of course. It makes too much sense, so even appealing to greed won't help. One could only wish that they would listen to their customers even more than they do, and thereby make their shareholders even happier than they are.
You mean because Buddhism isn't a religion and Buddha was neither a prophet nor a priest, but rather was a practicing social psychiatrist and ethicist? Like that?
But the issue Stallman is raising is that over many years, Jobs was about ownership and money as much as he was about anything else. He was not a leading light of the open source software movement. In fact, he and his company continue to be rather aggressively proprietary anywhere they can get away with it. They only moved to a Unix base because not to do so was fatal -- they didn't have a chance of developing a creditable non-Unix multitasking multiuser operating system to replace the long series of completely proprietary Mac OS's, at a time that even Microsoft was reading the writing on the wall (and MS had NT, for better or worse, and it took most of a decade to develop that to where it was capable of turning into e.g. XP and giving MS a consumer OS that wasn't doomed out of the gate.
Basically, the OSS community saved Apple's ass every bit as much as the Ipod did -- without OSX the actual Apple "computer" was dead and everybody knows it and knew it at the time (and Apple came within a hair of ceasing to exist because of it). So what, exactly, did Apple then do for the OSS community? Move to open standards for (say) music? Move to open standards for anything at all where the standards were not already dictated by the marketplace? Become an aggressive corporate presence calling for an end to proprietary software and hardware?
Hardly. Does the Ipod use a USB port to play music or charge? It does! Does it use a standard USB connector? It does not! Hence an instant, enormous aftermarket for a proprietary piece of cabling that won't work with anybody else's anything and that gains no particular benefit from the difference. Over decades -- printer cables, modem cables, mouse cable -- if it was Apple only Apple's version would fit on an Apple piece of hardware.
Software no better. I personally am neither glad he's dead nor glad he's gone because either OSS can make it on its own in spite of people like Jobs and Gates and companies like Apple and Microsoft or it can't, but Jobs was in a position to do the compassionate and ethical thing at least a time or two in there and I would not say that his corporate business decisions properly reflected the general Buddhist philosophy or ethos.
It was, and remains, all about the money and power and influence every bit as much as it was about the joy.
OTOH, it still means the source wasn't a separate and distinct human being that had to be destroyed in order to produce them (which is the whole kick against the embryonic ones in the first place), so I don't foresee any major (or credible) theological or moral opposition to the idea.
But you see, the whole point is that every single cell in your body that has a full complement of your DNA is, potentially, a separate and distinct human being. A zygote is, potentially, a separate and distinct human being. The difference between the one and the other is purely theological, doubly so when the DNA from one of your cells is turned into an "embryonic clone", a.k.a. "a zygote". Look at it through the microscope, and there it is, an egg cell with a full complement of DNA. Did it get the full complement from sexual fertilization? Sure -- the only question is when the fertilization occurred. Will it grow if properly implanted on a receptive uterus? To be sure. Will it grow into a separate and distinct human being (in both cases)? Of course. The only difference would only be visible to a cellular biologist, the length of the telomeres in the clone would likely be reduced according to the life of the original adult source and hence one of the separate and distinct humans might die younger than one might expect. But which one? One out of two "naturally" fertilized eggs fail to implant, plenty of "naturally" produced separate and distinct humans have genetic flaws.
Ultimately, it comes down to this. Humans are not single celled animals. Humans are not embryos. Humans are not fetuses. Humans are not stem cells. There is no single place one can point to and say -- "Now this is human, before it was not". That is just as true on the trailing side of human existence, as life wanes, as it is on the leading side, where life waxes. What one can do (in both cases) is say things about the brain and its capacity for sentience, true self-awareness, the one thing (perhaps) that separates humans at some point from animals that otherwise follow the same process of development. When your brain is dead, "you" are dead whatever the condition of your body. When your brain is reduced to the level of functionality observed in a fetus on the downhill side of life, "you" are dead.
On the leading side there is no possible way that a zygote (created by any means whatsoever) can think. A cell is not a brain and cannot function as one. Even a fully developed fetus has no real brain, or rather, it has a brain that might one day be able to think and might support real self-awareness, but it has nothing to think about. The earliest states that can conceivably be called "thinking" almost certainly occur well after birth, but birth itself is a very reasonable time to think about conferring formal and legal human status on a pile of cells that has the "right" genetic complement and the potential to one day become properly human. That is a single point which separates that pile of cells from being something that is deeply incapable of independent existence and insulated from any possibility of developing a mind to a new state, where it can breathe, eat, and grow apart, separate and distinct from all others. That's the day that every government in the world, for all of recorded history, has in fact granted human status to fetuses, the day that yes, you get to legally deduct them on your income taxes, the day where killing them is formalized as murder, the day the clock starts for them to be able to attend school, learn to drive, vote. That would be the birthday of the little human, and not before. If it is really before, the government owes me thousands of dollars in dependent deductions... but I don't think that they will pay;-)
Regardless, stem cells are going to be, quite literally, the stuff of miracles. With them in a decade or two humans will be able to do something that God and prayer have never managed -- heal amputees, regrowing complet
Yeah, I was kidding, I knew that. But the point is/was that \gamma isn't the LT, (and doesn't require dual capitalization) and to the extent that one writes kiddy-physics-wise L' = L/\gamma or t' = \gamma t for simple length contraction or time dilation instead of writing a proper LT using e.g. the boost parameter and hyperbolic 4-rotations it does work and work quite well, to describe things like ground level mu meson flux. That's an easy one because to measure it requires two good sized photomultipliers and a bit of electronics, readily available in nearly any undergrad physics lab. Coincidence detection within the decay window even gives you directionality.
Finally, all bodies will end up transforming their matter into radiant energy and this energy will be converted into light. In addition, from every direction of the curved space this light will convex upon one centre in order to produce a new creative explosion. In synthesis: Light is eternal, it is the origin and the end of the Universe. It is of no interest here to study the processes of densification, nor, inversely, those of increasing vibration of matter, anti-matter, and energy. It suffices to say that these are three expressions of the same principle, that each of them can turn into light and vice versa.
It is absolutely true that some of the anomalies that are not being interpreted as dark matter/dark energy have been around (observationally) for a long time, but the Universe is big and making accurate measurements on a macro scales hasn't even been possible until fairly recent times. The observations now are simply reaching the point where they strongly suggest if not demand new physics to explain them, the floor is now open for theories that consistently describe the new phenomena and still explain the old phenomena as well.
However, this mish-mosh you are quoting is not science. There is no evidence for a prior state "fall of light" -- the BB erased all useful details of prior state, although with empirically confirmed predictive quantitative theories we might eventually be able to extrapolate our post-BB observations into knowledge of prior state. The problem is a difficult one, though -- sort of like expecting to be able to read the manufacturing stickers off of a thermonuclear device from the mass and energy distribution visible from a certain direction from far, far away, long after the blast. Furthermore, all of the other stuff in this post, about moving away and returning on curved trajectories and all of that -- I don't know what all of that means. Nobody does. The English (or Spanish) words are meaningless, impossible to compare to observational reality, impossible to verify or refute with experiment.
What might mean something is a specific mathematical model that can be shown to be completely consistent with known physics and existing observational evidence and that describes the deviations from four-force model gravitationally bound galaxies in a quantitatively consistent way. That actually would mean something, and would even be compelling. It is also what is (AFAIK) completely lacking at this point, although there are a few very crude models that can provide some degree of qualitative agreement. As far as I know, there is no physical principle or law of nature that suggests that all matter will ``turn into light'' at any point in the future time evolution of the known interactions. I would go so far as to say that this is more or less impossible, in fact. What is an electron going to turn into that conserves charge, spin, and so on? Even theorized finite lifetimes of protons are finite but so very, very large that they can be consistent with the fact that we have never, so far, observed a proton to decay. The null hypothesis that they don't decay is so far a tenable one; although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody salted the tail of one tomorrow, a good theory isn't the measure of truth or knowledge, reliable observation is.
Without such a quantitative, predictive, empirically verified mathematical model, flowery words are just quasi-religious bullshit and in some deep sense have no place in physics. They smack of "Maharishi physics" or the kind of crap that you can see in "Down the Rabbit Hole" or "Multiple Worlds Quantum Theory" (so far).
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [nobelprize.org]. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a/. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)
OTOH, it might be. As my Ph.D. advisor (Larry Biedenharn, a Nobel wannabe) used to ask me -- "How do you think they choose who gets the award?" Generally I think they do a pretty good job -- they have the same problem as the Oscar committee, they have to reward people for some specific piece of work but some people up are really being proposed (and perhaps occasionally awarded) for a lifetime of many submarginal contributions, so they'll sometimes grant a prize that at first glance seems "odd". But/. readers are a pretty well informed bunch (with a few notable exceptions, don't make me come down there and spank you) and given time to debate to a consensus would probably do just as well.
Your remarks concerning color- and gender- blindness of the committee are dead on the money; the Nobel prize goes to the physics far more than the person, and we absolutely revere physicists of any color or gender who make "great" contributions. In physics especially people just don't really give a damn; brilliance is where you find it. If there is a fault leading to a disparity in the distribution of prizes in physics, it is in the general educational and social system that feeds graduate research programs and beyond -- in the US (and probably Europe) females and certain minorities are still underrepresented in the system in spite of decades (at this point) of active recruiting. However, this really is getting better, and I'd predict that in two more decades will be a non-issue. I've seen a huge shift in the time I've been teaching physics, from having basically one black physics major every decade (first decade) to having black majors every year, including black students who top out the class with the best overall score (in damn difficult classes!). In another decade those students will come online and we'll see prizes headed that way.
Attracting female majors is still behind -- we're still a long way from 50% in the intro-majors classes I've been teaching, more like 20-25% in a good year -- but the ones we're getting are great, I've had women nailing the top THREE slots in intro physics classes total scorewise, and again I think that they are "sticking" and going on to academic careers that will eventually lead to more prizes. Our department has certainly been actively recruiting female and nonwhite faculty -- our current department chair is both female and not white, although we are probably still a decade plus away from parity due to the fact that no matter what it takes time to roll over tenured physics positions and race/gender is only ONE consideration in hiring/recruiting, secondary to competence and ability to fund research and teach and all that.
I won't say that there are no bastions of white maleness out there in physics-land, but I would say that they are a rapidly diminishing population, and that the real place changes need to take place (and are taking place) is elementary school and high school. Physics requires serious math, and there has been an enormous female anti-math social bias entrenched across the teen years forever that is just recently starting to thaw. Math majoring has gotten to where it is very nearly general balanced (still not balanced at the faculty level, though -- the same decadal lag) and I think physics is not far behind as it is now "cool" and socially "feminine" for women to be good at math in high school. I may be dead before things are really level, but my kids won't be.
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Wannabe nerds that act as the working hands of science will just out anybody as an idiot if someone dare says that the Lorentz Factor is a load of horse shit. They want to tie velocity and gravity together, whenever the recent experiment breaking the light speed barrier throws all of that away.
To Anonymous,
Oh dear, Mr. Coward, just when my self-esteem was starting to recover, now I'm a wannabe nerd, a "working hand of science". Sigh. Well, my duty is clear -- your brilliant comment has shown me what I must do.
You, sir, are an idiot because you dare to say the Lorentz Factor (whatever the hell that is -- I know what the Lorentz Transformation is, I know what O(1,3) is, I know what a Lie algebra is, but "Lorentz Factor" -- capitalized, no less -- I can only assume that you mean \gamma) is a load of horse shit.
Perhaps if you went back to University -- assuming that your substance abuse problem is now under control and you are taking your meds -- you could learn a little bit about actual relativity theory instead of learning it from the Discovery channel with its silly pictures of curved surfaces and ponderous voiceovers, and who knows? Maybe you'd learn of the eight zillion pieces of experimental evidence we have that it is, for the most part, correct (instead of citing the one as-yet unverified report of a single particle that might -- might, mind you -- prove the exception to a very general rule).
For example, there is little problem with mu-mesons, produced by cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere that leave them streaking at nearly the speed of light towards the Earth. Their exponential time constant is roughly 2 microseconds (I can say this authoritatively as I myself measured it in a physics lab as an undergrad). 2 microseconds times 3X10^8 = 600 meters, so that basically no mu mesons should reach the ground, many tens of exponential lifetimes away. Yet nearly all of them do, because of that pesky Lorentz Factor, \gamma! How about that! The mu mesons think that all of that distance is contracted to be less than 600 meters, and we think that their little bitty clocks are all dilated and everything so that they live much longer than they would at rest. It quantitatively works out.
I'd continue and wax poetical about e.g. spin orbit interactions, successive infinitesimal Lorentz transformations, and g-factors, but if I did your head would clearly explode. Suffice it to say that ordinary chemistry would be extraordinarily different if relativity theory where entirely false. You did say that you believe in biology and chemistry, right? You do know that chemistry is derivable from physics, and that biology is best understood in terms of chemistry (and physics), right?
But no, no, to even understand the evidence you'd have to actually learn some mathematics, and clearly that is out of the question, even with your meds adjusted. Besides, if we listened to the scientific consensus, we would never have broken the sound barrier, that's clear (and I did not know that, thanks for cluing me in). I guess everything I read back as a lad about how we actually did break the sound barrier, overcoming all sorts of physics and engineering problems involving turbulence and critical properties of fluid flow was, sadly, a lie. I'm surprised that you didn't accuse scientists of still being in a state of denial about that. I certainly was. Now I am Enlightened.
I hope you don't interpret this reply wrong. I would indeed have said in response to a less informative comment, one that didn't communicate with your clear, incisive wit, that I'm open to new ideas and new theories, as a theoretical physicist. I would have said, in fact, that the entire physics community is pretty damn open to new ideas, new theories, and new evidence (hence TFA, Nobel Prizes given to people who have pursued what I would call a "new idea, a new theory" and found experimental evidence to support it). But
Tweak it just a little -- you might try removing my initials, for example, so that the FBI comes after you instead of me -- and launch it with e.g.
nagbot Joe joe_senator@congress.gov please_reconsider.txt
On day one, Joe gets an email message from you, his loyal constituent, containing reconsider.txt, which asks him to reconsider his vote on permitting cell phones to be used for automated political (or other) phone calls. No problem.
On day two, Joe gets two messages.
On day three, Joe gets four messages.
... On day N, Joe gets 2^{N-1} messages (if you haven't been blacklisted by all the major carriers and murdered by your local admin). Anyway, you get the idea. Fight fire with fire, I always say.
Every time I have used this on a student they caved by day five or six. I had a schedule for finishing the work in minutes, and had the work on my desk almost instantly later.
Mind you, this is probably illegal. But I think the script could easily be hacked to call the congressperson's phone lines and play a recorded message... ideally their personal cell phone lines or the phone line belonging to their spouse. At dinnertime, of course.
Right, but as the craft moves away from the Sun (in particular) solar gravity drops off at exactly the same rate that solar flux drops off (both 1/r^2). OTOH the craft isn't trying to pull directly away from the Sun, it is angling the sail to get a maximum transverse acceleration to increase its orbital speed. OTOOH as its transverse speed increases F_\perp v_\perp (to r) increases with v_\perp as F_\perp remains nearly constant, so the power delivered to the mass is nearly constant. Eventually it all makes my head hurt and want to turn to matlab to just integrate the EOM and see what happens.
The long and short of it (or rather, thick and thin of it) is that a 20x20 sail is a practical joke (or rather, practically a joke) good for little but to prove a concept that doesn't really require much proof. It's the engineering and scaling that are problems. A sail one micron -- 10,000 atoms or so -- thick means that 1 m^3 of sail material is 10^6 m^2 of sail. 1 m^3 has a mass of at least 1, more likely 2 metric tons -- GENEROUSLY call it 1000 kg. That is thin enough that Uri Gellar could punch holes in it just by grimacing from ten meters away. Now imagine something really exotic -- spun carbon nanotube fibers, spider silk -- to use as rigging, and make it also so thin that harsh words would snap it, add some rather complicated servomotors to pull in and extend the rigging synchronously and perfectly (as any sort of defect in the sail will tear it or snap the rigging lines), add a computer to control it all, add power to run the servomotors (solar, sure, but add solar panels and batteries), add a housing -- and you're at LEAST at another metric ton of dead weight before you get to a real payload.
Your sail generates around 3.5 N of thrust, optimally tipped, at Earth orbit (assuming round number I_sun = 1500 W/m^2). Add a 1.5 metric ton payload (so the total mass is 3.5x10^3 kg and you have a convenient a_t = 10^{-3}. Low orbital speed is roughly 0.7 escape speed, call it 7 km/sec, so it takes you around 4000 m/sec / 10^3 m/sec^2 \approx 10^7 sec to escape from the Earth (probably 2x this or more, actually, given probably non-optimal tacking). \pi \times 10^7 seconds is a year, so call it a year to reach escape speed with a bit over a metric ton of payload and a ratio of maybe 2:1 sail and support to payload. Quibbling a bit is possible, but this is (if I did arithmetic right, always doubtable:-) order of magnitude reasonable.
The good news is that once you are in Earth's orbit it is free. The bad news is that getting to low Earth orbit already cost you half the energy required to escape, and that's a lot of energy -- moreso since you have to spend the energy to lift the sail, not just the payload, with all of those early nonlinearities multiplied by 3+. A win, but not an enormous one, and a rocket lets you step right up to escape speed and get there MUCH earlier.
Not a great way for humans to travel, actually. Maybe a good way to send food and air on ahead to waystation orbits en route to Mars, if you don't mind taking a decade or so for your food etc to get there. Perhaps a good way for relatively large, permanent research robots to float around in the solar system over century timescales, useful "forever" (or until the sail develops a defect and rips in half, IMO likely a long time before forever directly exposed to CMEs and the solar wind and high UV, all of which make the MATERIAL of the sail likely to come apart (and embrittle) in years to a decade, assuming almost any kind of flexible e.g. aluminized polymer as a base. Indeed, I suspect that the solar wind might exert MORE force on the sail than sunlight at certain times, probably in a disastrous storm-at-sea sort of way.
Why do you think I'm hatin'? After all, pony porn dates back at least to Catherine the Great, and any sexual act good enough for an actual Tsarina of Russia is, well, good for her neigh...bors as well. Even though I'm sure she was just horsing around.
It just emphasizes that there really is little new about the Internet. I'm sure that pony porn was invented no more than a couple of days after photography was invented. In fact, Daguerre's first known photograph was of a pony being led by a young boy (see wikipedia:Photography). The second one (long since lost) no doubt involved the young boy, the pony, and Daguerre's mistress and was being sold days later from back alleys on Parisian streets.
I dunno. Now it is nothing but facebook chatter about Star Search and Hi-res full length movies of naked women (and men, and sheep, and the occasional pony). Little has changed, in other words, but the volume and resolution.
I am still buoyed by the eternal truth: "The Internet interprets control as damage and routes around it." It doesn't really matter what political groups devoted to the repression and control of communication do at this point. Punching a hole through a control barrier is routine hackery that many pursue merely for the sport and pleasure at this point (witness the world's virus plague).
Damn skippy. This post isn't about trying to take over the world, it's about providing cybernetic replacements or augmentations that can eventually allow real people with stroke damage etc to recover essential function. It may be a race -- now that Our Government is actually pushing stem cell research big time, it seems not unlikely that in a decade or three they'll be able to actually regrow damaged brain tissue in situ -- there are already some whopping success stories with growing or repairing missing pieces of the more mundane and peripheral sort, but I expect autologous regrown organs within the decade (perhaps starting with replacement livers or hearts).
On the cybernetic neurological side in addition to possibly repair cerebellar damage, there has already been success at e.g. restoring sight (so far of a very limited quality) to the blind and hearing to the deaf. Again, inside a decade I suspect that there will be artificial eyes with at least tolerable/useful resolution. This isn't about "the Singularity" -- it is about real world, enormously useful advances in medical technology that can and will reduce the human suffering in the world.
Except that they don't, in fact, observe neutrinos before supernovae. They arrive right when they "should", at or slightly after the light arrives. Bear in mind that \Delta t is 6x10^{-8} seconds over 500 miles. A light year is roughly 6 x 10^12 miles, so a supernova from hundreds to millions of LY away would produce neutrinos that arrive anywhere from hours to days or months before the light. And they don't, or at least no one has yet observed that they do. That is, it isn't really a tiny percentage, not tiny as in at all difficult to resolve. 60 nanoseconds is hundreds of CPU clock cycles -- your computer could resolve the timing to a couple of significant figures and I'm guessing state of the art clocks and transducers can do at least orders of magnitude better.
It's one of several reasons that people are skeptical about the superluminal result, one of several things that will ultimately have to be explained if the superluminal result is eventually validated.
I agree with that. New physics would be great fun, actually, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and ideally, confirmation from multiple experiments and different KINDS of experiments). Neutrinos are I admit a bit tough to observe, so this may take a while, but there are detectors out there now. Otherwise, I am minded of the (at least two) times magnetic monopoles have been observed. Or more unkindly, of cold fusion -- well, not really. I doubt that the CERN people are infected with rampant confirmation bias here, probably rather the opposite. They fully realize that their result is PROBABLY a subtle error of some sort, but of course the exciting thing is that until it is explained that way then maybe, just maybe, it is real. In which case it is a short trip over to Stockholm to meet the King...;-)
If you look at the orders of magnitude involved, I think that is an absurd hypothesis -- violently inconsistent with the strength of the Earth's gravitational field and its ability to affect time and both the supernova neutrino experiments and the various prior laboratory experiments on the speed of neutrino relative to the speed of light. The supernova observation flatly rules it out, and bear in mind that those neutrinos got their supposed "head start" in the gravitational field of an exploding star, in field strength's that make the earth's look like a vacuum by comparison. But I'd be interested in any reference that suggests that weak transverse gravitational fields can induce enormous shifts in speed...
Yeah, but on the other hand, people have been measuring the speed of neutrinos over much longer distances for decades, including things like the timing differences between nova light and arrival of neutrinos over interstellar or intergalactic distances. 18 meters over ~500 km is an egregious impossible-to-miss result. Which leads to the big question -- if true, how could it have possibly been missed all of these years?
Personally, I'm betting that it hasn't been missed all of these years. If I'm wrong, of course, I'm wrong -- nature is what nature is, not what we want it to be. But as somebody that teaches relativity from time to time, it's going to be really, really painful to try to make physics consistent again if neutrinos travel faster than light. Interesting times...
That's how much of an error in the presumed distance between the stations is required to explain a 60 ns discrepancy. Bearing in mind that neutrinos travel "as the crow flies" along a geodesic (effectively a straight line) between the two points, where light signals in the form of e.g. radio waves or in optical fibers, in addition to being retarded by an index of refraction, must follow an arc length along the Earth's surface if not worse.
You're right, that really would fix the carbon problem, the only way that's actually better than just waiting a bit for hydrocarbons and coal to be too expensive to use for fuel (I'm guessing that will be in the next decade, maybe two). But even without hydrocarbon fuels and CO_2, the earth is 7 billion humans and growing strong, growing at a rate that makes some hypothetical melting of icecaps and rising of oceans cosmically irrelevant.
Soylendra Green -- or a really perfect global plague that kills (say) four out of five people currently alive -- might preserve good old Mom Earth long enough to let us achieve a Type I civilization, but otherwise carbon offsets are, as they say, pissing into a force four gale.
Ah, AC, you sly devil. So that's where you got off to, when you left the less-anonymous city.
Down here in NC folks have several good solutions to the beer problem, including making their own (which is way, way better than the beer you can get in any gas station in the boonies unless for you US corporate beer is the epitome of corn-flavored goodness) or saying screw the beer and turning their malted corn directly into an untempered distilled spirit, made (as you say) in relative seclusion. I can only guess that you live in the northern boonies.
Of course, true boonie-dwellers in NC often eschew newfangled contraptions like wi-fi, cell phones, phones, microwave ovens, and computers, and only use electricity to run their well-pump and refrigerator and lights. They often cook whole pigs or vats of deer, squirrel, and groundhog into a thick nourishing stew and aren't averse to using the occasional revenuer or overly nosy neighbor (seeking to unrighteously rip-off some of that pot) as mulch for their barley or corn crop. Occasionally they can spell and still have all of their teeth. But we don't often hear from them on/.
Time to found an uplift institute. All we need is to perform a little bit of tinkering, pop a gene for auditory cortex in there somewhere, breed for larger skulls and a bit more grey matter to give that auditory context room to take off in, and chimps at least are golden -- verbally enabled neo-chimps arise! Or we could probably accomplish the same thing by aggressive selective breeding much more slowly (waiting for those mutations). Dogs, or course, would also need lips, and maybe some omnivore front teeth, although my border collie does pretty well with "oooerrr"s or body language when he's talking...
You mean like dogs can mate with wolves and foxes and create perfectly normal offspring? Or the way lions can mate with tigers? I thought at this point the notion that speciesization involved an inability to crossbreed with nearby branches and produced "normal", often fertile, offspring was passe'. Evolution is a lot more interesting than "just Darwin" these days, with the discovery that breeding across species is possible and even commonplace as well as the even more interesting discovery that a significant fraction (maybe 8%) of the human genome is viral DNA probably intercalated via retroviruses in a way that "stuck". It isn't all about simple single-site mutation and in-species crossover anymore (although natural selection itself survives, of course).
However, your point is well taken -- as far as I know the aboriginal genome isn't sufficiently divergent to count as a separate species, any more than the pigmy genome. Or if they are, it's so uber-politically incorrect to point it out that nobody is doing so. OTOH, there was the recent discovery that one single bay in Australia is home to a unique species of porpoise that is genetically divergent enough to be considered separate (although I'd bet it is smoothly crossfertile with other Tursiops).
Well said, sir! Now, if you can only build a small script that will repost that automatically to/. whenever somebody claims that EC2 is a good deal for tasks that will, in fact, keep all of your compute nodes busy all of the time (since your argument scales rather well)...
Not necessarily naked. And I get patent-dibs on the horizontally polarized transparent plastic coveralls with "Fly Clear" stencilled on the front. And on the vertically polarized sunglasses everybody will have to wear to preserve modesty, unless they tip their head sideways to get a peek at that absolutely gorgeous stacked blonde. Although, given the fat tattooed lady in between with a bit of paper stuck between the cheeks, most of us will probably opt to keep our heads straight up...:-)
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As I'm a GPL author, you might at least have the grace to say that the GPL prevents people from using my code to make money in ways that I don't approve of, like stealing it and then selling it back to me for money. I'm sure that that annoys people who want to take other people's code, dress it up a bit, and then resell it for cash -- or even re-copyright it and then prevent the original author him or herself from using it -- but it is hard to argue that the authors, including me, don't have every right to grant conditional/contingent licenses that prohibit this.
rgb
Is there a difference? Acting on negative feedback from a customer base is "appeasing" the stock holders, unless the stockholders are eager to lose their investment.
If only they were as responsive in the two other areas where they get negative feedback -- from me, at least:
* Lack of a (proprietary or not) functional linux client.
* Lack of clear progress towards making the DVD rental business moot by putting all of their movies up for streaming viewing.
The one I fully understand is a dicey proposition to them, however technically simple it is. All of those copyright owners get nervous about movies playing on a system without ironclad DRM. Unfortunately they don't understand that there is no such thing as an "ironclad" movie player on any system wherein the DRM cannot easily be circumvented by anyone that really wants to, and that China is a land filled with "entrepreneurs" who both want to and long, long since have. Great job of locking a barn door that cannot, really, be locked, a door in a two dimensional false front, a "hollywood wall" straight out of Blazing Saddles, the kind anybody can just walk around.
In the meantime, they are shooting themselves in the head as far as the derivable revenue stream that they might expect from the thousands of long-tail movies out there is concerned. There are thousands of old TV shows and movies I would be happy to watch, but not if I have to mess with DVD shipping even as easy as they have made it. It is a PITA and wasteful and expensive and requires that I decide today what I want to watch three days from now, if I have time to watch anything at all.
I'd be willing to pay more to Netflix if they simply got everything online. It's easily worth it to me to pay a nickel or a dime for every hour I view over a month to NOT have to wait for shipping, not NOT have to try to crack and store all of the movies and shows in existence and to have a halfway decent interface to them on both my computers and my TV. If they simply shared this revenue with the movies' distributors, it would spin straw into gold, easily matching their revenue from the handful of DVDs Netflix has to maintain for the older/slower titles.
It ain't happen', of course. It makes too much sense, so even appealing to greed won't help. One could only wish that they would listen to their customers even more than they do, and thereby make their shareholders even happier than they are.
rgb
You mean because Buddhism isn't a religion and Buddha was neither a prophet nor a priest, but rather was a practicing social psychiatrist and ethicist? Like that?
But the issue Stallman is raising is that over many years, Jobs was about ownership and money as much as he was about anything else. He was not a leading light of the open source software movement. In fact, he and his company continue to be rather aggressively proprietary anywhere they can get away with it. They only moved to a Unix base because not to do so was fatal -- they didn't have a chance of developing a creditable non-Unix multitasking multiuser operating system to replace the long series of completely proprietary Mac OS's, at a time that even Microsoft was reading the writing on the wall (and MS had NT, for better or worse, and it took most of a decade to develop that to where it was capable of turning into e.g. XP and giving MS a consumer OS that wasn't doomed out of the gate.
Basically, the OSS community saved Apple's ass every bit as much as the Ipod did -- without OSX the actual Apple "computer" was dead and everybody knows it and knew it at the time (and Apple came within a hair of ceasing to exist because of it). So what, exactly, did Apple then do for the OSS community? Move to open standards for (say) music? Move to open standards for anything at all where the standards were not already dictated by the marketplace? Become an aggressive corporate presence calling for an end to proprietary software and hardware?
Hardly. Does the Ipod use a USB port to play music or charge? It does! Does it use a standard USB connector? It does not! Hence an instant, enormous aftermarket for a proprietary piece of cabling that won't work with anybody else's anything and that gains no particular benefit from the difference. Over decades -- printer cables, modem cables, mouse cable -- if it was Apple only Apple's version would fit on an Apple piece of hardware.
Software no better. I personally am neither glad he's dead nor glad he's gone because either OSS can make it on its own in spite of people like Jobs and Gates and companies like Apple and Microsoft or it can't, but Jobs was in a position to do the compassionate and ethical thing at least a time or two in there and I would not say that his corporate business decisions properly reflected the general Buddhist philosophy or ethos.
It was, and remains, all about the money and power and influence every bit as much as it was about the joy.
rgb
With a mobius twist of lime, no doubt.
OTOH, it still means the source wasn't a separate and distinct human being that had to be destroyed in order to produce them (which is the whole kick against the embryonic ones in the first place), so I don't foresee any major (or credible) theological or moral opposition to the idea.
But you see, the whole point is that every single cell in your body that has a full complement of your DNA is, potentially, a separate and distinct human being. A zygote is, potentially, a separate and distinct human being. The difference between the one and the other is purely theological, doubly so when the DNA from one of your cells is turned into an "embryonic clone", a.k.a. "a zygote". Look at it through the microscope, and there it is, an egg cell with a full complement of DNA. Did it get the full complement from sexual fertilization? Sure -- the only question is when the fertilization occurred. Will it grow if properly implanted on a receptive uterus? To be sure. Will it grow into a separate and distinct human being (in both cases)? Of course. The only difference would only be visible to a cellular biologist, the length of the telomeres in the clone would likely be reduced according to the life of the original adult source and hence one of the separate and distinct humans might die younger than one might expect. But which one? One out of two "naturally" fertilized eggs fail to implant, plenty of "naturally" produced separate and distinct humans have genetic flaws.
Ultimately, it comes down to this. Humans are not single celled animals. Humans are not embryos. Humans are not fetuses. Humans are not stem cells. There is no single place one can point to and say -- "Now this is human, before it was not". That is just as true on the trailing side of human existence, as life wanes, as it is on the leading side, where life waxes. What one can do (in both cases) is say things about the brain and its capacity for sentience, true self-awareness, the one thing (perhaps) that separates humans at some point from animals that otherwise follow the same process of development. When your brain is dead, "you" are dead whatever the condition of your body. When your brain is reduced to the level of functionality observed in a fetus on the downhill side of life, "you" are dead.
On the leading side there is no possible way that a zygote (created by any means whatsoever) can think. A cell is not a brain and cannot function as one. Even a fully developed fetus has no real brain, or rather, it has a brain that might one day be able to think and might support real self-awareness, but it has nothing to think about. The earliest states that can conceivably be called "thinking" almost certainly occur well after birth, but birth itself is a very reasonable time to think about conferring formal and legal human status on a pile of cells that has the "right" genetic complement and the potential to one day become properly human. That is a single point which separates that pile of cells from being something that is deeply incapable of independent existence and insulated from any possibility of developing a mind to a new state, where it can breathe, eat, and grow apart, separate and distinct from all others. That's the day that every government in the world, for all of recorded history, has in fact granted human status to fetuses, the day that yes, you get to legally deduct them on your income taxes, the day where killing them is formalized as murder, the day the clock starts for them to be able to attend school, learn to drive, vote. That would be the birthday of the little human, and not before. If it is really before, the government owes me thousands of dollars in dependent deductions... but I don't think that they will pay;-)
Regardless, stem cells are going to be, quite literally, the stuff of miracles. With them in a decade or two humans will be able to do something that God and prayer have never managed -- heal amputees, regrowing complet
Yeah, I was kidding, I knew that. But the point is/was that \gamma isn't the LT, (and doesn't require dual capitalization) and to the extent that one writes kiddy-physics-wise L' = L/\gamma or t' = \gamma t for simple length contraction or time dilation instead of writing a proper LT using e.g. the boost parameter and hyperbolic 4-rotations it does work and work quite well, to describe things like ground level mu meson flux. That's an easy one because to measure it requires two good sized photomultipliers and a bit of electronics, readily available in nearly any undergrad physics lab. Coincidence detection within the decay window even gives you directionality.
BTW, great sig.
rgb
Finally, all bodies will end up transforming their matter into radiant energy and this energy will be converted into light. In addition, from every direction of the curved space this light will convex upon one centre in order to produce a new creative explosion. In synthesis: Light is eternal, it is the origin and the end of the Universe. It is of no interest here to study the processes of densification, nor, inversely, those of increasing vibration of matter, anti-matter, and energy. It suffices to say that these are three expressions of the same principle, that each of them can turn into light and vice versa.
It is absolutely true that some of the anomalies that are not being interpreted as dark matter/dark energy have been around (observationally) for a long time, but the Universe is big and making accurate measurements on a macro scales hasn't even been possible until fairly recent times. The observations now are simply reaching the point where they strongly suggest if not demand new physics to explain them, the floor is now open for theories that consistently describe the new phenomena and still explain the old phenomena as well.
However, this mish-mosh you are quoting is not science. There is no evidence for a prior state "fall of light" -- the BB erased all useful details of prior state, although with empirically confirmed predictive quantitative theories we might eventually be able to extrapolate our post-BB observations into knowledge of prior state. The problem is a difficult one, though -- sort of like expecting to be able to read the manufacturing stickers off of a thermonuclear device from the mass and energy distribution visible from a certain direction from far, far away, long after the blast. Furthermore, all of the other stuff in this post, about moving away and returning on curved trajectories and all of that -- I don't know what all of that means. Nobody does. The English (or Spanish) words are meaningless, impossible to compare to observational reality, impossible to verify or refute with experiment.
What might mean something is a specific mathematical model that can be shown to be completely consistent with known physics and existing observational evidence and that describes the deviations from four-force model gravitationally bound galaxies in a quantitatively consistent way. That actually would mean something, and would even be compelling. It is also what is (AFAIK) completely lacking at this point, although there are a few very crude models that can provide some degree of qualitative agreement. As far as I know, there is no physical principle or law of nature that suggests that all matter will ``turn into light'' at any point in the future time evolution of the known interactions. I would go so far as to say that this is more or less impossible, in fact. What is an electron going to turn into that conserves charge, spin, and so on? Even theorized finite lifetimes of protons are finite but so very, very large that they can be consistent with the fact that we have never, so far, observed a proton to decay. The null hypothesis that they don't decay is so far a tenable one; although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody salted the tail of one tomorrow, a good theory isn't the measure of truth or knowledge, reliable observation is.
Without such a quantitative, predictive, empirically verified mathematical model, flowery words are just quasi-religious bullshit and in some deep sense have no place in physics. They smack of "Maharishi physics" or the kind of crap that you can see in "Down the Rabbit Hole" or "Multiple Worlds Quantum Theory" (so far).
rgb
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [nobelprize.org]. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a /. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)
/. readers are a pretty well informed bunch (with a few notable exceptions, don't make me come down there and spank you) and given time to debate to a consensus would probably do just as well.
OTOH, it might be. As my Ph.D. advisor (Larry Biedenharn, a Nobel wannabe) used to ask me -- "How do you think they choose who gets the award?" Generally I think they do a pretty good job -- they have the same problem as the Oscar committee, they have to reward people for some specific piece of work but some people up are really being proposed (and perhaps occasionally awarded) for a lifetime of many submarginal contributions, so they'll sometimes grant a prize that at first glance seems "odd". But
Your remarks concerning color- and gender- blindness of the committee are dead on the money; the Nobel prize goes to the physics far more than the person, and we absolutely revere physicists of any color or gender who make "great" contributions. In physics especially people just don't really give a damn; brilliance is where you find it. If there is a fault leading to a disparity in the distribution of prizes in physics, it is in the general educational and social system that feeds graduate research programs and beyond -- in the US (and probably Europe) females and certain minorities are still underrepresented in the system in spite of decades (at this point) of active recruiting. However, this really is getting better, and I'd predict that in two more decades will be a non-issue. I've seen a huge shift in the time I've been teaching physics, from having basically one black physics major every decade (first decade) to having black majors every year, including black students who top out the class with the best overall score (in damn difficult classes!). In another decade those students will come online and we'll see prizes headed that way.
Attracting female majors is still behind -- we're still a long way from 50% in the intro-majors classes I've been teaching, more like 20-25% in a good year -- but the ones we're getting are great, I've had women nailing the top THREE slots in intro physics classes total scorewise, and again I think that they are "sticking" and going on to academic careers that will eventually lead to more prizes. Our department has certainly been actively recruiting female and nonwhite faculty -- our current department chair is both female and not white, although we are probably still a decade plus away from parity due to the fact that no matter what it takes time to roll over tenured physics positions and race/gender is only ONE consideration in hiring/recruiting, secondary to competence and ability to fund research and teach and all that.
I won't say that there are no bastions of white maleness out there in physics-land, but I would say that they are a rapidly diminishing population, and that the real place changes need to take place (and are taking place) is elementary school and high school. Physics requires serious math, and there has been an enormous female anti-math social bias entrenched across the teen years forever that is just recently starting to thaw. Math majoring has gotten to where it is very nearly general balanced (still not balanced at the faculty level, though -- the same decadal lag) and I think physics is not far behind as it is now "cool" and socially "feminine" for women to be good at math in high school. I may be dead before things are really level, but my kids won't be. rgb
Wannabe nerds that act as the working hands of science will just out anybody as an idiot if someone dare says that the Lorentz Factor is a load of horse shit. They want to tie velocity and gravity together, whenever the recent experiment breaking the light speed barrier throws all of that away.
To Anonymous,
Oh dear, Mr. Coward, just when my self-esteem was starting to recover, now I'm a wannabe nerd, a "working hand of science". Sigh. Well, my duty is clear -- your brilliant comment has shown me what I must do.
You, sir, are an idiot because you dare to say the Lorentz Factor (whatever the hell that is -- I know what the Lorentz Transformation is, I know what O(1,3) is, I know what a Lie algebra is, but "Lorentz Factor" -- capitalized, no less -- I can only assume that you mean \gamma) is a load of horse shit.
Perhaps if you went back to University -- assuming that your substance abuse problem is now under control and you are taking your meds -- you could learn a little bit about actual relativity theory instead of learning it from the Discovery channel with its silly pictures of curved surfaces and ponderous voiceovers, and who knows? Maybe you'd learn of the eight zillion pieces of experimental evidence we have that it is, for the most part, correct (instead of citing the one as-yet unverified report of a single particle that might -- might, mind you -- prove the exception to a very general rule).
For example, there is little problem with mu-mesons, produced by cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere that leave them streaking at nearly the speed of light towards the Earth. Their exponential time constant is roughly 2 microseconds (I can say this authoritatively as I myself measured it in a physics lab as an undergrad). 2 microseconds times 3X10^8 = 600 meters, so that basically no mu mesons should reach the ground, many tens of exponential lifetimes away. Yet nearly all of them do, because of that pesky Lorentz Factor, \gamma! How about that! The mu mesons think that all of that distance is contracted to be less than 600 meters, and we think that their little bitty clocks are all dilated and everything so that they live much longer than they would at rest. It quantitatively works out.
I'd continue and wax poetical about e.g. spin orbit interactions, successive infinitesimal Lorentz transformations, and g-factors, but if I did your head would clearly explode. Suffice it to say that ordinary chemistry would be extraordinarily different if relativity theory where entirely false. You did say that you believe in biology and chemistry, right? You do know that chemistry is derivable from physics, and that biology is best understood in terms of chemistry (and physics), right?
But no, no, to even understand the evidence you'd have to actually learn some mathematics, and clearly that is out of the question, even with your meds adjusted. Besides, if we listened to the scientific consensus, we would never have broken the sound barrier, that's clear (and I did not know that, thanks for cluing me in). I guess everything I read back as a lad about how we actually did break the sound barrier, overcoming all sorts of physics and engineering problems involving turbulence and critical properties of fluid flow was, sadly, a lie. I'm surprised that you didn't accuse scientists of still being in a state of denial about that. I certainly was. Now I am Enlightened.
I hope you don't interpret this reply wrong. I would indeed have said in response to a less informative comment, one that didn't communicate with your clear, incisive wit, that I'm open to new ideas and new theories, as a theoretical physicist. I would have said, in fact, that the entire physics community is pretty damn open to new ideas, new theories, and new evidence (hence TFA, Nobel Prizes given to people who have pursued what I would call a "new idea, a new theory" and found experimental evidence to support it). But
No, no, no, silly beanie. You use my (open source) nagbot script:
... On day N, Joe gets 2^{N-1} messages (if you haven't been blacklisted by all the major carriers and murdered by your local admin). Anyway, you get the idea. Fight fire with fire, I always say.
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/nagbot
Tweak it just a little -- you might try removing my initials, for example, so that the FBI comes after you instead of me -- and launch it with e.g.
nagbot Joe joe_senator@congress.gov please_reconsider.txt
On day one, Joe gets an email message from you, his loyal constituent, containing reconsider.txt, which asks him to reconsider his vote on permitting cell phones to be used for automated political (or other) phone calls. No problem.
On day two, Joe gets two messages.
On day three, Joe gets four messages.
Every time I have used this on a student they caved by day five or six. I had a schedule for finishing the work in minutes, and had the work on my desk almost instantly later.
Mind you, this is probably illegal. But I think the script could easily be hacked to call the congressperson's phone lines and play a recorded message... ideally their personal cell phone lines or the phone line belonging to their spouse. At dinnertime, of course.
rgb
Right, but as the craft moves away from the Sun (in particular) solar gravity drops off at exactly the same rate that solar flux drops off (both 1/r^2). OTOH the craft isn't trying to pull directly away from the Sun, it is angling the sail to get a maximum transverse acceleration to increase its orbital speed. OTOOH as its transverse speed increases F_\perp v_\perp (to r) increases with v_\perp as F_\perp remains nearly constant, so the power delivered to the mass is nearly constant. Eventually it all makes my head hurt and want to turn to matlab to just integrate the EOM and see what happens.
The long and short of it (or rather, thick and thin of it) is that a 20x20 sail is a practical joke (or rather, practically a joke) good for little but to prove a concept that doesn't really require much proof. It's the engineering and scaling that are problems. A sail one micron -- 10,000 atoms or so -- thick means that 1 m^3 of sail material is 10^6 m^2 of sail. 1 m^3 has a mass of at least 1, more likely 2 metric tons -- GENEROUSLY call it 1000 kg. That is thin enough that Uri Gellar could punch holes in it just by grimacing from ten meters away. Now imagine something really exotic -- spun carbon nanotube fibers, spider silk -- to use as rigging, and make it also so thin that harsh words would snap it, add some rather complicated servomotors to pull in and extend the rigging synchronously and perfectly (as any sort of defect in the sail will tear it or snap the rigging lines), add a computer to control it all, add power to run the servomotors (solar, sure, but add solar panels and batteries), add a housing -- and you're at LEAST at another metric ton of dead weight before you get to a real payload.
Your sail generates around 3.5 N of thrust, optimally tipped, at Earth orbit (assuming round number I_sun = 1500 W/m^2). Add a 1.5 metric ton payload (so the total mass is 3.5x10^3 kg and you have a convenient a_t = 10^{-3}. Low orbital speed is roughly 0.7 escape speed, call it 7 km/sec, so it takes you around 4000 m/sec / 10^3 m/sec^2 \approx 10^7 sec to escape from the Earth (probably 2x this or more, actually, given probably non-optimal tacking). \pi \times 10^7 seconds is a year, so call it a year to reach escape speed with a bit over a metric ton of payload and a ratio of maybe 2:1 sail and support to payload. Quibbling a bit is possible, but this is (if I did arithmetic right, always doubtable:-) order of magnitude reasonable.
The good news is that once you are in Earth's orbit it is free. The bad news is that getting to low Earth orbit already cost you half the energy required to escape, and that's a lot of energy -- moreso since you have to spend the energy to lift the sail, not just the payload, with all of those early nonlinearities multiplied by 3+. A win, but not an enormous one, and a rocket lets you step right up to escape speed and get there MUCH earlier.
Not a great way for humans to travel, actually. Maybe a good way to send food and air on ahead to waystation orbits en route to Mars, if you don't mind taking a decade or so for your food etc to get there. Perhaps a good way for relatively large, permanent research robots to float around in the solar system over century timescales, useful "forever" (or until the sail develops a defect and rips in half, IMO likely a long time before forever directly exposed to CMEs and the solar wind and high UV, all of which make the MATERIAL of the sail likely to come apart (and embrittle) in years to a decade, assuming almost any kind of flexible e.g. aluminized polymer as a base. Indeed, I suspect that the solar wind might exert MORE force on the sail than sunlight at certain times, probably in a disastrous storm-at-sea sort of way.
rgb
Why do you think I'm hatin'? After all, pony porn dates back at least to Catherine the Great, and any sexual act good enough for an actual Tsarina of Russia is, well, good for her neigh...bors as well. Even though I'm sure she was just horsing around.
It just emphasizes that there really is little new about the Internet. I'm sure that pony porn was invented no more than a couple of days after photography was invented. In fact, Daguerre's first known photograph was of a pony being led by a young boy (see wikipedia:Photography). The second one (long since lost) no doubt involved the young boy, the pony, and Daguerre's mistress and was being sold days later from back alleys on Parisian streets.
rgb
I dunno. Now it is nothing but facebook chatter about Star Search and Hi-res full length movies of naked women (and men, and sheep, and the occasional pony). Little has changed, in other words, but the volume and resolution.
I am still buoyed by the eternal truth: "The Internet interprets control as damage and routes around it." It doesn't really matter what political groups devoted to the repression and control of communication do at this point. Punching a hole through a control barrier is routine hackery that many pursue merely for the sport and pleasure at this point (witness the world's virus plague).
rgb
Damn skippy. This post isn't about trying to take over the world, it's about providing cybernetic replacements or augmentations that can eventually allow real people with stroke damage etc to recover essential function. It may be a race -- now that Our Government is actually pushing stem cell research big time, it seems not unlikely that in a decade or three they'll be able to actually regrow damaged brain tissue in situ -- there are already some whopping success stories with growing or repairing missing pieces of the more mundane and peripheral sort, but I expect autologous regrown organs within the decade (perhaps starting with replacement livers or hearts).
On the cybernetic neurological side in addition to possibly repair cerebellar damage, there has already been success at e.g. restoring sight (so far of a very limited quality) to the blind and hearing to the deaf. Again, inside a decade I suspect that there will be artificial eyes with at least tolerable/useful resolution. This isn't about "the Singularity" -- it is about real world, enormously useful advances in medical technology that can and will reduce the human suffering in the world.
rgb
Except that they don't, in fact, observe neutrinos before supernovae. They arrive right when they "should", at or slightly after the light arrives. Bear in mind that \Delta t is 6x10^{-8} seconds over 500 miles. A light year is roughly 6 x 10^12 miles, so a supernova from hundreds to millions of LY away would produce neutrinos that arrive anywhere from hours to days or months before the light. And they don't, or at least no one has yet observed that they do. That is, it isn't really a tiny percentage, not tiny as in at all difficult to resolve. 60 nanoseconds is hundreds of CPU clock cycles -- your computer could resolve the timing to a couple of significant figures and I'm guessing state of the art clocks and transducers can do at least orders of magnitude better.
It's one of several reasons that people are skeptical about the superluminal result, one of several things that will ultimately have to be explained if the superluminal result is eventually validated.
rgb
I agree with that. New physics would be great fun, actually, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and ideally, confirmation from multiple experiments and different KINDS of experiments). Neutrinos are I admit a bit tough to observe, so this may take a while, but there are detectors out there now. Otherwise, I am minded of the (at least two) times magnetic monopoles have been observed. Or more unkindly, of cold fusion -- well, not really. I doubt that the CERN people are infected with rampant confirmation bias here, probably rather the opposite. They fully realize that their result is PROBABLY a subtle error of some sort, but of course the exciting thing is that until it is explained that way then maybe, just maybe, it is real. In which case it is a short trip over to Stockholm to meet the King...;-)
If you look at the orders of magnitude involved, I think that is an absurd hypothesis -- violently inconsistent with the strength of the Earth's gravitational field and its ability to affect time and both the supernova neutrino experiments and the various prior laboratory experiments on the speed of neutrino relative to the speed of light. The supernova observation flatly rules it out, and bear in mind that those neutrinos got their supposed "head start" in the gravitational field of an exploding star, in field strength's that make the earth's look like a vacuum by comparison. But I'd be interested in any reference that suggests that weak transverse gravitational fields can induce enormous shifts in speed...
Yeah, but on the other hand, people have been measuring the speed of neutrinos over much longer distances for decades, including things like the timing differences between nova light and arrival of neutrinos over interstellar or intergalactic distances. 18 meters over ~500 km is an egregious impossible-to-miss result. Which leads to the big question -- if true, how could it have possibly been missed all of these years?
Personally, I'm betting that it hasn't been missed all of these years. If I'm wrong, of course, I'm wrong -- nature is what nature is, not what we want it to be. But as somebody that teaches relativity from time to time, it's going to be really, really painful to try to make physics consistent again if neutrinos travel faster than light. Interesting times...
rgb
That's how much of an error in the presumed distance between the stations is required to explain a 60 ns discrepancy. Bearing in mind that neutrinos travel "as the crow flies" along a geodesic (effectively a straight line) between the two points, where light signals in the form of e.g. radio waves or in optical fibers, in addition to being retarded by an index of refraction, must follow an arc length along the Earth's surface if not worse.
rgb
Did you just say SoyLendra Green?
You're right, that really would fix the carbon problem, the only way that's actually better than just waiting a bit for hydrocarbons and coal to be too expensive to use for fuel (I'm guessing that will be in the next decade, maybe two). But even without hydrocarbon fuels and CO_2, the earth is 7 billion humans and growing strong, growing at a rate that makes some hypothetical melting of icecaps and rising of oceans cosmically irrelevant.
Soylendra Green -- or a really perfect global plague that kills (say) four out of five people currently alive -- might preserve good old Mom Earth long enough to let us achieve a Type I civilization, but otherwise carbon offsets are, as they say, pissing into a force four gale.
rgb
Ah, AC, you sly devil. So that's where you got off to, when you left the less-anonymous city.
/.
Down here in NC folks have several good solutions to the beer problem, including making their own (which is way, way better than the beer you can get in any gas station in the boonies unless for you US corporate beer is the epitome of corn-flavored goodness) or saying screw the beer and turning their malted corn directly into an untempered distilled spirit, made (as you say) in relative seclusion. I can only guess that you live in the northern boonies.
Of course, true boonie-dwellers in NC often eschew newfangled contraptions like wi-fi, cell phones, phones, microwave ovens, and computers, and only use electricity to run their well-pump and refrigerator and lights. They often cook whole pigs or vats of deer, squirrel, and groundhog into a thick nourishing stew and aren't averse to using the occasional revenuer or overly nosy neighbor (seeking to unrighteously rip-off some of that pot) as mulch for their barley or corn crop. Occasionally they can spell and still have all of their teeth. But we don't often hear from them on
rgb
Time to found an uplift institute. All we need is to perform a little bit of tinkering, pop a gene for auditory cortex in there somewhere, breed for larger skulls and a bit more grey matter to give that auditory context room to take off in, and chimps at least are golden -- verbally enabled neo-chimps arise! Or we could probably accomplish the same thing by aggressive selective breeding much more slowly (waiting for those mutations). Dogs, or course, would also need lips, and maybe some omnivore front teeth, although my border collie does pretty well with "oooerrr"s or body language when he's talking...
rgb
You mean like dogs can mate with wolves and foxes and create perfectly normal offspring? Or the way lions can mate with tigers? I thought at this point the notion that speciesization involved an inability to crossbreed with nearby branches and produced "normal", often fertile, offspring was passe'. Evolution is a lot more interesting than "just Darwin" these days, with the discovery that breeding across species is possible and even commonplace as well as the even more interesting discovery that a significant fraction (maybe 8%) of the human genome is viral DNA probably intercalated via retroviruses in a way that "stuck". It isn't all about simple single-site mutation and in-species crossover anymore (although natural selection itself survives, of course).
However, your point is well taken -- as far as I know the aboriginal genome isn't sufficiently divergent to count as a separate species, any more than the pigmy genome. Or if they are, it's so uber-politically incorrect to point it out that nobody is doing so. OTOH, there was the recent discovery that one single bay in Australia is home to a unique species of porpoise that is genetically divergent enough to be considered separate (although I'd bet it is smoothly crossfertile with other Tursiops).
rgb
Well said, sir! Now, if you can only build a small script that will repost that automatically to /. whenever somebody claims that EC2 is a good deal for tasks that will, in fact, keep all of your compute nodes busy all of the time (since your argument scales rather well)...
rgb
Not necessarily naked. And I get patent-dibs on the horizontally polarized transparent plastic coveralls with "Fly Clear" stencilled on the front. And on the vertically polarized sunglasses everybody will have to wear to preserve modesty, unless they tip their head sideways to get a peek at that absolutely gorgeous stacked blonde. Although, given the fat tattooed lady in between with a bit of paper stuck between the cheeks, most of us will probably opt to keep our heads straight up...:-)
rgb