You can always trade functionality for privacy, but I don't think it is a trade that consumers should be required to make. You can leave you phone at home. You can not drive to avoid license plate readers, or at least not drive cars that report locations to the manufacturers. You can not use the internet to avoid identity tracking. You can live in the back woods somewhere and pretty much not be tracked at all.
The problem is that to interact fully with modern society you need to do all these things and it is not reasonable to ask people to give up this interaction in order to maintain privacy. That is sort of like saying that if you don't want peeping toms, you should board up your windows.
Physical tracking information is very dangerous. It shows how long you were at work, at the bar, at home, at a co-workers house, the gym, walking etc. If that information is held by a for-profit company they will have an incentive to sell it.
If you are married and tracking shows you went to a strip club, will FB send adds for divorce attorneys to your spouse?
At least at $5B I hope that they are building something like the worlds most advanced light source for a new type of fab. It would be an incredibly stupid waste of money to spend that on a pretty building.
When I see some of the possible outcomes of an election in the US, I have a strong interest in the government not being able to track everything I say or do online.
The present government isn't dangerous, but the collected information will endure and some day (soon?) we may have a government that will act against me for statements that were completely legal when they were made.
I don't object to blocking all child porn (that involves actual children) because its production involves the commission of a crime. I am also happy with systems that prevent people from inadvertently stumbling on content that a significant number of people would find offensive, or that is inappropriate for children.
Where I do not agree with current policies is in blocking any political speech. I don't care if that speech encourages jihad, racism, etc. There have been too many cases in history where topics (like opposition to Christianity, or aristocratic birth rights) were considered "obviously" unacceptable, yet later society later changed their minds.
Speech that instructs direct illegal actions, slander, violation of copyright etc, can be blocked, but speech that simply supports a viewpoint or organization that opposes the government should always be allowed .
I think a lot of people may not realize the difference in knowledge between a newly minted private pilot, and a pilot with an airline rating. A new private pilot can fly safely UNDER A VERY LIMITED SET OF CONDITIONS. Its a "license to learn". He / she flies to familiar destinations in good weather as they go from the 70 hours training for a typical license to the 1500 hours minimum to get an ATP rating.
If you add money, you create a financial incentive for the inexperienced pilot to take more risks.
Meanwhile passengers may not realize the dramatic difference in safety between regularly scheduled airline travel (much safer than cars by almost any measure) and private flights - much more dangerous than cars - 1/100,000 hour fatality rate.
I have over 1500 hours, fly a twin engine plane - and I know that my operations are no where near as safe as the airliners. I only take passengers that I am convinced can really understand and accept the risks that they are taking.
So they want a technology that can accurately identify me by all sorts of unconscious traits. This would make any form of anonymity impossible.
I completely understand why Google wants this - collecting and selling information is their business model. I don't understand why *I* as a customer would want it.
Isn't H2O2 an oxidizer, not a reducer (like normal fuels?). What would you react it with to generate energy? It can be decomposed to produce energy, but the density isn't very high and any sort of monopropoellent type fuel is likely to have detonation risks.
You don't want to knee-jerk it. Who approved the upload of untested software and why. There could be a valid reason - say a fatal bug discovered in the existing code and no way to change the launch schedule. It could be budget pressure - simply not enough money to test. It could be plain incompetence.
Unfortunately its not simple. Scientists and the organization that they work for are judged based on their publications. So a lab that spent a lot of money to build a new experiment need to show a lot of publications from that experiment or they won't get future funding.
Its not a great system, but it is what is in place and its not obvious how to do better.
average velocity during acceleration is 0.1C or 3e7M/s. so it travels 2e11Meters. With a 10M sail, the transmitter needs a divergence angle of 5e-11 radians. With 1 micron light, that is a 2e4 M transmitter - 20 km. Pretty big for a diffraction limited mirror - the largest telescopes are only 30M.
Also, 99.9% reflectivity is only possible with multi-layer mirrors which are too heavy, or with infrared light which requires a larger transmitter.
Just background gas creates a pretty harsh radiation environment at these speeds. Lots of 10MeV protons. The denser gas and dust in the solar system is a lot worse.
The mirror has to be very good. My numbers were roughly based on diffraction limit. If you have a worse quality mirror it needs to be larger.
I'm not saying that its physically impossible, but if you put in numbers for a reasonable mirror size, and power dissipation on the sail, it quickly becomes clear that it doesn't come close to working.
Going to soft X-rays helps because diffraction limit is much smaller. (hard x-rays and higher don't work, the sail needs to be too think to absorb them). Still the numbers quickly become heroic for the whole system.
Besides, for 1/10 C you can use a fission powered high ISP ion drive rocket - which while incredibly difficult, is less exotic than the laser sail.
A visible light laser can't practically be focused to meter scales over more than about ~10^7M considering diffraction and reasonable (eg 10s of M) sized mirrors. At 0.1C, that gives you an acceleration time of ~1 second. So the sail material is hit by ~10% of its mass energy in 1 second. No way it could possibly survive, even if the laser could be constructed.
Considering that a 30M telescope is a ~$1B project, requiring a much larger telescope is not consistent with a $100M project.
This is why we need experimental physicists as well as theorists.....
Aircraft are designed to survive bird strikes with minimal damage, and engines are designed to survive ingesting birds. Drones might present a problem because they contain small hard metal parts in the motors. Its not clear that a jet engine could survive that.
The odds of hitting an aircraft are pretty low but mid-air collisions do happen with aircraft, and they show up on radar and pilots who are actively trying to avoid collisions.
When traveling internationally, you often get better exchange rates at your foreign destination. Physical cash exchanged for physical cash is the easiest, and sometimes has to be done in ~$1000 amounts
I like having physical cash at home. There is always a possibility of losing access to my bank accounts for a while - identity theft, etc. Having enough cash to live on for a couple of months seems like a good way to protect against the short term fallout.
There are a number of purchases that I make that I do not wish to be tracked, Nothing illegal, but things I don't want tracked by advertisers.
I've had credit cards canceled because someone stole the number. If this happens while I am on travel it could get ugly if I didn't have enough cash to cover my expenses.
I understand that the government wants absolutely surveilance of everything, but I don't wan tot give it to them.
Sadly there is little hope of that ever happening. (not counting hovering over specially prepared conducting surfaces which at least in principal works)
I expect (hope) the police will enforce the laws, and arrest people who have violated the laws, and not those who have not done so. The laws may be bad or biased in various ways, but it is not the job of the police to change laws - that is the function of the legislature.
Agreed, but in a world with complete automation "profits" may not be a meaningful concept. The amount of stuff available to you will be based on the automation that you control. Your own attempts to exponentiate your automation will be in competition with others. It may well end with a single winner - most likely an AI.
Exiting economies require labor, so there is value to the wealthy to keep the poor in the economy. In a hypothetical economy where automation does everything, there is no benefit to the wealthy to include the poor in any way.
If you change your "must" to "should", then I largely agree. Unfortunately I think you can also have a stable situation where almost all productivity comes form automation, and a small percentage of the population controls that production by owning the capital. I would like to think that they would take care of the unemployed masses, but I don't see any reason to think that is how they will act.
Even this is still just an intermediate state. Unless there is something non-physical about humans, we should expect that automation that is better at EVERYTHING will eventually become available. At that point humans are pets or vermin.
Gravity also propagates at the speed of light. If the sun were split in half, and each half thrown out of the plane of the solar system at near light speed, it would still take the 8 minutes of light travel time to the earth for any effect at all to be detected.
The difference between gravity and gravity waves is like the difference between an electric field and electromagnetic radiation. They are closely related, but one is a static field, the other a propagating wave.
It not that different from an electromagnetic wave (light). With an electromagnetic wave, if you have two charged objects at different locations they will feel a force that causes them to move relative to each other. In electromagnetism you can also detect the motion with one particle because it feels an acceleration.
With a gravity wave, two massive objects will move relative to each other. Here you can't detect with a single object because it feels no acceleration - the object is in free fall even though it is moving relative to distant objects. Still the idea is very similar.
If gravity waves were very strong, you could detect them with two pendulums and a ruler.
BTW - they are are quadrople radiation, so if you have an array of objects you are looking at, they will be squeezed together along one axis and stretched apart along the second. This (roughtly) follows from conservation of momentum - you can't move the center of mass of an object up an back without moving something else in the opposite direction.
Its possible to formulate theories of gravity that don't have gravity waves, but there was already strong evidence of their existence from measurements of the orbit decay of neutron star binaries.
Direct detection was fantastic - but it confirmed what was already believed to be extremely likely.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly can't tell if this is a satire piece ore not.
You can always trade functionality for privacy, but I don't think it is a trade that consumers should be required to make. You can leave you phone at home. You can not drive to avoid license plate readers, or at least not drive cars that report locations to the manufacturers. You can not use the internet to avoid identity tracking. You can live in the back woods somewhere and pretty much not be tracked at all.
The problem is that to interact fully with modern society you need to do all these things and it is not reasonable to ask people to give up this interaction in order to maintain privacy. That is sort of like saying that if you don't want peeping toms, you should board up your windows.
Physical tracking information is very dangerous. It shows how long you were at work, at the bar, at home, at a co-workers house, the gym, walking etc. If that information is held by a for-profit company they will have an incentive to sell it.
If you are married and tracking shows you went to a strip club, will FB send adds for divorce attorneys to your spouse?
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-n...
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ici...
At least at $5B I hope that they are building something like the worlds most advanced light source for a new type of fab. It would be an incredibly stupid waste of money to spend that on a pretty building.
When I see some of the possible outcomes of an election in the US, I have a strong interest in the government not being able to track everything I say or do online.
The present government isn't dangerous, but the collected information will endure and some day (soon?) we may have a government that will act against me for statements that were completely legal when they were made.
I don't object to blocking all child porn (that involves actual children) because its production involves the commission of a crime. I am also happy with systems that prevent people from inadvertently stumbling on content that a significant number of people would find offensive, or that is inappropriate for children.
Where I do not agree with current policies is in blocking any political speech. I don't care if that speech encourages jihad, racism, etc. There have been too many cases in history where topics (like opposition to Christianity, or aristocratic birth rights) were considered "obviously" unacceptable, yet later society later changed their minds.
Speech that instructs direct illegal actions, slander, violation of copyright etc, can be blocked, but speech that simply supports a viewpoint or organization that opposes the government should always be allowed .
I think a lot of people may not realize the difference in knowledge between a newly minted private pilot, and a pilot with an airline rating. A new private pilot can fly safely UNDER A VERY LIMITED SET OF CONDITIONS. Its a "license to learn". He / she flies to familiar destinations in good weather as they go from the 70 hours training for a typical license to the 1500 hours minimum to get an ATP rating.
If you add money, you create a financial incentive for the inexperienced pilot to take more risks.
Meanwhile passengers may not realize the dramatic difference in safety between regularly scheduled airline travel (much safer than cars by almost any measure) and private flights - much more dangerous than cars - 1/100,000 hour fatality rate.
I have over 1500 hours, fly a twin engine plane - and I know that my operations are no where near as safe as the airliners. I only take passengers that I am convinced can really understand and accept the risks that they are taking.
So they want a technology that can accurately identify me by all sorts of unconscious traits. This would make any form of anonymity impossible.
I completely understand why Google wants this - collecting and selling information is their business model. I don't understand why *I* as a customer would want it.
Isn't H2O2 an oxidizer, not a reducer (like normal fuels?). What would you react it with to generate energy? It can be decomposed to produce energy, but the density isn't very high and any sort of monopropoellent type fuel is likely to have detonation risks.
You don't want to knee-jerk it. Who approved the upload of untested software and why. There could be a valid reason - say a fatal bug discovered in the existing code and no way to change the launch schedule. It could be budget pressure - simply not enough money to test. It could be plain incompetence.
Unfortunately its not simple. Scientists and the organization that they work for are judged based on their publications. So a lab that spent a lot of money to build a new experiment need to show a lot of publications from that experiment or they won't get future funding.
Its not a great system, but it is what is in place and its not obvious how to do better.
average velocity during acceleration is 0.1C or 3e7M/s. so it travels 2e11Meters. With a 10M sail, the transmitter needs a divergence angle of 5e-11 radians. With 1 micron light, that is a 2e4 M transmitter - 20 km. Pretty big for a diffraction limited mirror - the largest telescopes are only 30M.
Also, 99.9% reflectivity is only possible with multi-layer mirrors which are too heavy, or with infrared light which requires a larger transmitter.
Just background gas creates a pretty harsh radiation environment at these speeds. Lots of 10MeV protons. The denser gas and dust in the solar system is a lot worse.
Still I think its the least of the problems.
The mirror has to be very good. My numbers were roughly based on diffraction limit. If you have a worse quality mirror it needs to be larger.
I'm not saying that its physically impossible, but if you put in numbers for a reasonable mirror size, and power dissipation on the sail, it quickly becomes clear that it doesn't come close to working.
Going to soft X-rays helps because diffraction limit is much smaller. (hard x-rays and higher don't work, the sail needs to be too think to absorb them). Still the numbers quickly become heroic for the whole system.
Besides, for 1/10 C you can use a fission powered high ISP ion drive rocket - which while incredibly difficult, is less exotic than the laser sail.
Accelerator physicist - which really means engineer......
but I play Kerbal a lot so I'm an expert in space stuff ;-)
A visible light laser can't practically be focused to meter scales over more than about ~10^7M considering diffraction and reasonable (eg 10s of M) sized mirrors. At 0.1C, that gives you an acceleration time of ~1 second. So the sail material is hit by ~10% of its mass energy in 1 second. No way it could possibly survive, even if the laser could be constructed.
Considering that a 30M telescope is a ~$1B project, requiring a much larger telescope is not consistent with a $100M project.
This is why we need experimental physicists as well as theorists.....
Aircraft are designed to survive bird strikes with minimal damage, and engines are designed to survive ingesting birds. Drones might present a problem because they contain small hard metal parts in the motors. Its not clear that a jet engine could survive that.
The odds of hitting an aircraft are pretty low but mid-air collisions do happen with aircraft, and they show up on radar and pilots who are actively trying to avoid collisions.
When traveling internationally, you often get better exchange rates at your foreign destination. Physical cash exchanged for physical cash is the easiest, and sometimes has to be done in ~$1000 amounts
I like having physical cash at home. There is always a possibility of losing access to my bank accounts for a while - identity theft, etc. Having enough cash to live on for a couple of months seems like a good way to protect against the short term fallout.
There are a number of purchases that I make that I do not wish to be tracked, Nothing illegal, but things I don't want tracked by advertisers.
I've had credit cards canceled because someone stole the number. If this happens while I am on travel it could get ugly if I didn't have enough cash to cover my expenses.
I understand that the government wants absolutely surveilance of everything, but I don't wan tot give it to them.
Sadly there is little hope of that ever happening. (not counting hovering over specially prepared conducting surfaces which at least in principal works)
I expect (hope) the police will enforce the laws, and arrest people who have violated the laws, and not those who have not done so. The laws may be bad or biased in various ways, but it is not the job of the police to change laws - that is the function of the legislature.
Agreed, but in a world with complete automation "profits" may not be a meaningful concept. The amount of stuff available to you will be based on the automation that you control. Your own attempts to exponentiate your automation will be in competition with others. It may well end with a single winner - most likely an AI.
Exiting economies require labor, so there is value to the wealthy to keep the poor in the economy. In a hypothetical economy where automation does everything, there is no benefit to the wealthy to include the poor in any way.
If you change your "must" to "should", then I largely agree. Unfortunately I think you can also have a stable situation where almost all productivity comes form automation, and a small percentage of the population controls that production by owning the capital. I would like to think that they would take care of the unemployed masses, but I don't see any reason to think that is how they will act.
Even this is still just an intermediate state. Unless there is something non-physical about humans, we should expect that automation that is better at EVERYTHING will eventually become available. At that point humans are pets or vermin.
Gravity also propagates at the speed of light. If the sun were split in half, and each half thrown out of the plane of the solar system at near light speed, it would still take the 8 minutes of light travel time to the earth for any effect at all to be detected.
The difference between gravity and gravity waves is like the difference between an electric field and electromagnetic radiation. They are closely related, but one is a static field, the other a propagating wave.
It not that different from an electromagnetic wave (light). With an electromagnetic wave, if you have two charged objects at different locations they will feel a force that causes them to move relative to each other. In electromagnetism you can also detect the motion with one particle because it feels an acceleration.
With a gravity wave, two massive objects will move relative to each other. Here you can't detect with a single object because it feels no acceleration - the object is in free fall even though it is moving relative to distant objects. Still the idea is very similar.
If gravity waves were very strong, you could detect them with two pendulums and a ruler.
BTW - they are are quadrople radiation, so if you have an array of objects you are looking at, they will be squeezed together along one axis and stretched apart along the second. This (roughtly) follows from conservation of momentum - you can't move the center of mass of an object up an back without moving something else in the opposite direction.
Its possible to formulate theories of gravity that don't have gravity waves, but there was already strong evidence of their existence from measurements of the orbit decay of neutron star binaries.
Direct detection was fantastic - but it confirmed what was already believed to be extremely likely.