I agree that it would be nice to get rid of content that really was produce without consent. Tricky to do, but if the images are out there, at least there is some chance of catching the criminals.
There is also the issue of externalities. Discovering something new about the universe would benefit many people, not just the investors who paid for the science. When you have a situation where lots of people will benefit, but the cost tends to be concentrated, you have a good reason for government funding.
Stunningly bad. The correct response was to say that the Tesla support people had given bad advice, but that the car was OK, and that the support staff were being retrained. It may even have been true - I've had enough terrible advice from support people at other companies that it wouldn't surprise me if the Tesla support were bad as well.
Even if the support wasn't at fault, claiming they were would clear the car's reputation and provide the company a way to "fix" the problem through additional training.
Claiming that a reporter for a major newspaper is blatantly lying is absolutely not the right way to go about this. Many readers will think of the reporter as a "customer", and telling the customer that they are wrong is rarely a good approach, especially when dealing with high end luxury goods.
If I had Tesla stock I'd be tempted to sell, not because the car is bad, but because their PR is so terrible that I fear for their future.
If there is actual rape or assault, then that is already a crime. Anyone who publishes videos of their crimes on the internet is likely to get caught.
If it was consensual, then I don't see a problem. Do we really want to ban movies where people pretend to do bad things to other people? Is a rape scene somehow less offensive if the genitals are blurred out?
I know that there are some people who regret their decision to do porn. I suspect that there are also people who regret their decision to be crab fishermen, or software engineers, or dental hygienists. One of the downsides of freedom is that it includes the freedom to do things that you will later regret.
Unfortunately its a strong natural monopoly. If you already are using MS office you will find that Libreoffice isn't compatible enough: formatting differences in powerpoint, issues with pivot tables, problems with markup, etc. Even in the rare case that you are really starting from scratch you will find that people you hire are more likely to be familiar with MS office. Vendors and customers are more likely to be able to read and write MS office - you could use pdf, but that has its own issues.
The cost just isn't a driver for business. An office employee can cost anywhere from $100K to $250K / year due to overhead. An extra few hundred $ for software isn't a big deal.
NY times is generally considered a reputable newspaper, they are one of the major papers in the US. I don't know anything about their auto reports though. The columnist claims that he did talk to Tesla about how to charge and operate the car.
Maybe there should be a clear distinction (in names and designs) between service and bravery medals. Both have meaning and can be used to reward actions above and beyond the ordinary, but it would be good to not confuse the two.
To be honest, I'm not feeling exploited - I'm quite happy with my job and I'm paid well for what I do. Its just not worth his time, or my time, or the purchasing department's time to get the company to pay for software I use at home. But this is drifting well off topic.
I did say standard (for that business). If my business used libreoffice, I would use it. It uses MS office so I use that. Yes, in principal I could ask the company to pay for my personal copy of MS office so I can work at home, but I'm a firm believer that one of the ways to be a good (eg successful) employee is to minimize the amount of effort your boss needs to spend supporting you.
There is also the issue that since I use MS office at work I am very familiar with it. Libreoffice is simliar, but the interface is a bit different. Probably not worth a few hundred $ for my time to get as familiar with libreoffice.
That said, this change is making me re-think what I will use at home. I certainly won't upgrade to office 2013, I don't want to be held hostage to microsoft for my documents. Its not that I mind spending a few hundred $, the problem is that I have no idea what the rules will be for me to use their software 10 years from now. For all I know they might go cloud-only or something else unacceptable and I won't be able to transfer my office software to whatever computer I have then.
At least in the US most cars have automatic transmissions and many don't even have tachometers. Fuel nozzles are sized so that you can't accidentally put diesel in a gas engine car. I'm not saying that people shouldn't understand how cars work, just that in many cases they don't. The electric may not be more difficult, but its different. I don't think the NY times guy was trying to do a bad review. He just got into the Tesla and drove it the way he would drive a gas car.
I wish it did, but it doesn't. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with libreoffice, but it is not completely compatible with MS office. If you work in a business that uses MS office you really can't get by with libreoffice - not unless you want to regularly tell you boss that you couldn't make the updates to the document he just sent you because you insist on using non-standard (for that business) software.
Conventional cars are so well evolved that people have very high expectations. I've had less than one breakdown per 100,000 miles. I can drive almost any car until the "low gas"light turns on, and then have >30 miles range to reach a gas station. When I fill my car at the pump it is filled. No fast fill / slow fill. No trickle-fill. If I somehow don't completely fill it, the gas gage doesn't read full and I can refill a few hours later. Most cars will drive ~400 miles on a tank, and its rare in this country to have to go more than 50 miles to find a gas station.
It sounds like the electric car works as designed when used by a knowledgeable person. The problem is that people don't need to be knowledgeable about conventional cars. If you buy a new car it just works.
So while I don't think the Tesla car is in any way bad, it just doesn't meet the exceptionally high expectations for usability that Americans have come to expect.
W bosons have a mass of ~80GeV, corresponding to a frequency of ~10^25 Hz, gamma rays, not microwaves. The oscillation frequencies in the microwave cavity will (by definition) be in the microwave range ~10^10Hz. Even if you had photons in the frequency range of W bosons, you can't just absorb neutrinos - you need to conserve lepton number and charge. What are you suggesting for a Feynman diagram?
Even if you could absorb neutrinos (and I don't see any mechanism at all for this), the total momentum carried by solar neutrinos is only ~2% of the photon momentum so even if that (probably impossible mechanism) worked, the system still wouldn't produce noticeable thrust.
From a high energy physics interaction point of view, a microwave cavity isn't interesting. The fields are very low (compared to nuclear fields), and the frequencies are low (compared to say gamma ray frequencies). There just isn't any reason to expect any unusual interactions.
You can still conceptually put a box around the system and look at what comes out. If the mass of the system is decreasing, then you have some sort of rocket that generates thrust from gas, or ions (like a standard ion drive), or something similar - but they claim they are not doing this. If you are creating new particles (photons, W particles, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, whatever), then you need energy to create them and you wind up with the same power requirements that you have for photons (or generally worse).
You need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain leaks out. In this case the claim is so extraordinary: it violates one of the best tested physical principals that the evidence must be very strong. In the case of the FTL neutrinos a tremendous amount of effort went into finding a flaw in the experiment, and eventully one was found.
Also just trying random stuff to see what happens is likely to end up with experiments that are subject to all sorts experimental errors. If you have a theory that electromagnetic radiation doesn't conserve momentum, then you design a specific experiment to look: If you think its a high field effect, you do particle collisions, or relativistic particles in intense laser beams. If you think its a small but linear effect you do superconducting microwave cavities suspended on ultra-sensitive force balances. You don't start out trying to build a rocket engine.
There is a description of the Sagnac effect on wikipedia, this is the basis of a laser gyroscope. Interestingly Newtonian physics and relativity give the same answer for this. I isn't related to the microwave drive. I think they mention it because laser gyroscopes are conceptually complicated and they hope that the reader won't understand them, and therefor not understand that if anything they are yet more evidence that this trick doesn't work.
You could imagine some system that used electromagnetic fields to produce forces on other objects in the solar system to generate thrust. That isn't what they describe, and I can't think of any way to do that (but it wouldn't violate conservation of momentum if there were a way).
Whatever happens in the box, the momentum change of the engine will be the same as the amount of momentum that exits as exhaust. If the only thing that exits the system is photons, then the ratio of power to thrust is extremely large - it is not a useful means of propulsion for any application that I can think of (not counting antimatter powered starships that is).
In fact the 600MW were used to drive microwave resonators (X-band accelerator structures). Not only that but they had different group and phase velocities. I guess I should be surprised they didn't launch themselves into low earth orbit....
I'd agree with all that except that its actually tricky to do the experiment correctly. With lots of microwave power, high currents, etc in the system it would be easy to fool yourself. Of course if you have any brains you know it can't work from first principals and wouldn't' bother trying.
Conservation of momentum is extended in relativity to conservation of 4-momentum, basically a combination of momentum and energy. In a rest frame this means that standard Newtonian momentum is conserved, it just makes conservation also work when you are observing a system that is moving past you at relativistic speeds.
From the article: "Seems to violate law of conservation of momentum". - Yup it does. Imagine putting an invisible mass-less box around the entire system. Almost nothing comes out the back (only microwave energy - more on that later). The center of mass of the box accelerates. This is a violation of conservation of momentum - one of the most well understood and best tested laws in physics. If there were some exotic high energy physics effect proposed for this at least it might be worth listening, but this is just electromagnetism - very well understood. The "group velocity / phase velocity" is just jargon that has nothing to do with this since it is the Poynting vector that carries momentum.
You CAN make a reaction drive using photons (microwaves in this case), this idea has been around for many decades. The problem is that photons carry a lot of energy relative to their momentum so it takes an enormous power source to produce any thrust. So far no one has found a practical application where there was a large enough energy (and high enough power ) source to make this practical.
There have been a lot of experiments with microwaves - I've personally worked on a 600MW pulse microwave system. There have even been attempts at microwave driven spacecraft sails. Some early experiments seemed to indicate more thrust than would be expected from momentum conservation. Eventually this was tracked down to gas absorbed on the surface being heated and released by the microwaves - essentially a conventional rocket. With very high microwave powers you can generate forces in all sorts of ways in a closed laboratory environment that would not work in space.
In #2 I meant a LOT more advanced. When I was hiking in the Canadian Rockies a Pika (small fluffy rodent) jumped up on a rock and started squeaking at me. It was acting at its most threatening trying to scare off the invader. It was adorable and we took many pictures.
Its not clear that a peaceful society will develop the sort of high energy technologies that are probably need for space. They might instead develop a low energy sustainable technology that lets a modest size population live happily on the limited resources of a planet. Space travel may only be done by irrationally aggressive species. Look at what happened to manned space with the end of the cold war.
The China analogy doesn't really work. For thousands of years they were the most powerful civilization on earth but the stayed at home while the Europeans explored and conquered. Eventually the mighty empire of China was brought low by the technological superiority of the Europeans it he opium war etc. I don't think the west "got lucky" I think that their exploration and conquest made them strong. Perhaps the world would have been a very different place if the Cheng-Ho fleet hadn't been recalled.
BTW: I am in no way endorsing the colonial behavior of the Europeans, or trying to imply that I think it is morally acceptable to exterminate an alien race.
Without knowing either the technology for interstellar travel, or the motivations of an alien intelligence its difficult to figure out why they might want our planet. The might simply like planets, and not care that someone else was there first. They may be motivated by religion to convert all sentients to their own beliefs. Large scale planetary modification may be more difficult that interstellar travel: Its pretty easy to imagine technology to get to 0.1C (even fission rockets could do that). A million-ton spacecraft at 0.1C is a lot less energy than dismantling a planet.
They may "colonize" earth without sending a lot of mass. Engineered microbes in micro-spacecraft.
Maybe artificial intelligences that hack into out networks and redirect the productive capability of our civilization. All we'd notice is an inexplicable trend away from developing space travel, nuclear power,and other potentially dangerous technologies.
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I agree that it would be nice to get rid of content that really was produce without consent. Tricky to do, but if the images are out there, at least there is some chance of catching the criminals.
There is also the issue of externalities. Discovering something new about the universe would benefit many people, not just the investors who paid for the science. When you have a situation where lots of people will benefit, but the cost tends to be concentrated, you have a good reason for government funding.
Stunningly bad. The correct response was to say that the Tesla support people had given bad advice, but that the car was OK, and that the support staff were being retrained. It may even have been true - I've had enough terrible advice from support people at other companies that it wouldn't surprise me if the Tesla support were bad as well.
Even if the support wasn't at fault, claiming they were would clear the car's reputation and provide the company a way to "fix" the problem through additional training.
Claiming that a reporter for a major newspaper is blatantly lying is absolutely not the right way to go about this. Many readers will think of the reporter as a "customer", and telling the customer that they are wrong is rarely a good approach, especially when dealing with high end luxury goods.
If I had Tesla stock I'd be tempted to sell, not because the car is bad, but because their PR is so terrible that I fear for their future.
If there is actual rape or assault, then that is already a crime. Anyone who publishes videos of their crimes on the internet is likely to get caught.
If it was consensual, then I don't see a problem. Do we really want to ban movies where people pretend to do bad things to other people? Is a rape scene somehow less offensive if the genitals are blurred out?
I know that there are some people who regret their decision to do porn. I suspect that there are also people who regret their decision to be crab fishermen, or software engineers, or dental hygienists. One of the downsides of freedom is that it includes the freedom to do things that you will later regret.
Unfortunately its a strong natural monopoly. If you already are using MS office you will find that Libreoffice isn't compatible enough: formatting differences in powerpoint, issues with pivot tables, problems with markup, etc. Even in the rare case that you are really starting from scratch you will find that people you hire are more likely to be familiar with MS office. Vendors and customers are more likely to be able to read and write MS office - you could use pdf, but that has its own issues.
The cost just isn't a driver for business. An office employee can cost anywhere from $100K to $250K / year due to overhead. An extra few hundred $ for software isn't a big deal.
NY times is generally considered a reputable newspaper, they are one of the major papers in the US. I don't know anything about their auto reports though. The columnist claims that he did talk to Tesla about how to charge and operate the car.
Maybe there should be a clear distinction (in names and designs) between service and bravery medals. Both have meaning and can be used to reward actions above and beyond the ordinary, but it would be good to not confuse the two.
To be honest, I'm not feeling exploited - I'm quite happy with my job and I'm paid well for what I do. Its just not worth his time, or my time, or the purchasing department's time to get the company to pay for software I use at home. But this is drifting well off topic.
I did say standard (for that business). If my business used libreoffice, I would use it. It uses MS office so I use that. Yes, in principal I could ask the company to pay for my personal copy of MS office so I can work at home, but I'm a firm believer that one of the ways to be a good (eg successful) employee is to minimize the amount of effort your boss needs to spend supporting you.
There is also the issue that since I use MS office at work I am very familiar with it. Libreoffice is simliar, but the interface is a bit different. Probably not worth a few hundred $ for my time to get as familiar with libreoffice.
That said, this change is making me re-think what I will use at home. I certainly won't upgrade to office 2013, I don't want to be held hostage to microsoft for my documents. Its not that I mind spending a few hundred $, the problem is that I have no idea what the rules will be for me to use their software 10 years from now. For all I know they might go cloud-only or something else unacceptable and I won't be able to transfer my office software to whatever computer I have then.
BTW: I think android is OK.
At least in the US most cars have automatic transmissions and many don't even have tachometers. Fuel nozzles are sized so that you can't accidentally put diesel in a gas engine car. I'm not saying that people shouldn't understand how cars work, just that in many cases they don't. The electric may not be more difficult, but its different. I don't think the NY times guy was trying to do a bad review. He just got into the Tesla and drove it the way he would drive a gas car.
I wish it did, but it doesn't. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with libreoffice, but it is not completely compatible with MS office. If you work in a business that uses MS office you really can't get by with libreoffice - not unless you want to regularly tell you boss that you couldn't make the updates to the document he just sent you because you insist on using non-standard (for that business) software.
Conventional cars are so well evolved that people have very high expectations. I've had less than one breakdown per 100,000 miles. I can drive almost any car until the "low gas"light turns on, and then have >30 miles range to reach a gas station. When I fill my car at the pump it is filled. No fast fill / slow fill. No trickle-fill. If I somehow don't completely fill it, the gas gage doesn't read full and I can refill a few hours later. Most cars will drive ~400 miles on a tank, and its rare in this country to have to go more than 50 miles to find a gas station.
It sounds like the electric car works as designed when used by a knowledgeable person. The problem is that people don't need to be knowledgeable about conventional cars. If you buy a new car it just works.
So while I don't think the Tesla car is in any way bad, it just doesn't meet the exceptionally high expectations for usability that Americans have come to expect.
W bosons have a mass of ~80GeV, corresponding to a frequency of ~10^25 Hz, gamma rays, not microwaves. The oscillation frequencies in the microwave cavity will (by definition) be in the microwave range ~10^10Hz. Even if you had photons in the frequency range of W bosons, you can't just absorb neutrinos - you need to conserve lepton number and charge. What are you suggesting for a Feynman diagram?
Even if you could absorb neutrinos (and I don't see any mechanism at all for this), the total momentum carried by solar neutrinos is only ~2% of the photon momentum so even if that (probably impossible mechanism) worked, the system still wouldn't produce noticeable thrust.
From a high energy physics interaction point of view, a microwave cavity isn't interesting. The fields are very low (compared to nuclear fields), and the frequencies are low (compared to say gamma ray frequencies). There just isn't any reason to expect any unusual interactions.
You can still conceptually put a box around the system and look at what comes out. If the mass of the system is decreasing, then you have some sort of rocket that generates thrust from gas, or ions (like a standard ion drive), or something similar - but they claim they are not doing this. If you are creating new particles (photons, W particles, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, whatever), then you need energy to create them and you wind up with the same power requirements that you have for photons (or generally worse).
You need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain leaks out. In this case the claim is so extraordinary: it violates one of the best tested physical principals that the evidence must be very strong. In the case of the FTL neutrinos a tremendous amount of effort went into finding a flaw in the experiment, and eventully one was found.
Agreed.
Also just trying random stuff to see what happens is likely to end up with experiments that are subject to all sorts experimental errors. If you have a theory that electromagnetic radiation doesn't conserve momentum, then you design a specific experiment to look: If you think its a high field effect, you do particle collisions, or relativistic particles in intense laser beams. If you think its a small but linear effect you do superconducting microwave cavities suspended on ultra-sensitive force balances. You don't start out trying to build a rocket engine.
There is a description of the Sagnac effect on wikipedia, this is the basis of a laser gyroscope. Interestingly Newtonian physics and relativity give the same answer for this. I isn't related to the microwave drive. I think they mention it because laser gyroscopes are conceptually complicated and they hope that the reader won't understand them, and therefor not understand that if anything they are yet more evidence that this trick doesn't work.
You could imagine some system that used electromagnetic fields to produce forces on other objects in the solar system to generate thrust. That isn't what they describe, and I can't think of any way to do that (but it wouldn't violate conservation of momentum if there were a way).
Whatever happens in the box, the momentum change of the engine will be the same as the amount of momentum that exits as exhaust. If the only thing that exits the system is photons, then the ratio of power to thrust is extremely large - it is not a useful means of propulsion for any application that I can think of (not counting antimatter powered starships that is).
In fact the 600MW were used to drive microwave resonators (X-band accelerator structures). Not only that but they had different group and phase velocities. I guess I should be surprised they didn't launch themselves into low earth orbit....
Maybe we should have used Tesla coils instead,
I'd agree with all that except that its actually tricky to do the experiment correctly. With lots of microwave power, high currents, etc in the system it would be easy to fool yourself. Of course if you have any brains you know it can't work from first principals and wouldn't' bother trying.
Conservation of momentum is extended in relativity to conservation of 4-momentum, basically a combination of momentum and energy. In a rest frame this means that standard Newtonian momentum is conserved, it just makes conservation also work when you are observing a system that is moving past you at relativistic speeds.
From the article: "Seems to violate law of conservation of momentum". - Yup it does. Imagine putting an invisible mass-less box around the entire system. Almost nothing comes out the back (only microwave energy - more on that later). The center of mass of the box accelerates. This is a violation of conservation of momentum - one of the most well understood and best tested laws in physics. If there were some exotic high energy physics effect proposed for this at least it might be worth listening, but this is just electromagnetism - very well understood. The "group velocity / phase velocity" is just jargon that has nothing to do with this since it is the Poynting vector that carries momentum.
You CAN make a reaction drive using photons (microwaves in this case), this idea has been around for many decades. The problem is that photons carry a lot of energy relative to their momentum so it takes an enormous power source to produce any thrust. So far no one has found a practical application where there was a large enough energy (and high enough power ) source to make this practical.
There have been a lot of experiments with microwaves - I've personally worked on a 600MW pulse microwave system. There have even been attempts at microwave driven spacecraft sails. Some early experiments seemed to indicate more thrust than would be expected from momentum conservation. Eventually this was tracked down to gas absorbed on the surface being heated and released by the microwaves - essentially a conventional rocket. With very high microwave powers you can generate forces in all sorts of ways in a closed laboratory environment that would not work in space.
This will not work.
In #2 I meant a LOT more advanced. When I was hiking in the Canadian Rockies a Pika (small fluffy rodent) jumped up on a rock and started squeaking at me. It was acting at its most threatening trying to scare off the invader. It was adorable and we took many pictures.
Its not clear that a peaceful society will develop the sort of high energy technologies that are probably need for space. They might instead develop a low energy sustainable technology that lets a modest size population live happily on the limited resources of a planet. Space travel may only be done by irrationally aggressive species. Look at what happened to manned space with the end of the cold war.
The China analogy doesn't really work. For thousands of years they were the most powerful civilization on earth but the stayed at home while the Europeans explored and conquered. Eventually the mighty empire of China was brought low by the technological superiority of the Europeans it he opium war etc. I don't think the west "got lucky" I think that their exploration and conquest made them strong. Perhaps the world would have been a very different place if the Cheng-Ho fleet hadn't been recalled.
BTW: I am in no way endorsing the colonial behavior of the Europeans, or trying to imply that I think it is morally acceptable to exterminate an alien race.
Without knowing either the technology for interstellar travel, or the motivations of an alien intelligence its difficult to figure out why they might want our planet. The might simply like planets, and not care that someone else was there first. They may be motivated by religion to convert all sentients to their own beliefs. Large scale planetary modification may be more difficult that interstellar travel: Its pretty easy to imagine technology to get to 0.1C (even fission rockets could do that). A million-ton spacecraft at 0.1C is a lot less energy than dismantling a planet.
They may "colonize" earth without sending a lot of mass. Engineered microbes in micro-spacecraft.
Maybe artificial intelligences that hack into out networks and redirect the productive capability of our civilization. All we'd notice is an inexplicable trend away from developing space travel, nuclear power,and other potentially dangerous technologies.