.. others to alter their work because it is not technical documentation or code, but an expression of their own thoughts.
Depends: in supercomputing simulations, the code is crucial.
On this note, I would embrace the NC-SA (non-commercial / share alike) options: I have been putting countless hours per week for years now on developing code under a measly academic salary, and I see no reason whatsoever to not charge a hefty price to any one that wants to use the code commercially.
A good practice is a spin-off company from the university that exclusively licenses use of an invention to investors, where each partner (inventor, university, investor) has 1/3 of the profit, but only the inventor (or researcher) and the investors have boardroom seats.
and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free
US universities charge fees in the six-figure range. How is that 'for free' ?
perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"
And perhaps it should not. Why would it? A non-US citizen in the US barely has any rights, and a visitor is taxed at a flat 30% having to go through excessive paperwork to cut it down to almost 20%. By comparison, A US citizen in, f.i., the EU (and elsewhere) has several, like free (as in 'free beer') medical coverage, legal representation, even psychological support in most member-states, and elsewhere: services for which they would pay dearly in the US. Some have actually complained that they are exempt from the EU unemployment safety net, bitter for not being entitled to 'free money' after a couple of years of employment, and that they have to pay fees for education in EU institutions. Fortunately, they were laughed at, infused by generous doses of 'european' humor.
I just did: no time to compile my own, so I installed a build.
Just firing it up, and it already tried to connect to several Google-owned domains (including the controversial gstatic.com) out-of-the-box without any warning or permission.
Attempting to just write text to the adress bar triggers another cascade of connections- initially to just activate the "aid" of predicting the site I am looking for, I know- but not stopping there. So where does it stop, exactly?
Respectfully, this reminds me of the various spyware "helpbars" that would perform unsolicited installs, and the nature of the "help" I get only reminds me of Clippy.
Since there may be others that feel this way, in the case of exoplanets here is "the one", all-inclusive resource that even the professionals in the field make use of and cite.
(For the click-lazy:) "The Exoplanet Data Explorer is an interactive table and plotter for exploring and displaying data from the Exoplanet Orbit Database. The Exoplanet Orbit Database is a carefully constructed compilation of quality, spectroscopic orbital parameters of exoplanets orbiting normal stars from the peer-reviewed literature, and updates the Catalog of nearby exoplanets."
Access is granted to all data, and I (hopefully along with other slashdotters) am willing to "translate" from the scientific jargon if something sounds too specialized.
Chrome's functionality sounds great, but I do not like its attitude: it establishes numerous connections "on the side" talking back to Google central all the time, almost constantly transmitting all sorts of information: Google intercepts and highjacks most of the traffic when someone uses Chrome, that much is obvious.
I have yet to see any 3D scene where the 3D is used as a storytelling device
Then perhaps you should look more carefully: hopefully your local planetarium has a few of those new stereoscopic documentaries where one can see of how great an educational use stereoscopy-based 3D can have. Not all "3D" has to derive from the Marvel Comics genre.
There has been an immense progress: vivid colours, better depth, all that. More appreciation and less nagging, people.
What is the purpose of the study ice cores? Is this to the exploitation of resources?
Gases can get 'diluted' into liquids, almost the same way solids (e.g. sugar, salt) do. The assumption is that gases get 'locked' into the ice (along with other stuff) so one can drill a core, keep it as frozen and pristine (avoid contamination) as possible during transport, get it to the lab, and perform precision measurements of what one is looking for.
The core is thought to 'record' the atmospheric history, because the levels of certain gases at various parts of the core reflect the atmospheric abundances of this and that gas, at the time that particular part of the core was frozen (created). So, in principle, a '2000-year' core is a core obtained by drilling to a depth that was the surface of the snow/ice 2000 years ago. Therefore by vaporizing parts of the core and taking precise measurements (say with a mass spectrometer) can give clues to the dominant atmospheric conditions of that age. Other frozen material can come as a bonus.
The above are just basic principles, as I understand them, and I am certain the actual measurements and processing is far from trivial. But I am not an expert on this field, I only know a few people that are; perhaps someone that is an expert can consider contributing some more information.
oil drillers are actively drilling in this area and willing to give up the cores for free as they are an unavoidable byproduct of their operations
In those cases, would you happen to know how scientifically usable is the drilled core in comparison to scientific expeditions, where the core is the end goal (and not a byproduct)?
Your assessment seems based on several questionable assumptions, including but not limited to the following.
(list of several questionable asumptions)
Yes, it kind of is: that is because here I am only considering the DNA-based thing that lives in three spatial dimension, and one (linear and one-way) temporal direction, replicates, feeds, and where the only 'magic' is the quantum behavior of matter/energy, and the elaborate yet stochastically developed protein folding.
Of course you need life to make life, and there might be a host of other things going on- I may maintain that life may very well be an "Intelligent Shade of Purple", or some multidimensional entity, or that life 'knows' how to evolve itself, but I cannot really conduct reproducible experiments on those otherwise very intriguing notions.
if any other culture in the universe could have harnessed fission or fusion effectively [..] we'd have detected them by now.
I am not sure about that- think of the practicalities: the distances are vast (so signal-to-noise does not look promising), and there is barely any monitoring project. Even so, there are targets, and the idea is to try to obtain spectra of exoplanetary atmospheres. As for detecting fusion, consider that the largest nuclear yield ever detonated from humans is at around 50Mt (TNT equivalent, Tsar Bomba) and all that energy was delivered in a heartbeat. Compare that to the 100,000,000,000 megatons of (equivalent) TNT per second that is output from the Sun, a pretty dim star if you just travel a bit outside and look at it from a distance. If you were to stand on the outskirts of the Solar System, extend your arm and hold a pin in front of you, the pin's head would cover the Sun; if you were as far as only the nearest star, the Sun would look like a dim point source of light, with no dimensions at all: you would have to a) have superb instruments, b) know exactly where to look and keep looking, and c) get lucky, in order to say see an extraterrestrial nuclear test happen, on the exoplanet that hapens.
So overall, for detecting signs that someone is smart, I would look on atmospheres and lasers. Or some other coherent form of radiation that cannot be attributed to a known astrophysical (natural) process.
I'd put money on primary energy. Base your whole culture and economy on petrochemicals, use them up, then ? [..] So when the oil and coal is burned up, that's it. Back to 1700 at best.
I hear your argument. Perhaps renewable energy can be the answer. And personally, I haven't given up on achieving a break-even point for fusion, even though mining of rare materials may be necessary (making the meaning of 'break-even' tricky, because someone will have to burn energy to go, mine, fetch and refine them). But true renewable energy, not that 'green' crap that is marketed everywhere nowadays. That, and lots, LOTS of recycling (especially with water) and an ingenious farming scheme to feed an ever-growing population.
In about a hundred years from now, half-naked African nomads (just an example here) that are not much into television and consider themselves lucky and wealthy because they own a small herd of cattle, will suddenly stop looking so 'stupid' and 'backwards' to the West: food is going to get very expensive.
e.g. that the early stars going nova are the primary source of heavier elements
Massive stars go supernova within a few million years from their creation: solids have been around in the Solar system for at least 4.567 billion years (from meteoritic studies), and the universe is at minimum 14.5 billion years old (cosmology arguments). There are already plenty of visible galaxies where star formation is not proceeding as fast as in this one.
And, in light of new evidence, numerous planets around most stars seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
So, plenty of time to develop life similar to this one, even if one needs 2 billion years from rocks to bacteria, another 2 from bacteria to apes, and only another tiny -in comparison- 200,000 years perhaps to get the apes to do their own rocket science.
That said, in my opinion I do not think that the low initial metalicity is much of a convincing counter-argument here.
Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out.. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else: they either boil, starve, or poison themselves.
If this projection is correct, and the effect grows at an exponential rate, it will be 1 degree for the last century, (order of) 3 for the next, 9 for the one after that, and then it is either super-tech or extinction.
I did, following your reccomendation, and I was shortly after spammed with an unsolicited email from curse dot com, complete with invisible tracking links.
What is
10 something: GOTO 10
if not an (endless) loop?
'something' may include a 'break'- or 'exit'-type of statement, encapsulated into an 'if' block. If the conditional pans out, the program will break and there will be no loop because the 'GOTO 10' will never be reached.
The golden age of humanity will start soon. [..] The future is not space, it's synthetic biology.
The power of synthetic biology unleashed upon a society that is run on the administrative and economic protocols that apply now, will be a nightmare, not a golden age.
You think you are going to be doing synthetic biology in your garage? For one, you will have to do exactly what the supersoldiers tell you to. How do you recon this amazing technology will reach you? Even if there comes to be such a thing as a technologically developed Elixir of Life, the Universe, and Everything, you think that people on top will just hand it over to you? Or that greed will be somehow magically rendered obsolete worldwide overnight?
Awesome synthetic biology + current greed-driven model = even faster route *straight* to Hell
Slashdot Mirror
No. Orpheus escaped, Euridice perished, and Persephone has a time-share between Hades (Pluto) and her mom.
.. people who happened to vote in some panel ..
Same procedure in law-making. Also in the patent system. Your point?
Like that, but with fewer buttons and way more expensive.
And with the usual ridiculous patent claims.
.. others to alter their work because it is not technical documentation or code, but an expression of their own thoughts.
Depends: in supercomputing simulations, the code is crucial.
On this note, I would embrace the NC-SA (non-commercial / share alike) options: I have been putting countless hours per week for years now on developing code under a measly academic salary, and I see no reason whatsoever to not charge a hefty price to any one that wants to use the code commercially.
A good practice is a spin-off company from the university that exclusively licenses use of an invention to investors, where each partner (inventor, university, investor) has 1/3 of the profit, but only the inventor (or researcher) and the investors have boardroom seats.
and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free
US universities charge fees in the six-figure range. How is that 'for free' ?
perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"
And perhaps it should not. Why would it? A non-US citizen in the US barely has any rights, and a visitor is taxed at a flat 30% having to go through excessive paperwork to cut it down to almost 20%. By comparison, A US citizen in, f.i., the EU (and elsewhere) has several, like free (as in 'free beer') medical coverage, legal representation, even psychological support in most member-states, and elsewhere: services for which they would pay dearly in the US. Some have actually complained that they are exempt from the EU unemployment safety net, bitter for not being entitled to 'free money' after a couple of years of employment, and that they have to pay fees for education in EU institutions. Fortunately, they were laughed at, infused by generous doses of 'european' humor.
"In your face, engineers !"
-- Physicists
Who would have thought!
Use Chromium instead.
I just did: no time to compile my own, so I installed a build.
Just firing it up, and it already tried to connect to several Google-owned domains (including the controversial gstatic.com) out-of-the-box without any warning or permission.
Attempting to just write text to the adress bar triggers another cascade of connections- initially to just activate the "aid" of predicting the site I am looking for, I know- but not stopping there. So where does it stop, exactly?
Respectfully, this reminds me of the various spyware "helpbars" that would perform unsolicited installs, and the nature of the "help" I get only reminds me of Clippy.
So your point is?
Terrible headline aside
Since there may be others that feel this way, in the case of exoplanets here is "the one", all-inclusive resource that even the professionals in the field make use of and cite.
(For the click-lazy:) "The Exoplanet Data Explorer is an interactive table and plotter for exploring and displaying data from the Exoplanet Orbit Database. The Exoplanet Orbit Database is a carefully constructed compilation of quality, spectroscopic orbital parameters of exoplanets orbiting normal stars from the peer-reviewed literature, and updates the Catalog of nearby exoplanets."
Access is granted to all data, and I (hopefully along with other slashdotters) am willing to "translate" from the scientific jargon if something sounds too specialized.
Chrome's functionality sounds great, but I do not like its attitude: it establishes numerous connections "on the side" talking back to Google central all the time, almost constantly transmitting all sorts of information: Google intercepts and highjacks most of the traffic when someone uses Chrome, that much is obvious.
.. who cares. Cool as heck!
I have yet to see any 3D scene where the 3D is used as a storytelling device
Then perhaps you should look more carefully: hopefully your local planetarium has a few of those new stereoscopic documentaries where one can see of how great an educational use stereoscopy-based 3D can have. Not all "3D" has to derive from the Marvel Comics genre.
There has been an immense progress: vivid colours, better depth, all that. More appreciation and less nagging, people.
If someone runes it into something you have a viking problem, not a car problem.
If someone runes it, then the problem is dwarfed.
According to yahoo news it is huge and Sky & Telescope says it is little. :)
Also, TFA's source [space.com] has 16 (sixteen) collaborating spy/ad/crap/tracksites going nuts with scripts and cookies and all that.
By comparison, Slashdot has three: DoubleClick, Google Analytics and ScoreCard Research.
What is the purpose of the study ice cores? Is this to the exploitation of resources?
Gases can get 'diluted' into liquids, almost the same way solids (e.g. sugar, salt) do. The assumption is that gases get 'locked' into the ice (along with other stuff) so one can drill a core, keep it as frozen and pristine (avoid contamination) as possible during transport, get it to the lab, and perform precision measurements of what one is looking for.
The core is thought to 'record' the atmospheric history, because the levels of certain gases at various parts of the core reflect the atmospheric abundances of this and that gas, at the time that particular part of the core was frozen (created). So, in principle, a '2000-year' core is a core obtained by drilling to a depth that was the surface of the snow/ice 2000 years ago. Therefore by vaporizing parts of the core and taking precise measurements (say with a mass spectrometer) can give clues to the dominant atmospheric conditions of that age. Other frozen material can come as a bonus.
The above are just basic principles, as I understand them, and I am certain the actual measurements and processing is far from trivial. But I am not an expert on this field, I only know a few people that are; perhaps someone that is an expert can consider contributing some more information.
Am I the only one thinking "worlds most expensive frozen margarita" ?
Nope- there have already been coctail parties in Greenland (following long weeks of science) and guess where the ice in the drinks was from =)
oil drillers are actively drilling in this area and willing to give up the cores for free as they are an unavoidable byproduct of their operations
In those cases, would you happen to know how scientifically usable is the drilled core in comparison to scientific expeditions, where the core is the end goal (and not a byproduct)?
Your assessment seems based on several questionable assumptions, including but not limited to the following.
(list of several questionable asumptions)
Yes, it kind of is: that is because here I am only considering the DNA-based thing that lives in three spatial dimension, and one (linear and one-way) temporal direction, replicates, feeds, and where the only 'magic' is the quantum behavior of matter/energy, and the elaborate yet stochastically developed protein folding.
Of course you need life to make life, and there might be a host of other things going on- I may maintain that life may very well be an "Intelligent Shade of Purple", or some multidimensional entity, or that life 'knows' how to evolve itself, but I cannot really conduct reproducible experiments on those otherwise very intriguing notions.
if any other culture in the universe could have harnessed fission or fusion effectively [..] we'd have detected them by now.
I am not sure about that- think of the practicalities: the distances are vast (so signal-to-noise does not look promising), and there is barely any monitoring project. Even so, there are targets, and the idea is to try to obtain spectra of exoplanetary atmospheres. As for detecting fusion, consider that the largest nuclear yield ever detonated from humans is at around 50Mt (TNT equivalent, Tsar Bomba) and all that energy was delivered in a heartbeat. Compare that to the 100,000,000,000 megatons of (equivalent) TNT per second that is output from the Sun, a pretty dim star if you just travel a bit outside and look at it from a distance. If you were to stand on the outskirts of the Solar System, extend your arm and hold a pin in front of you, the pin's head would cover the Sun; if you were as far as only the nearest star, the Sun would look like a dim point source of light, with no dimensions at all: you would have to a) have superb instruments, b) know exactly where to look and keep looking, and c) get lucky, in order to say see an extraterrestrial nuclear test happen, on the exoplanet that hapens.
So overall, for detecting signs that someone is smart, I would look on atmospheres and lasers. Or some other coherent form of radiation that cannot be attributed to a known astrophysical (natural) process.
I'd put money on primary energy. Base your whole culture and economy on petrochemicals, use them up, then ? [..] So when the oil and coal is burned up, that's it. Back to 1700 at best.
I hear your argument. Perhaps renewable energy can be the answer. And personally, I haven't given up on achieving a break-even point for fusion, even though mining of rare materials may be necessary (making the meaning of 'break-even' tricky, because someone will have to burn energy to go, mine, fetch and refine them). But true renewable energy, not that 'green' crap that is marketed everywhere nowadays. That, and lots, LOTS of recycling (especially with water) and an ingenious farming scheme to feed an ever-growing population.
In about a hundred years from now, half-naked African nomads (just an example here) that are not much into television and consider themselves lucky and wealthy because they own a small herd of cattle, will suddenly stop looking so 'stupid' and 'backwards' to the West: food is going to get very expensive.
e.g. that the early stars going nova are the primary source of heavier elements
Massive stars go supernova within a few million years from their creation: solids have been around in the Solar system for at least 4.567 billion years (from meteoritic studies), and the universe is at minimum 14.5 billion years old (cosmology arguments). There are already plenty of visible galaxies where star formation is not proceeding as fast as in this one.
And, in light of new evidence, numerous planets around most stars seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
So, plenty of time to develop life similar to this one, even if one needs 2 billion years from rocks to bacteria, another 2 from bacteria to apes, and only another tiny -in comparison- 200,000 years perhaps to get the apes to do their own rocket science.
That said, in my opinion I do not think that the low initial metalicity is much of a convincing counter-argument here.
Now that the number of planets around stars in this galaxy alone is in the ballpark of several billions, one starts to think that the reason for no apparent alien civilizations similar to this one is because they boil themselves out .. they simply raise the temperature of their own place before they are able to either counter the effect, or before they are tech savvy enough to colonize someplace else: they either boil, starve, or poison themselves.
If this projection is correct, and the effect grows at an exponential rate, it will be 1 degree for the last century, (order of) 3 for the next, 9 for the one after that, and then it is either super-tech or extinction.
Careful now, humans.
Just an aside, have you tried Feed The Beast?
I did, following your reccomendation, and I was shortly after spammed with an unsolicited email from curse dot com, complete with invisible tracking links.
Obviously, my login credencials were intercepted.
I am NOT pleased.
What is 10 something: GOTO 10 if not an (endless) loop?
'something' may include a 'break'- or 'exit'-type of statement, encapsulated into an 'if' block. If the conditional pans out, the program will break and there will be no loop because the 'GOTO 10' will never be reached.
Yes, the full paper
It is not a paper, it is just a letter.
is beyond a paywall
$35 for 48 hours of access? Really?
The golden age of humanity will start soon. [..] The future is not space, it's synthetic biology.
The power of synthetic biology unleashed upon a society that is run on the administrative and economic protocols that apply now, will be a nightmare, not a golden age.
You think you are going to be doing synthetic biology in your garage? For one, you will have to do exactly what the supersoldiers tell you to. How do you recon this amazing technology will reach you? Even if there comes to be such a thing as a technologically developed Elixir of Life, the Universe, and Everything, you think that people on top will just hand it over to you? Or that greed will be somehow magically rendered obsolete worldwide overnight?
Awesome synthetic biology + current greed-driven model = even faster route *straight* to Hell