Don't worry, if that state is anything like the ones I'm familiar with (NY and IL) then traffic court is only a little bit above a kangaroo court. The judges very often don't have much legal background and can almost make up the law as they go along. Your only recourse, if you don't like their ruling, is to then try and escalate it up to a much more expensive appeal in "real" court. So, as far as I know, there is no reason to believe this ruling will matter much even in other places within the same state.
I know it's horrible that some first responders died in this, but I have to ask if anyone's looked to see if there have been any new hand-crafted soap manufacturers and/or liposuction clinic thefts in the area lately...
I love Bill Nye's work, but personally I think he made a mistake in getting involved in this. He's not going to convince the die-hard creationists of anything. The only thing that can be accomplished here is to provide the nutter museum high-profile publicity (which is, almost certainly, the reason Ham was interested in doing this in the first place).
Creationism is, even still, a fringe group of nutters that seem to psychologically thrive off of single-minded obstinance and a belief of personal exceptionalism in their willingness to throw away actual logic and facts. The fact that their beliefs are so fringe is the reason why, almost anywhere else in society outside their individual congregations or this crazy freak show^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMuseum they have to try and water it down by calling it "Intelligent Design" in an attempt to get somewhat more rational people to go along with it.
They seem to be a little behind the times. Most cars already have a back door. It's usually referred to as a trunk, hatch, or boot. I'm pretty sure I'd notice it if they tried to put in a second one. Are they planning on making it a really really tiny door using nano-technology?
"Or you could just * Perfect the technology to create magic spells"
Much of the technology we make use of today might look like magic to someone from ~100 years ago.
"Most of the crap you think is easy to do is literally hundreds, if not thousands of years in the future. You see small tiny problems when the core issues are far larger."
Nope, I know they're extremely difficult problems. That said, I disagree with how long they might take to accomplish. As a species, our rate of technological development has historically accelerated greatly as time progresses. We have already invested heavily in all the technologies I mentioned (less so on keeping disembodies heads) and look to be continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. Personally, I wouldn't think 50 years would be too far ahead to be able to begin putting all these techniques together into a unified process.
Also, personally, I take a long-view on this whole topic. I have no problem with the idea of planning far in advance for such things and leaving the intermediary space exploration to robots and shorter length human missions. The simple reality is that this also makes sense from the standpoint of propulsion design. It can take decades to develop a new propulsion technology into a reliable physical product (mostly because of the extreme cost of building working prototypes so the previously mentioned acceleration of technological development won't have much impact here). The technologies coming down the pipe in this realm (VASMIR, nuclear fusion, antimatter?, etc.) have such a potential to leap-frog each other so much that it's not really worth sending humans on very long-term missions when they could be beaten to their destination by ships propelled by newer technology.
Using those two main facts, we need two:
Communicate with machines in space (already doing) as opposed to going there.
Create tools to modify our environment as opposed to modifying ourselves. That is, create pseudo gravity, and block radiation, etc., not change ourselves as radically as you think we need to."
Yes, of course. We've been trying to do that since the very start of the space age. The problem is that it's looking more and more like this just won't be economically possible, especially the longer the mission we want to send people on. This is why we have very knowledgeable/experienced scientists suggesting one-way missions to mars. For example, adding more shielding to the ships has always been possible, the problem is that the price becomes absurdly unreasonable and that problem scales with the distance of the trip. The point of my suggestions was to NOT have to change ourselves much. The idea is that a returning astronaut would end up a fully functional normal human being once they arrive at their destination. This leads us to your next point...
Failing those things, the easiest way to change our selves is not through radical surgery, but genetically. Genetically engineering people that can survive in space would be very hard, but still far easier than the radical changes you are discussing
I'm not sure where to even begin with this one after all the hyperbole you just spewed about "magic". Compared to the stuff I suggested, this one is even further out there as far as I can see. We have only the barest/crudest idea of how to change DNA/RNA in order to get the desired results we want and doing so is such an absurdly random process that the idea of trying it on human genetics is the thing of horror movies. Unless you're suggesting some kind of Dr. Mengela level lack of scientific ethics, such research will take an absurd amount of time to make significant progress. Even if it did though, this throws your idea of not "changing ourselves" right out the window. (not that I, personally, have much issue with that but you seemed to be against it just a moment ago...)
I'm not suggesting that genetic manipulation isn't a good idea to research heavily, but since we're already doing to along with the things I mentioned I highly doubt it will produce the results you suggest more quickly.
Even if that were true, it shouldn't really matter to Twitter. I don't see how Twitter accounts should be any different than MMORPG accounts. Most of the companies that run MMORPGs have been fighting the idea that players can buy and sell accounts for about as long as the genre has existed. To a lesser extent, this might be because they are miffed that they aren't making any money off the transaction but the real reason has traditionally been that if virtual goods (like the account or items in the game world) can be shown to have a legitimate real-world value then there is a good possibility that they might end up with legal liability in the event that their server code screws up and erases the account (or, possibly, even if a bug in their code causes items in the game economy to loose significant value in the real-world).
Like I said, I would expect Twitter to see individual Twitter accounts the same way. I doubt they want even the possibility that they could be sued for the $50,000 that someone offered this guy for his account and would expect that if you looked at their TOS such transactions are probably a direct violation (I'm too lazy to check such things myself).
The solution to many of these problems is this (and, no, I'm not joking):
* Perfect the technology to keep disembodied heads alive (researchers in the US and USSR already did some rudimentary research into this during the cold war with moderate success).
* Perfect the technology to grow brainless human bodies (we can already grown or 3d print some limited organs and much research effort it already directed towards this)
* Perfect the technology to re-attach disembodied heads to the lab grown brainless human bodies with full nerve re-attachment and muscle control. (we're getting closer and closer to being able to re-connect spinal cords and have already had much success re-connecting severed limbs. Much medical research is already directed towards this.)
* Perfect VR technology and brain-computer interfaces (again, much research is already being directed to both these problems)
* Once all these technologies are completed, make sure that all long-term human space missions only ever send the heads into space and re-attach those heads to lab-grown bodies once they reach their destination.
The advantages of this method should be:
* A vastly smaller volume of the human astronaut should allow much, much more radiation shielding.
* No more bones to worry about becoming brittle (other than the skull which, if need be, could later be reinforced with something like metal plates).
* Good enough VR and brain-computer interfaces should be almost indistinguishable from real life thus eliminating the psychological issues of long-term confinement.
* No stomach means no eating process to go wrong due to micro-gravity.
* As an added bonus, having a much smaller astronaut size and no need to move about the cabin would, also, allow for a massive decrease in spaceship mass even after massively increasing the amount of radiation shielding. This means much lower fuel costs for the same distance trip.
Nah, no need to take the political risk of releasing dirt on them (for now, at least. Future revenge actions aren't out of the question). The president will just say "no" and these guys most likely aren't influential enough to go any further than that. The GOP might pick it up as a talking point (like Bengahzi), but it'll be easy for the administration to write that off as the partisan politics it would legitimately be. Their only hope is that this draws support from more Democrats which, unfortunately, I think is unlikely.
Too late, Makerbot products were already labelled as over-priced and under-performing in the 3D printing community (among anyone who knows anything about the many competing products like Ultimaker, Lulzbot, and any of the other far less expensive 3d scanners out there). It sounds like a match made in heaven to me.
All of the printers I've seen are based on sintering powdered metal into a single larger piece of metal. My understanding of the process is that sintered parts are no-where near the strength of a solid piece of metal. Also, engineered metals used in performance components are selected for the specific capabilities of the alloy. Printing your tie-rod ends from a generic metal is likely t result in a sub-standard part that fails far more quickly than you would otherwise expect.
This isn't to say that there isn't some other non-sintered 3d printing process out there I haven't heard of but I'm not aware of any such system being anywhere even near production.
Ink cartridges that expire each time you unwrap them? Where are you from, the '90's? Welcome to the future my friend, today we have ink cartridges that expire while sitting, un-opened, on the shelf.
I'm not really joking, we have an HP plotter where I work that does exactly this. When they went to replace the ink cartridge, they found that the entire stock of back-up cartridges had already "expired" according to a pre-set date built into a chip in the cartridge. Thankfully, HP was nice enough to provide a setting hidden away in the firmware that lets you over-ride that check. My guess is that they think the pro-market might not be willing to put up with their crap if they pushed it that far.
Is it possible that a third party could come to national prominence in a given election cycle? Sure, its happened before in the past. That's why we don't have parties like the Whigs and the Bull Moose Party. However, that won't accomplish a stable multi-party system in this country. All that will accomplish is (as has happened in the past) that one of the existing entrenched parties will go away and we'll be back to a two party system with the same actors and issues (most likely by the next election cycle).
Until we can get some of the fundamentals of the system changed (at the very least, at the state election law level) this will always be the case. Such change will, by it's nature, have to happen WITHIN the present, broken, two party system. I'm not claiming it'll be easy, I'm just claiming it's the reality of the situation as I see it. Until then, I'll keep voting for whichever party I think will do the least damage to the people of this country. For as long as I've been alive, as bad as they are, that has happened to be the Democrats.
* Realize that while both parties are bad, they are NOT equally bad and do not have the same effect on society while in power. * Realize that thinking that the system has to be up to my minimum standard or, otherwise, I'll just sit around and play my fiddle while Rome burns (throw my vote away on a third party that I know won't win) is childish and simple-minded thinking bred from irrational anger and frustration. * Vote within our existing, admittedly broken, system in order to try and minimize the damage in the short-term in the hopes that the system can be fixed over time.
Because I don't like to throw away my vote. I play the game based on how the rules are now, not how I think they should. I agree in the need for a strong multi-party system (more than just two) but our present system of laws is rigged to ensure that such a system simply isn't viable. If you believe that needs to change, I believe the only useful effort would be to work to get those laws changed. I reject the fallacy that both parties are "the same" or "just as bad as each other", they're not. While I'm waiting for the system to get fixed, I'm going to vote within this broken system in order to try an minimize the damage it causes.
Honestly, I voted for Obama (and would vote for him again simply because of how much crazier the GOP is) but I think Snowden should get Obama's Peace Prize.
So, what you're saying is that when the US government used the CIA to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Guatemala in 1954 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) they did so because if they hadn't helped the United Fruit Company continue to make large profits from a cheap source of bananas it would have lead to the fall of the United States? Or was it because they were concerned that their ideology of democracy might spread across the American continents and corrupt our American way of life? Sounds to me like your willful ignorance of history is making you the bitch in this discussion...
Have you actually read up on the issue? They're not protesting the technology, they're protesting the rising rents in the city due to Google (and other big IT company) employees moving in and commuting to their work outside the city. Do you actually understand what the word "Luddite" means?
How badly things get distorted probably depends on the specific frequencies of light they choose to represent the primary colors; how common those specific frequencies are in nature; and how tightly tuned the silver nanoparticles really are (how much of the light a little above and a little below the target frequency also gets reflected). If they can target the frequencies closely enough and choose shades that aren't quite as common, then the effect might not be very notable. If they can select all three colors with this effect in mind, they might be able to make the effect seem like more of a general slight darkening rather than an odd looking color shift.
You haven't heard? A few months ago Larry Ellison had Bjarne Stroustrup kidnapped. He's holding him hostage on his America's Cup boat somewhere in international waters. If ISO and IEC don't do what he says, Struostrup joins Wilson...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, if that state is anything like the ones I'm familiar with (NY and IL) then traffic court is only a little bit above a kangaroo court. The judges very often don't have much legal background and can almost make up the law as they go along. Your only recourse, if you don't like their ruling, is to then try and escalate it up to a much more expensive appeal in "real" court. So, as far as I know, there is no reason to believe this ruling will matter much even in other places within the same state.
I know it's horrible that some first responders died in this, but I have to ask if anyone's looked to see if there have been any new hand-crafted soap manufacturers and/or liposuction clinic thefts in the area lately...
I love Bill Nye's work, but personally I think he made a mistake in getting involved in this. He's not going to convince the die-hard creationists of anything. The only thing that can be accomplished here is to provide the nutter museum high-profile publicity (which is, almost certainly, the reason Ham was interested in doing this in the first place).
Creationism is, even still, a fringe group of nutters that seem to psychologically thrive off of single-minded obstinance and a belief of personal exceptionalism in their willingness to throw away actual logic and facts. The fact that their beliefs are so fringe is the reason why, almost anywhere else in society outside their individual congregations or this crazy freak show^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMuseum they have to try and water it down by calling it "Intelligent Design" in an attempt to get somewhat more rational people to go along with it.
That's the old hiring practice. The new practice adds the additional question "Are you willing to spy a lot on the American people?"
They seem to be a little behind the times. Most cars already have a back door. It's usually referred to as a trunk, hatch, or boot. I'm pretty sure I'd notice it if they tried to put in a second one. Are they planning on making it a really really tiny door using nano-technology?
"Or you could just * Perfect the technology to create magic spells"
Much of the technology we make use of today might look like magic to someone from ~100 years ago.
"Most of the crap you think is easy to do is literally hundreds, if not thousands of years in the future. You see small tiny problems when the core issues are far larger."
Nope, I know they're extremely difficult problems. That said, I disagree with how long they might take to accomplish. As a species, our rate of technological development has historically accelerated greatly as time progresses. We have already invested heavily in all the technologies I mentioned (less so on keeping disembodies heads) and look to be continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. Personally, I wouldn't think 50 years would be too far ahead to be able to begin putting all these techniques together into a unified process.
Also, personally, I take a long-view on this whole topic. I have no problem with the idea of planning far in advance for such things and leaving the intermediary space exploration to robots and shorter length human missions. The simple reality is that this also makes sense from the standpoint of propulsion design. It can take decades to develop a new propulsion technology into a reliable physical product (mostly because of the extreme cost of building working prototypes so the previously mentioned acceleration of technological development won't have much impact here). The technologies coming down the pipe in this realm (VASMIR, nuclear fusion, antimatter?, etc.) have such a potential to leap-frog each other so much that it's not really worth sending humans on very long-term missions when they could be beaten to their destination by ships propelled by newer technology.
Using those two main facts, we need two:
Communicate with machines in space (already doing) as opposed to going there.
Create tools to modify our environment as opposed to modifying ourselves. That is, create pseudo gravity, and block radiation, etc., not change ourselves as radically as you think we need to."
Yes, of course. We've been trying to do that since the very start of the space age. The problem is that it's looking more and more like this just won't be economically possible, especially the longer the mission we want to send people on. This is why we have very knowledgeable/experienced scientists suggesting one-way missions to mars. For example, adding more shielding to the ships has always been possible, the problem is that the price becomes absurdly unreasonable and that problem scales with the distance of the trip. The point of my suggestions was to NOT have to change ourselves much. The idea is that a returning astronaut would end up a fully functional normal human being once they arrive at their destination. This leads us to your next point...
Failing those things, the easiest way to change our selves is not through radical surgery, but genetically. Genetically engineering people that can survive in space would be very hard, but still far easier than the radical changes you are discussing
I'm not sure where to even begin with this one after all the hyperbole you just spewed about "magic". Compared to the stuff I suggested, this one is even further out there as far as I can see. We have only the barest/crudest idea of how to change DNA/RNA in order to get the desired results we want and doing so is such an absurdly random process that the idea of trying it on human genetics is the thing of horror movies. Unless you're suggesting some kind of Dr. Mengela level lack of scientific ethics, such research will take an absurd amount of time to make significant progress. Even if it did though, this throws your idea of not "changing ourselves" right out the window. (not that I, personally, have much issue with that but you seemed to be against it just a moment ago...)
I'm not suggesting that genetic manipulation isn't a good idea to research heavily, but since we're already doing to along with the things I mentioned I highly doubt it will produce the results you suggest more quickly.
Even if that were true, it shouldn't really matter to Twitter. I don't see how Twitter accounts should be any different than MMORPG accounts. Most of the companies that run MMORPGs have been fighting the idea that players can buy and sell accounts for about as long as the genre has existed. To a lesser extent, this might be because they are miffed that they aren't making any money off the transaction but the real reason has traditionally been that if virtual goods (like the account or items in the game world) can be shown to have a legitimate real-world value then there is a good possibility that they might end up with legal liability in the event that their server code screws up and erases the account (or, possibly, even if a bug in their code causes items in the game economy to loose significant value in the real-world).
Like I said, I would expect Twitter to see individual Twitter accounts the same way. I doubt they want even the possibility that they could be sued for the $50,000 that someone offered this guy for his account and would expect that if you looked at their TOS such transactions are probably a direct violation (I'm too lazy to check such things myself).
The solution to many of these problems is this (and, no, I'm not joking):
* Perfect the technology to keep disembodied heads alive (researchers in the US and USSR already did some rudimentary research into this during the cold war with moderate success).
* Perfect the technology to grow brainless human bodies (we can already grown or 3d print some limited organs and much research effort it already directed towards this)
* Perfect the technology to re-attach disembodied heads to the lab grown brainless human bodies with full nerve re-attachment and muscle control. (we're getting closer and closer to being able to re-connect spinal cords and have already had much success re-connecting severed limbs. Much medical research is already directed towards this.)
* Perfect VR technology and brain-computer interfaces (again, much research is already being directed to both these problems)
* Once all these technologies are completed, make sure that all long-term human space missions only ever send the heads into space and re-attach those heads to lab-grown bodies once they reach their destination.
The advantages of this method should be:
* A vastly smaller volume of the human astronaut should allow much, much more radiation shielding.
* No more bones to worry about becoming brittle (other than the skull which, if need be, could later be reinforced with something like metal plates).
* Good enough VR and brain-computer interfaces should be almost indistinguishable from real life thus eliminating the psychological issues of long-term confinement.
* No stomach means no eating process to go wrong due to micro-gravity.
* As an added bonus, having a much smaller astronaut size and no need to move about the cabin would, also, allow for a massive decrease in spaceship mass even after massively increasing the amount of radiation shielding. This means much lower fuel costs for the same distance trip.
Nah, no need to take the political risk of releasing dirt on them (for now, at least. Future revenge actions aren't out of the question). The president will just say "no" and these guys most likely aren't influential enough to go any further than that. The GOP might pick it up as a talking point (like Bengahzi), but it'll be easy for the administration to write that off as the partisan politics it would legitimately be. Their only hope is that this draws support from more Democrats which, unfortunately, I think is unlikely.
Too late, Makerbot products were already labelled as over-priced and under-performing in the 3D printing community (among anyone who knows anything about the many competing products like Ultimaker, Lulzbot, and any of the other far less expensive 3d scanners out there). It sounds like a match made in heaven to me.
That is one incredibly powerful magnet.
All of the printers I've seen are based on sintering powdered metal into a single larger piece of metal. My understanding of the process is that sintered parts are no-where near the strength of a solid piece of metal. Also, engineered metals used in performance components are selected for the specific capabilities of the alloy. Printing your tie-rod ends from a generic metal is likely t result in a sub-standard part that fails far more quickly than you would otherwise expect.
This isn't to say that there isn't some other non-sintered 3d printing process out there I haven't heard of but I'm not aware of any such system being anywhere even near production.
Ink cartridges that expire each time you unwrap them? Where are you from, the '90's? Welcome to the future my friend, today we have ink cartridges that expire while sitting, un-opened, on the shelf.
I'm not really joking, we have an HP plotter where I work that does exactly this. When they went to replace the ink cartridge, they found that the entire stock of back-up cartridges had already "expired" according to a pre-set date built into a chip in the cartridge. Thankfully, HP was nice enough to provide a setting hidden away in the firmware that lets you over-ride that check. My guess is that they think the pro-market might not be willing to put up with their crap if they pushed it that far.
No, it really is broken.
Is it possible that a third party could come to national prominence in a given election cycle? Sure, its happened before in the past. That's why we don't have parties like the Whigs and the Bull Moose Party. However, that won't accomplish a stable multi-party system in this country. All that will accomplish is (as has happened in the past) that one of the existing entrenched parties will go away and we'll be back to a two party system with the same actors and issues (most likely by the next election cycle).
Until we can get some of the fundamentals of the system changed (at the very least, at the state election law level) this will always be the case. Such change will, by it's nature, have to happen WITHIN the present, broken, two party system. I'm not claiming it'll be easy, I'm just claiming it's the reality of the situation as I see it. Until then, I'll keep voting for whichever party I think will do the least damage to the people of this country. For as long as I've been alive, as bad as they are, that has happened to be the Democrats.
Not that have a chance of winning control of the US government under our present electoral system.
c)
* Realize that while both parties are bad, they are NOT equally bad and do not have the same effect on society while in power.
* Realize that thinking that the system has to be up to my minimum standard or, otherwise, I'll just sit around and play my fiddle while Rome burns (throw my vote away on a third party that I know won't win) is childish and simple-minded thinking bred from irrational anger and frustration.
* Vote within our existing, admittedly broken, system in order to try and minimize the damage in the short-term in the hopes that the system can be fixed over time.
Because I don't like to throw away my vote. I play the game based on how the rules are now, not how I think they should. I agree in the need for a strong multi-party system (more than just two) but our present system of laws is rigged to ensure that such a system simply isn't viable. If you believe that needs to change, I believe the only useful effort would be to work to get those laws changed. I reject the fallacy that both parties are "the same" or "just as bad as each other", they're not. While I'm waiting for the system to get fixed, I'm going to vote within this broken system in order to try an minimize the damage it causes.
Honestly, I voted for Obama (and would vote for him again simply because of how much crazier the GOP is) but I think Snowden should get Obama's Peace Prize.
So, what you're saying is that when the US government used the CIA to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Guatemala in 1954 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) they did so because if they hadn't helped the United Fruit Company continue to make large profits from a cheap source of bananas it would have lead to the fall of the United States? Or was it because they were concerned that their ideology of democracy might spread across the American continents and corrupt our American way of life? Sounds to me like your willful ignorance of history is making you the bitch in this discussion...
Never mind, the Ars story seams to specifically be dealing with a nutty fringe group in the issue.
Have you actually read up on the issue? They're not protesting the technology, they're protesting the rising rents in the city due to Google (and other big IT company) employees moving in and commuting to their work outside the city. Do you actually understand what the word "Luddite" means?
Really, "Great Firewall of UK" is clumsy and doesn't doesn't make much sense in context. Perhaps we should call it "Hadrian's Firewall"?
How badly things get distorted probably depends on the specific frequencies of light they choose to represent the primary colors; how common those specific frequencies are in nature; and how tightly tuned the silver nanoparticles really are (how much of the light a little above and a little below the target frequency also gets reflected). If they can target the frequencies closely enough and choose shades that aren't quite as common, then the effect might not be very notable. If they can select all three colors with this effect in mind, they might be able to make the effect seem like more of a general slight darkening rather than an odd looking color shift.
Nah, if you're talking about the situation here in the US it seems to me that it's more of a de-developing country...
You haven't heard? A few months ago Larry Ellison had Bjarne Stroustrup kidnapped. He's holding him hostage on his America's Cup boat somewhere in international waters. If ISO and IEC don't do what he says, Struostrup joins Wilson...