It doesn't even come close to making the whole. Consider the time and effort involved. And the risk that even if you have a solid claim, a court may find the other way.
The DMCA is a good argument for burning down the entire copyright system. Sony Bono was bad enough, but the DMCA is so bad that I can't see any possible redemption except tossing it our and starting over with, say, the copyright laws existing in 1800.
Well, actually while a false claim can be enforced, the defense is "I believed I (or my client) owned the copyright", and lawyers are allowed to believe their clients. Even ones that repeatedly lie to them. So basically the false claims punishment only applies to those who don't have a lawyer on the pad.
So you're claiming that Leonardo da Vinci didn't have patrons? Because the people giving him money certainly expected results. So did those who paid Michaelangelo.
I think your idea of what a patron expects is a bit shaped by fanciful fiction.
They aren't identical. Look into how bacteria reproduce, and their rate of copying errors. It's like killing yourself so several of your third cousins will have a more successful life. Or possibly fourth cousins.
That said, it's true that the "cat lady" creation benefits the bacteria that are hosted in the cat, and they are loosely related to the bacteria that cause the benefit, but that's not the kind of thing evolution favors very strongly. What's more likely is that there's a foolish action as a result of infection that both people and mice have. With mice it makes it more likely to be eaten by a cat (which is what gets evolved) and with humans it's gets the more likely to keep multiple cats, with is the serendipitous event. And probably the change is to find the smell of cats more attractive. This directly benefits the bacteria that infect mice, and if it affects humans similarly (probable, but not, as far as I've seen, proven) this would be a side benefit, which the bacteria causing the benefit could not benefit from, and therefore would find it not evolutionarily advantageous...but not disadvantageous either. Besides which they're in a dead end and can't reproduce, so they can't evolve away from the action. This kind of thing happens in many instances. Look into the lives of fig wasps (i.e., the ones that pollinate figs, and are excluded from the US by the department of agriculture [well, at least as of a couple of decades ago...I haven't checked recently]).
The harder problem is that those charged with implementing an improved system have minimal reason to design a system that the end-user would consider improved. Fix that and over time the system would repair itself. Don't fix that, and no change is going to make things better.
But should a VOIP system be able to set its own caller ID? That's a clear invitation to fraud. Perhaps the system needs to be modified to allow setting a "call back" ID while not allowing the caller ID to be hidden.
While that's malfeasance and corruption, it's not treason. The US constitution specifically defines what treason is, and that's not it. It's only two or three major felonies.
No. It would be fair to call it a mouse parasite, because the mouse is a part of the natural life cycle, but instances of T.gondii that end up infecting people are dead ended (unless the person is eaten by a leopard or some other cat). So while lots of humans are infected, and their behavior probably altered, it only indirectly affects any T.gondii, and doesn't benefit those that are infecting the person.
T.gondii needs to be eaten by some kind of cat or other to complete its life cycle. (So calling is a mouse parasite, while reasonable, is less valid than calling it a cat parasite.)
While most of your facts are correct, your chain of reasoning fails. But it doesn't require a diatribe, and the average heath of USians isn't quite relevant, as that's more related to the obscene travesty of a health-care system.
What's significant is that the US system is rigged to favor corporate interests over any others (including national interest). Therefore US regulations and approvals of foods should be expected to favor the interests of the corporations over those of the consumers. Multiple examples of this in practice are easy to uncover. Look into the history of the "food pyramid", e.g.
So you can't trust US approval to mean that a food is safe. It may be, but you need to rely on multiple other sources.
That said, even were it totally demonstrated to be safe I'd be opposed to genetically modified foods because of the implementation of the patent law, and various unmitigated abuses of it.
You're assuming that everyone's opposition to genetically modified foods is based in science. If it's based in something else, then their ignorance of the science is irrelevant.
E.g.: My opposition to genetically modified foods is based around patent law and biased food safety regulations/regulators. I do happen to have a reasonably good understanding of genetics, but that's almost irrelevant to my opposition. (It's relevant to certain corner cases, so I can't say actually irrelevant. E.g. the spread of BT infusing genes into the weed gene pool is likely related to the decline in butterflies and many other insects, though I wouldn't call it a major cause without a study.) So I'm not intrinsically against genetically modified foods, but I'm strongly against the existing implementation. (As a related fact, I don't use either MS software or Apple software because I won't agree to their EULAs.)
Whether it's a different problem or a part of the same problem depends on how you frame the problem. If you frame it as "People believing fakes and frauds rather than actual experts in the field" then it's the same problem. I.e. people are afraid that their kids aren't being treated correctly, so they get worried and look for an answer outside of the officially correct channels. If the officially correct channels lied less often this would be more unreasonable.
The lady I saw using it wasn't living off the grid. She just wanted to weld plastic where there was sun, but no source of electricity. She wasn't using it as a replacement for grid electricity, but as a specific source for a specific project in a specific place. (OTOH, to justify the investment, she must do it fairly often.)
Like I said, concentrators are usually oversold. But they do have some used.
Well, I believe I started with "a space adapted civilization". I was thinking of just about all the time being spent between systems, with only very rarely getting in closer than the heliopause, and only for special purposes.
It's 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, and if you're going less 0.1c, then you'd be over 40 years enroute. And that sounds a lot faster than is safe to me. I was thinking of something closer to 0.001c, although relative to what is a bit of a question. So say 1000 km/hr faster (or slower) than the average velocity of the 50 closest objects large enough to show up on a highly tuned radar. Because if you're 400 years enroute nobody is going to think of a planet as home. Besides, you wouldn't be able to live there. If life isn't present, then the atmosphere won't be breathable, and if life sufficiently similar to ours that the atmosphere is breathable, then you won't be able to breathe it because of a massive allergic reaction. So you'd be living in an artificial habitat until you'd terraformed the planet in any case, and once we know how to do that it won't be a short term project. By the time you finish nobody will remember why you bothered.
So you'd have two groups of folks: Those living in habitats within a solar system and those living in habitats outside all solar systems...and all the ones living within solar systems would be descended from those living outside and wandering about.
Don't worry. As one antibiotic after another is rendered useless by overuse, we'll be back in a situation similar to the in a few decades.
Well, that is a worst case projection...no, a worst case projection has it next year, but that one's really unlikely. But the best case of we keep coming up with working antibiotics that don't have horrendous side effects, isn't very likely either.
To me this seems like overreacting, as measles did me no permanent harm. My ancestors were exposed to measles from way back. Other groups of people have found it fatal. Even in my group (North-Western Europeans) measles has been associated with massive increases in still-births and deformed births. And I'm not sure just how non-fatal it was. That I lived through it and my ancestors did, doesn't say how many didn't, even as recently as one generation back.
I suspect what should be done is strict quarantine with strong enforcement and forbidding any non-vaccinated child from going to school. But perhaps the governor didn't have an option to do that, and *could* declare a state of emergency.
In Southern California, where there's a lot of air conditioner use, and in the northern central valley (ditto), it does make a lot of sense. The heavy use and the heavy generation happen at the same time. Along the coast, where air conditioner use is minor, it's a lot more problematical, as heavy use tends to happen around 5-7PM, when the sun's not helping much. If the grid couldn't port the electricity generated in midday from the coast inland and to the South, photoelectric would be a horrendous problem. But even as it is, there's a huge requirement for storage and supplemental generation...which means CO2 or nuclear. (There's a small bit of geothermal electricity, but that's a trickle. There's also some wind, which is unpredictably variable.) Now backup generators take some time to come on-line, but the time requirements vary with the kind of generator. IIRC there's a kind of gas powered thermomagnetic generator that's nearly instantaneous...but I've never heard of a large one. So you need to have your backup power running already when you THINK you're going to need it.
I'm no specialist in this area, so I'm sure I left out a lot. But it's not a simple problem, and a few years ago (a decade?) I heard that when alternative power sources (i.e., those not controlled by the utility) get above 10% or 15% the grid becomes unstable. IIRC, this included all wind generators even if the utility owned them, because they could shut down generation unexpectedly.
P.S.: Please note that those who decide to go off the grid need to budget for a large oversupply of battery storage, or to accept that their power will go off occasionally. (With, of course, trade-off positions in intermediate positions with degrees of investment in generation and storage.)
You're under-rating concentrators...but not as much as some people overrate them. I've seen someone set up on the sidewalk using a concentrator to weld plastic. So they can be used and be useful. But she had to move as the sun moved. Inconvenient, at best.
I think concentrators could be quite useful in places where there's a lot of unshaded space to do something requiring focused moderate heat with someone already present to do the stuff...because someone's going to need to adjust the angles every so often.
Now that's a very limited use case, but it's a real one. Whether they're the best choice in even that circumstance may be dubious, but they don't require any external power, so perhaps.
There's no intention of getting the speed up to even a reasonable fraction of the speed of light. You need to be going at about the speed of the drift to harvest it, and to avoid being hit by stuff. But you need to be going at a slightly different speed in order to continually encounter new resources. We don't really know just how sparse resources are between Oort clouds. We know how much gas is there, but condensed matter is a lot harder to detect. My guess is towards the high end of what's reasonable, as I'm assuming that the "smaller is more common" trend seen in stars and asteroids, etc., is consistent in the areas where we can't detect it.
P.S.: This assumption means that fast interstellar journeys are beyond any simple projection from current state of the art. You'd be shot down by a meteor the size of a pea moving at, say, 10% the speed of light. Or you'd be sandblasted by dust at a similar speed. When you're moving fast you need a really clear trajectory. Go any faster and even gas becomes a problem. It may be a vacuum to you, but when you're moving at 25% the speed of light relative to it, it's sandblasted by a proton beam and irradiated by a neutron beam to you. (I may have the energies of that last one a bit off. But if you hit an atom of gas at 25% of light speed, it's not going to bounce off. It will, at minimum, eat away your ships crystal structure faster than an acid bath.)
That's why hyperspace, etc., is so popular. Anyone who seriously things about fast transit soon realized how unreasonable it is. Hyperspace is, comparatively, reasonable.
Well, I'm supposing that the habitats would be rebuild occasionally, and even duplicated when a rich area of resources was located. With fusion power the problems are sociology and a nearly closed ecology. If fusion power is impossible, or impractical, that doing it with fission power is a lot iffier...but might be possible. It depends on how much fissionable ore is carried by bodies out beyond the Oort. (But you still need to handle the problems of sociology and nearly closed ecology.)
Also, I'm not thinking of ramscoop, or anything similar. More like whaleboats. They'd actually need to go out and pick up the pieces. And be mobile enough to head in the direction where resources are thick enough...but that's not a very hard requirement. I suspect that even a modern ion rocket could do the job...well, a bank of them. And much of the time they'd just drift.
P.S.: This actually requires minor advances in a whole bunch of fields, including AI, but most of the requirements are trivial extensions of modern state of the art. And I'm not thinking of small habitats. More something the size of a medium sized town, say 200,000 people.
P.P.S: The real problem is coming up with a justification to get started. Economics doesn't look promising. Religious or political differences seems more likely. But don't expect the space habitat to be libertarian. Libertarianism will probably need to be restricted to virtual reality, where it can't damage the vehicle.
The thing is, we don't know that any of those is crucial. Or whether it's all of them. And most of them are of uncertain frequency. Which makes computing probability guesswork.
One is all we're certain of, but it could be as high as 1 in every 500 stars and we'd never know...without going to look.
No. The distances are long if you have a destination in mind. They aren't long if you're a space adapted civilization, that does its living in space. The question is, are there enough wandering planets/asteroids/comets/whatever-you-want-to-call-it to keep the wanderers in resources. With fusion power and slow travel speeds (just a bit above the speed of the drift) I think it's probable. It might even be possible with fission power.
OTOH, this requires a sociology far in advance of our current level. Probably one that would think of our current sociology as we think of astrology (or if you like astrology, alchemy...but I have a soft spot for alchemy).
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't even come close to making the whole. Consider the time and effort involved. And the risk that even if you have a solid claim, a court may find the other way.
The DMCA is a good argument for burning down the entire copyright system. Sony Bono was bad enough, but the DMCA is so bad that I can't see any possible redemption except tossing it our and starting over with, say, the copyright laws existing in 1800.
Well, actually while a false claim can be enforced, the defense is "I believed I (or my client) owned the copyright", and lawyers are allowed to believe their clients. Even ones that repeatedly lie to them. So basically the false claims punishment only applies to those who don't have a lawyer on the pad.
So you're claiming that Leonardo da Vinci didn't have patrons? Because the people giving him money certainly expected results. So did those who paid Michaelangelo.
I think your idea of what a patron expects is a bit shaped by fanciful fiction.
They aren't identical. Look into how bacteria reproduce, and their rate of copying errors. It's like killing yourself so several of your third cousins will have a more successful life. Or possibly fourth cousins.
That said, it's true that the "cat lady" creation benefits the bacteria that are hosted in the cat, and they are loosely related to the bacteria that cause the benefit, but that's not the kind of thing evolution favors very strongly. What's more likely is that there's a foolish action as a result of infection that both people and mice have. With mice it makes it more likely to be eaten by a cat (which is what gets evolved) and with humans it's gets the more likely to keep multiple cats, with is the serendipitous event. And probably the change is to find the smell of cats more attractive. This directly benefits the bacteria that infect mice, and if it affects humans similarly (probable, but not, as far as I've seen, proven) this would be a side benefit, which the bacteria causing the benefit could not benefit from, and therefore would find it not evolutionarily advantageous...but not disadvantageous either. Besides which they're in a dead end and can't reproduce, so they can't evolve away from the action. This kind of thing happens in many instances. Look into the lives of fig wasps (i.e., the ones that pollinate figs, and are excluded from the US by the department of agriculture [well, at least as of a couple of decades ago...I haven't checked recently]).
If it's a part of an agreed standard, there can be a standard "quick key" to do the callback. That gets around, or at least alleviates, that problem.
There isn't one, because the system designers have not motive to build one, not because it's difficult.
The harder problem is that those charged with implementing an improved system have minimal reason to design a system that the end-user would consider improved. Fix that and over time the system would repair itself. Don't fix that, and no change is going to make things better.
But should a VOIP system be able to set its own caller ID? That's a clear invitation to fraud. Perhaps the system needs to be modified to allow setting a "call back" ID while not allowing the caller ID to be hidden.
While that's malfeasance and corruption, it's not treason. The US constitution specifically defines what treason is, and that's not it. It's only two or three major felonies.
No. It would be fair to call it a mouse parasite, because the mouse is a part of the natural life cycle, but instances of T.gondii that end up infecting people are dead ended (unless the person is eaten by a leopard or some other cat). So while lots of humans are infected, and their behavior probably altered, it only indirectly affects any T.gondii, and doesn't benefit those that are infecting the person.
T.gondii needs to be eaten by some kind of cat or other to complete its life cycle. (So calling is a mouse parasite, while reasonable, is less valid than calling it a cat parasite.)
While most of your facts are correct, your chain of reasoning fails. But it doesn't require a diatribe, and the average heath of USians isn't quite relevant, as that's more related to the obscene travesty of a health-care system.
What's significant is that the US system is rigged to favor corporate interests over any others (including national interest). Therefore US regulations and approvals of foods should be expected to favor the interests of the corporations over those of the consumers. Multiple examples of this in practice are easy to uncover. Look into the history of the "food pyramid", e.g.
So you can't trust US approval to mean that a food is safe. It may be, but you need to rely on multiple other sources.
That said, even were it totally demonstrated to be safe I'd be opposed to genetically modified foods because of the implementation of the patent law, and various unmitigated abuses of it.
You're assuming that everyone's opposition to genetically modified foods is based in science. If it's based in something else, then their ignorance of the science is irrelevant.
E.g.: My opposition to genetically modified foods is based around patent law and biased food safety regulations/regulators. I do happen to have a reasonably good understanding of genetics, but that's almost irrelevant to my opposition. (It's relevant to certain corner cases, so I can't say actually irrelevant. E.g. the spread of BT infusing genes into the weed gene pool is likely related to the decline in butterflies and many other insects, though I wouldn't call it a major cause without a study.) So I'm not intrinsically against genetically modified foods, but I'm strongly against the existing implementation. (As a related fact, I don't use either MS software or Apple software because I won't agree to their EULAs.)
Whether it's a different problem or a part of the same problem depends on how you frame the problem. If you frame it as "People believing fakes and frauds rather than actual experts in the field" then it's the same problem. I.e. people are afraid that their kids aren't being treated correctly, so they get worried and look for an answer outside of the officially correct channels. If the officially correct channels lied less often this would be more unreasonable.
The lady I saw using it wasn't living off the grid. She just wanted to weld plastic where there was sun, but no source of electricity. She wasn't using it as a replacement for grid electricity, but as a specific source for a specific project in a specific place. (OTOH, to justify the investment, she must do it fairly often.)
Like I said, concentrators are usually oversold. But they do have some used.
Well, I believe I started with "a space adapted civilization". I was thinking of just about all the time being spent between systems, with only very rarely getting in closer than the heliopause, and only for special purposes.
It's 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, and if you're going less 0.1c, then you'd be over 40 years enroute. And that sounds a lot faster than is safe to me. I was thinking of something closer to 0.001c, although relative to what is a bit of a question. So say 1000 km/hr faster (or slower) than the average velocity of the 50 closest objects large enough to show up on a highly tuned radar. Because if you're 400 years enroute nobody is going to think of a planet as home. Besides, you wouldn't be able to live there. If life isn't present, then the atmosphere won't be breathable, and if life sufficiently similar to ours that the atmosphere is breathable, then you won't be able to breathe it because of a massive allergic reaction. So you'd be living in an artificial habitat until you'd terraformed the planet in any case, and once we know how to do that it won't be a short term project. By the time you finish nobody will remember why you bothered.
So you'd have two groups of folks: Those living in habitats within a solar system and those living in habitats outside all solar systems...and all the ones living within solar systems would be descended from those living outside and wandering about.
Don't worry. As one antibiotic after another is rendered useless by overuse, we'll be back in a situation similar to the in a few decades.
Well, that is a worst case projection...no, a worst case projection has it next year, but that one's really unlikely. But the best case of we keep coming up with working antibiotics that don't have horrendous side effects, isn't very likely either.
To me this seems like overreacting, as measles did me no permanent harm. My ancestors were exposed to measles from way back. Other groups of people have found it fatal. Even in my group (North-Western Europeans) measles has been associated with massive increases in still-births and deformed births. And I'm not sure just how non-fatal it was. That I lived through it and my ancestors did, doesn't say how many didn't, even as recently as one generation back.
I suspect what should be done is strict quarantine with strong enforcement and forbidding any non-vaccinated child from going to school. But perhaps the governor didn't have an option to do that, and *could* declare a state of emergency.
IIRC, the last time I investigated solar most of the cost was installation, not materials.
Where do they get their chips, though? I thought all the foundries moved overseas.
In Southern California, where there's a lot of air conditioner use, and in the northern central valley (ditto), it does make a lot of sense. The heavy use and the heavy generation happen at the same time. Along the coast, where air conditioner use is minor, it's a lot more problematical, as heavy use tends to happen around 5-7PM, when the sun's not helping much. If the grid couldn't port the electricity generated in midday from the coast inland and to the South, photoelectric would be a horrendous problem. But even as it is, there's a huge requirement for storage and supplemental generation...which means CO2 or nuclear. (There's a small bit of geothermal electricity, but that's a trickle. There's also some wind, which is unpredictably variable.) Now backup generators take some time to come on-line, but the time requirements vary with the kind of generator. IIRC there's a kind of gas powered thermomagnetic generator that's nearly instantaneous...but I've never heard of a large one. So you need to have your backup power running already when you THINK you're going to need it.
I'm no specialist in this area, so I'm sure I left out a lot. But it's not a simple problem, and a few years ago (a decade?) I heard that when alternative power sources (i.e., those not controlled by the utility) get above 10% or 15% the grid becomes unstable. IIRC, this included all wind generators even if the utility owned them, because they could shut down generation unexpectedly.
P.S.: Please note that those who decide to go off the grid need to budget for a large oversupply of battery storage, or to accept that their power will go off occasionally. (With, of course, trade-off positions in intermediate positions with degrees of investment in generation and storage.)
You're under-rating concentrators...but not as much as some people overrate them. I've seen someone set up on the sidewalk using a concentrator to weld plastic. So they can be used and be useful. But she had to move as the sun moved. Inconvenient, at best.
I think concentrators could be quite useful in places where there's a lot of unshaded space to do something requiring focused moderate heat with someone already present to do the stuff...because someone's going to need to adjust the angles every so often.
Now that's a very limited use case, but it's a real one. Whether they're the best choice in even that circumstance may be dubious, but they don't require any external power, so perhaps.
There's no intention of getting the speed up to even a reasonable fraction of the speed of light. You need to be going at about the speed of the drift to harvest it, and to avoid being hit by stuff. But you need to be going at a slightly different speed in order to continually encounter new resources. We don't really know just how sparse resources are between Oort clouds. We know how much gas is there, but condensed matter is a lot harder to detect. My guess is towards the high end of what's reasonable, as I'm assuming that the "smaller is more common" trend seen in stars and asteroids, etc., is consistent in the areas where we can't detect it.
P.S.: This assumption means that fast interstellar journeys are beyond any simple projection from current state of the art. You'd be shot down by a meteor the size of a pea moving at, say, 10% the speed of light. Or you'd be sandblasted by dust at a similar speed. When you're moving fast you need a really clear trajectory. Go any faster and even gas becomes a problem. It may be a vacuum to you, but when you're moving at 25% the speed of light relative to it, it's sandblasted by a proton beam and irradiated by a neutron beam to you. (I may have the energies of that last one a bit off. But if you hit an atom of gas at 25% of light speed, it's not going to bounce off. It will, at minimum, eat away your ships crystal structure faster than an acid bath.)
That's why hyperspace, etc., is so popular. Anyone who seriously things about fast transit soon realized how unreasonable it is. Hyperspace is, comparatively, reasonable.
Well, I'm supposing that the habitats would be rebuild occasionally, and even duplicated when a rich area of resources was located. With fusion power the problems are sociology and a nearly closed ecology. If fusion power is impossible, or impractical, that doing it with fission power is a lot iffier...but might be possible. It depends on how much fissionable ore is carried by bodies out beyond the Oort. (But you still need to handle the problems of sociology and nearly closed ecology.)
Also, I'm not thinking of ramscoop, or anything similar. More like whaleboats. They'd actually need to go out and pick up the pieces. And be mobile enough to head in the direction where resources are thick enough...but that's not a very hard requirement. I suspect that even a modern ion rocket could do the job...well, a bank of them. And much of the time they'd just drift.
P.S.: This actually requires minor advances in a whole bunch of fields, including AI, but most of the requirements are trivial extensions of modern state of the art. And I'm not thinking of small habitats. More something the size of a medium sized town, say 200,000 people.
P.P.S: The real problem is coming up with a justification to get started. Economics doesn't look promising. Religious or political differences seems more likely. But don't expect the space habitat to be libertarian. Libertarianism will probably need to be restricted to virtual reality, where it can't damage the vehicle.
Shimbo?
(ref.: Zelazny, Isle of the Dead)
The thing is, we don't know that any of those is crucial. Or whether it's all of them. And most of them are of uncertain frequency. Which makes computing probability guesswork.
One is all we're certain of, but it could be as high as 1 in every 500 stars and we'd never know...without going to look.
No. The distances are long if you have a destination in mind. They aren't long if you're a space adapted civilization, that does its living in space. The question is, are there enough wandering planets/asteroids/comets/whatever-you-want-to-call-it to keep the wanderers in resources. With fusion power and slow travel speeds (just a bit above the speed of the drift) I think it's probable. It might even be possible with fission power.
OTOH, this requires a sociology far in advance of our current level. Probably one that would think of our current sociology as we think of astrology (or if you like astrology, alchemy...but I have a soft spot for alchemy).