Secondly, what if they can pull in materials that are a bitch to find here? It is possible that it might be easier to dump something from orbit rather than try to hunt it down and dig it up on Earth.
My first thought was plutonium.
With the current (Not completely unfounded) fears of launching it from Earth, we have effectively removed one of the two best and only power sources available, not to mention the only power source that works in the outer solar system where the Sun isn't as bright.
Plus Plutonium is pretty rare on earth. Current thought is most of it has sunk deep into the Earths mantle and core billions of years ago. Places humanity won't have the capacity to even reach let alone mine anywhere in the next couple hundred years if that.
Having such a power source available already in orbit ready for refinement would mean an explosion in propulsion technology, space probes, and other powered crafts.
There are other rare and heavy isotopes and atoms that had a similar effect happen on Earth, and would be quite valuable. There are so many reasons why this is a good idea!
The real lesson here is to ignore the naysayers.
<rant> It doesn't surprise me the anti-technology crowd that has taken over the slashdot forums would be against it so ruthlessly. As long as the technology is being developed, these people bitch and moan how unnecessary the tech would be. Yet they are the first to bitch loudest and hardest when they personally can not avail themselves of that same tech once mass manufactured.
"Rawr space technology is such a waste of money! Take that 1% of the federal budget wasted on NASA to give to me!! Oh noz, my doctor just detected I have cancer! Plzplz doctor use that space technology to cure it!"
I just wish these people would totally ignore the science they hate so much and die in their 40s like nature intended, and stop holding the rest of humanity back with them.
How you could possibly interpret that statement as meaning anything other than "we need to negotiate a license" is beyond me
I had that situation at work actually. Probably not the same situation as Google, but the same situation as you point out.
We needed a new Apache server install, more or less dedicated to a web-app and set of server extensions that I didn't want to put on any existing Apache install. While discussing this with a co-worker (who is primarily a windows admin only), he suggested we simply purchase another Windows 2003 server to install as a VM, and put Apache on that.
Instead, I went ahead and installed Debian Linux and apt-get apache2.
After all, why spend $1100 plus CALs to run an open source program, when for $0 I can use an open source OS to run that same open source program?
By your logic, I now owe Microsoft $1100 x3 plus damages for using Linux, because I have an email in my inbox stating we need a windows server license!
I never read any of the "official" (or unofficial) histories but I was wondering; was a nuclear war supposed to have taken place, not between the U.S. and USSR but in Asia? Between India and China perhaps?
Memory Alpha is the closest thing to an official wiki of the star trek universe history.
Basically WW3 was between the USA and the "Eastern Coalition". A small foot note on the Eastern Coalition page states it was: A coalition of nations in the Far East and/or Middle East would seem to be suggested by the name of this combatant. It was later explained by Brannon Braga, in the film's audio commentary, that the ECON was at one time simply "China," but that it was changed in favor of political correctness.
So basically you are correct, it was mainly the USA and China.
So what's the difference between two particles meeting and a single particle by itself? The former is the same as the latter, just double the amount, right?
Wouldn't that be half the amount, not double?
After all if particles = 1 then amount = 1 if particles = 2 then annihilate =1 && amount = 0
Of course zero can't be half of something, and you can't have twice of zero, so now I'm just more confused!
Yeah, but that's a different subject (you did see the forgnost alien story I wrote about how the aliens are looking for life in the goant planets' moons, right? It's mentioned there).
ooo, no I haven't seen or read it, but that sounds up my ally. Was that a posting? Or could you provide a link?
Judge Kozinski has missed the biggest part of this equation: the concept that WE get to choose when we want to be private.
Exactly. The judges logic is akin to saying that since some people enjoy piercing their skin with hooks on ropes and hanging from the ceiling by them, that clearly it must be fine to force that on someone else.
Or on the flip side, he is stating as fact that since most people speed while driving, that speeding must clearly be legal. Since most people do not get punished for speeding, then no one can ever be punished for speeding.
Stupid logic either way you look at it. Further proof that judge, lawyers, and police do NOT live in the real world.
With the exception of TV broadcasts, none of the others you listed have enough power nor are transmitted omni-directionally to make it through our atmosphere. UHF can even bounce off the atmosphere. It all depends on the frequency there.
Sure, we have more TV broadcast, but the largest percentage of even our TV signals comes over a wire. I didn't claim broadcast TV was dead yet or anything, but do you really expect it to survive another hundred years? I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and TV broadcast will never die. I just can't see how when already it's such a tiny minority for communications use compared to the whole, now and in the past. But needlessly broadcasting up is just a waste of power, and we now have the technology to reduce that greatly.
But outside of TV, no. That's just silly.
Our satellites don't broadcast out towards space, they broadcast towards the surface. Same with cellular towers, they broadcast horizontally with nearly no signal going up. Likewise, being directly under a tower or wifi access point you'll note pretty crappy signal strength. This is because the signal starts out horizontally near the antenna, and slowly spreads outward up and down the further away it gets. It's like a doughnut ring shape with the antenna in the hole.
Bluetooth, wifi, even cell phones will at best go a couple miles up and be absorbed in the atmosphere. It takes a relatively large amount of directed power to punch through it and even make it to space.
Plus there's the whole annoying inverse square law. Yea I wish that bastard would leave us alone too.
I still hold that there is a very small amount of signal being 'accidentally' transmitted up with enough power to get through the atmosphere, and of course I already specifically excluded signals we send on purpose. TV was about it, and I'm only sure of that with the old analog TV broadcasts. No idea if they upgraded to newer methods when switching to HD (probably not)
Radio waves aren't going away in any infant alive's lifetime, and never will unless we discover something better.
Yes I admit that prediction is my opinion. But I still do believe there is a very real chance it will not be used for another 100 years. It would need to last for at least then to be "in the middle of this age", and anything less would indeed make us closer to the end than the beginning.
But that's the thing, for quite a large number of purposes we DO have better. Leaving cables and fiber aside, even the method in which we transmit radio is better. No longer do we waste tons of power broadcasting in a sphere from the transmitter, knowing no one directly above or below would need that signal. Instead we can broadcast directionally with a much lower power output for the same range. Alternately the same power output for a much further range.
Of course this falls into the category of "on purpose", but our long-range space probe communications network and ground based transmitters would have the highest chance of being detectable from another star system. Broadcast TV, the next strongest thing sent straight up, will be quite the difficult signal to pick out of the noise much too far away from Earth.
For systems only 100 ly away it would take at least 200 years for a reply and there is no guarantee that they are listening in the microwave or visible spectrum. They may be so advanced that radio or laser communication would be the equivalent of trying to communicate with smoke signals.
If they are that advanced, they should be able to still see "smoke signals" and recognize a pattern in the signal to realize it is not naturally occurring.
In other words, they may no longer use broadcast EM for their own communications, but that has little to nothing to do with looking for signs of life not on your own planet.
If they are looking at all, they will still see and recognize our signal. If they are attempting to be found, there is no reason not to broadcast at the lowest common denominator just to be safe.
All we can hope to do is catch the brief couple centuries where a civilization passes through the radio age and belches out a bunch of EM before switching to something else. Which is exactly what we are trying.
Some might argue that humanity itself is getting near the end of the radio age. We broadcast much less now, and communicate more via light over fiber or EM over a conductive cable. If that trend continues, we will become dark to any other civilization that might be looking. At which time there will only be a ~200 year bubble of EM noise being sent out, and then silence.
However if that does happen, there is no reason to think SETI will give up and shut down. Humanity will still be listening for EM from the stars, even if we no longer use it for our own communications.
So imagine a new rule is passed for a particular road which that states "Only motorized vehicles of car size or larger are permitted"
While the rule of "motorized" is arbitrarily drawn, arguing pluto is still a planet is akin to arguing that your roller skates should be allowed because they both have wheels and the human body is a motor.
You then follow by presenting evidence your roller skates should be labeled a motor vehicle because they are technically more like a jeep, and the line between a jeep and a car is so small as to not be worth mentioning... All the while not realizing the scale of difference between roller skates, and either a car or a jeep.
Two LBX20's and 4 cStreak6's are pretty hefty firepower though. Even for a Clan heavy. Also, 12 tons of ammo? That is enough for 45 turns of non-stop firing, most matches do not even last 16!
I don't think he intended to take that mech into battle. He's probably just upset at the neighbors dog and wanted to teach it a lesson. I have the same instinctive response with cats and areal vehicles for some reason *shrug*
so the FRC employs people to scan shows and find things that they can be offended at, and then provide their membership with a form letter they can use to bombard the latest victim with complaints from people who never watched what they've been told to be offended about.
The best part about their form letters is that after getting and ignoring the first one, it's pretty easy to add a spam filter rule to block literally every last complaint from their members.
They are such a teeny tiny minority, I have a hard time believing a boycott from them would even show up on the quarterly profit reports.
Remember that other than the head person, we are talking about people who have proven they can not think for themselves and have absolutely no will power of their own. Any person having those abilities would not be a participant in the first place, since they can make up their own mind what offends them and what doesn't. If one of these sheep sees an item at the store they want, they will make up any lie to themselves they need to justify the purchase. The others were not going to be customers anyway, so there is really no loss.
It's almost like the threat of all Slashdotters boycotting Sony. We are what, a fraction of a percent of their customers, at best? I just can't see why EA would even take it seriously, let alone respond.
Let them bitch about boycotting their advertizers. They won't remember for long, and will not adjust their purchasing habits one bit anyway.
Not to mention the research on the theory started very long ago.
My personal favorite book on the subject is Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. (The original from 1986 available online.)
The late Robert Bradbury also wrote quite a few related papers with more technical details, such as "Nano assembly of an aircraft carrier", "Planetary Dissembly", and "Molecular Construction Limits"
Exactly how small is possible, and numerous methods to go about it once we are able to construct items that small, and even the planning ahead to prevent the obvious (and not so obvious) disasters related to such technology have already been addressed and answered by many scientists over the last century.
It's not the universities and researchers we need to keep an eye on, they've had their day here. The next major breakthrough will come from the manufacturing sector, and they have quite a ways to go to meet let alone catch up to current theory.
I'll be excited once a similar announcement comes from Intel or IBM or the like, once they have a working prototype.
Funny enough timing wise, just last week at work we had a hardware failure in an old OS/2 computer that controls one of our radial insertion machines on the production line. I too ran into similar issues with replacement hardware.
In my case, the PC has a custom ISA card that acts as a controller to the machine hardware. I found a product called isa2usb from a company called Arstech combined with VirtualBox that did a good job getting that custom controller board working with newer hardware.
VirtualBox has decent support, and the guest tools work great under both warp 4.5 and eComStation. I used Linux underneath VirtualBox just due to licensing, but the isa2usb works under Linux as well as Windows.
You can install the OS/2 drivers for generic vga (gengradd) and sound blaster 16, make a 2gb image file for the HD, and allows for much easier backups of the entire VM instead of worrying about what boot CD of the day will work in under 256mb ram. Just set the VM to auto-start with the host OS and go full screen, and no re-training of employees required.
It might seem like a waste of hardware, but it's still much cheaper than finding a complete replacement solution to remove a perfectly working system out of the mix.
How long was your umbilical cord? You'd be hard pressed to get enough stem cells out of a few vials of blood to build new lungs. The chances are that by the time they can get these stem cells to replicate, they'll understand enough about cell manipulation to grow completely viable stem cells from adult tissue....
Having an equal number of stem cells as there are cells in a lung or two would indeed be difficult. However even in that case, the process used to tell the stem cells to convert into whatever cells has it's own set of problems.
Current state-of-the-art in organ printing only involves a tiny amount of initial stem cells. They use a special solution that becomes the organs scaffolding, to which the stem cells can attach and multiply, giving exponential growth.
A quick google search for "3d organ printing stem cells" turns up a bunch of medical and scientific papers on how far this field is advancing in the past year alone.
Despite the successful organ growth and organ printing that has already been done, it's just not yet ready for mass production.
I have a 2.5 (mine) and a 1.5 year old (foster child) and to me if you would need this I think they would probably have an indication of it before the kid is born
The state of the art in organ printing requires both stem cells and cells from a damaged organ to re-grow. This is insanely useful (or will be soon anyway) for accidental injury later in life as well.
Imagine getting replacement lungs, a new heart, and another kidney or two, all after age 40. Especially so if those replacements are required due to say a horrible car accident or something. Those are still a little bit hard to detect with an ultrasound before birth;}
Imagine where this technology will be 20 years time from now! Common place and more affordable. Much safer than a transplant as far as potential compatibility/rejection, plus not having to deal with the waiting list.
Not to mention the possibilities afforded to you after 80, 90, or 100 years of age, and after an equal number of years of medical advancements.
"I'm sorry sir, your lungs were damaged when you were blind sided by that car. They are filled with inflammatory tissue which is unreversible. We have put you on an organ transplant list, but the wait time is currently 2 years. Would you mind holding your breath for a little bit?"
Compared to
"While your lungs were damaged after you were hit by that car, we do have good news! Using your own stem cells put in storage after your birth, we can grow a new set of lungs for transplant, with zero percent chance of rejection, and we have already started the printing process, with only 2 hours remaining."
This type of thing is already well past the theoretical stages and being used in the lab successfully. That is right now. Adding additional organ types is a matter of details, and improving the speed, accuracy, and cost is just an engineering problem.
With luck similar results will be obtainable from adult stem cells extracted from your body when the time arises, and if so this type of storage may be rendered unneeded. But the technology is just in its infancy right now so it isn't unwise to plan ahead to side-step certain advances being needed, just in case they turn out problematic or out right impossible.
You know how when you build out a storage server with a crap load of hard drives, you generally get one or two extra drives of the same capacity to sit on a shelf as spares? That way when a drive dies you can pop in the spare and let the RAID do its thing without losing data while waiting on a part to be shipped.
Pretty much the same thing. Only this is backup spare components for the human body!
Just like we dread the feeling of placing a hard drive order for your degraded array, only to discover they are permanently out of stock and you need to find a suitable replacement, it would be equally unnerving to find your child has a medical condition that could be fixed if only they had compatible stem cells to use.
Similarly, there has been huge strides in printing organs using a mixture of stem cells, cells from the damaged organ, and other solutions that encourage it all to hold together. A 3D printer of sorts then creates a biological organ pattern with that mixture, and the stem cells end up recreating the original organ. 100% biologically compatible so no chance of rejection, and no need to stress over the news about how long you would be on the organ transplant waiting list. This type of planning ahead would give your child that much more of a head start on the process if they develop problems later in life after this technology matures further.
The first "real-world" tricorder was developed by a Canadian company called the Vital Technologies Corporation in 1996. The scanner was called the TR-107 Mark 1; Vital Technologies sold 10,000 of them before going out of business in 1997. The TR-107 could scan EM radiation, temperature, and barometric pressure.
The second was "wait, there are phones that can be remotely BRICKED? 8-( "
Some carriers load up their own software, such as Verizon. Some also include(d) carrier-IQ in the smartphone, so it is possible to have enabled backdoor functions. Bricking is technically possible, even if they never did it.
Additionally if your phones unique ID was in a "stolen phone" database then it really shouldn't be allowed back on the cellular network. This is just one of those common sense things to expect, it's a bit surprising to find out the police had to request this, let alone had their request denied.
Of course that isn't "bricked", but doesn't appear to be the original request made since they only wanted the phones be banned from the network.
The original article doesn't mention the fact a smartphone can still be used without cellular service. Basically an iPhone becomes an iPod. An Android becomes a.. er, a really tiny tablet? Well, still a useful device!
So there is still some incentive to steal these phones. But if they are banned from cellular service, they would be much less useful and a bit less desirable to steal.
I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun." The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids
Too true. Except unfortunately they will just up the minimum requirement to be 24 years or more worth of education in those 12 years.
At least it will prepare them for corporate life, where HR demands 10 years experience with a software package that has only existed for 4 years before they will hire you.
With any luck, by then they will have expanded the day to have more hours in it, and then the whole cycle can start anew!
In answer, there is nothing special about the atoms in your eyeball that are doing the absorbing of the photon.
Where a single hydrogen atom absorbing the photon simply goes into a higher energy state (aka, it gets warmer), the many many atoms in your eye that form a cone or rod will both get warmer as well as fire off an electrochemical signal.
The photon absorption happens a very very long time before that signal leaves your eye, let alone reaches your brain. Our bodies chemical systems are pretty slow, but even the electrical systems have resistance and signal slower than the speed of light through the atmosphere.
QM states the wave form for that photon is collapsed the moment it gets absorbed by something. Note that if the atom then proceeds to re-emit another photon, the process starts again. However that very act of absorption/reemitting is called a measurement. The photon affects the atom, even if it is nothing more than warming it up.
Consciousness does not even come into play on this scale. Nor is it a word used in the mathematics of QM.
Well, according to the most popular view of QM, a wave function doesn't collapse until an observation is made. So unless there are alien species that live closer to it and watch the skies, it has spent the last 40My in a superposition of "went nova" and "didn't go nova". So in some sense it "happened" just now.
No not quite. The word is "measurement" not "observation". Once the photon gets absorbed by Anything, it has been measured, or as you call it "observed". This can be a spec of dust floating in space, or a bit of rock or gas on a dead world. It could be next to anything that absorbs that photon to collapse its wave, and that something does not need to be alive or conscious or more than just a simple little atom of hydrogen.
Also with relativity you can not use "when something happens" alone as a metric. No such thing exists. The question is "when something happens, from what point of view"
From the stars point of view, yes it happened long ago and our part of the universe is just now being affected by it and seeing it. From our point of view, the light just made it here, so it just happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, what if they can pull in materials that are a bitch to find here? It is possible that it might be easier to dump something from orbit rather than try to hunt it down and dig it up on Earth.
My first thought was plutonium.
With the current (Not completely unfounded) fears of launching it from Earth, we have effectively removed one of the two best and only power sources available, not to mention the only power source that works in the outer solar system where the Sun isn't as bright.
Plus Plutonium is pretty rare on earth. Current thought is most of it has sunk deep into the Earths mantle and core billions of years ago. Places humanity won't have the capacity to even reach let alone mine anywhere in the next couple hundred years if that.
Having such a power source available already in orbit ready for refinement would mean an explosion in propulsion technology, space probes, and other powered crafts.
There are other rare and heavy isotopes and atoms that had a similar effect happen on Earth, and would be quite valuable. There are so many reasons why this is a good idea!
The real lesson here is to ignore the naysayers.
<rant>
It doesn't surprise me the anti-technology crowd that has taken over the slashdot forums would be against it so ruthlessly.
As long as the technology is being developed, these people bitch and moan how unnecessary the tech would be. Yet they are the first to bitch loudest and hardest when they personally can not avail themselves of that same tech once mass manufactured.
"Rawr space technology is such a waste of money! Take that 1% of the federal budget wasted on NASA to give to me!! Oh noz, my doctor just detected I have cancer! Plzplz doctor use that space technology to cure it!"
I just wish these people would totally ignore the science they hate so much and die in their 40s like nature intended, and stop holding the rest of humanity back with them.
Sorry for the </rant>
How you could possibly interpret that statement as meaning anything other than "we need to negotiate a license" is beyond me
I had that situation at work actually. Probably not the same situation as Google, but the same situation as you point out.
We needed a new Apache server install, more or less dedicated to a web-app and set of server extensions that I didn't want to put on any existing Apache install.
While discussing this with a co-worker (who is primarily a windows admin only), he suggested we simply purchase another Windows 2003 server to install as a VM, and put Apache on that.
Instead, I went ahead and installed Debian Linux and apt-get apache2.
After all, why spend $1100 plus CALs to run an open source program, when for $0 I can use an open source OS to run that same open source program?
By your logic, I now owe Microsoft $1100 x3 plus damages for using Linux, because I have an email in my inbox stating we need a windows server license!
I never read any of the "official" (or unofficial) histories but I was wondering; was a nuclear war supposed to have taken place, not between the U.S. and USSR but in Asia? Between India and China perhaps?
Memory Alpha is the closest thing to an official wiki of the star trek universe history.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/WWIII
Basically WW3 was between the USA and the "Eastern Coalition".
A small foot note on the Eastern Coalition page states it was:
A coalition of nations in the Far East and/or Middle East would seem to be suggested by the name of this combatant. It was later explained by Brannon Braga, in the film's audio commentary, that the ECON was at one time simply "China," but that it was changed in favor of political correctness.
So basically you are correct, it was mainly the USA and China.
So what's the difference between two particles meeting and a single particle by itself? The former is the same as the latter, just double the amount, right?
Wouldn't that be half the amount, not double?
After all
if particles = 1 then amount = 1
if particles = 2 then annihilate =1 && amount = 0
Of course zero can't be half of something, and you can't have twice of zero, so now I'm just more confused!
Yeah, but that's a different subject (you did see the forgnost alien story I wrote about how the aliens are looking for life in the goant planets' moons, right? It's mentioned there).
ooo, no I haven't seen or read it, but that sounds up my ally. Was that a posting? Or could you provide a link?
Thanks!
Judge Kozinski has missed the biggest part of this equation: the concept that WE get to choose when we want to be private.
Exactly. The judges logic is akin to saying that since some people enjoy piercing their skin with hooks on ropes and hanging from the ceiling by them, that clearly it must be fine to force that on someone else.
Or on the flip side, he is stating as fact that since most people speed while driving, that speeding must clearly be legal.
Since most people do not get punished for speeding, then no one can ever be punished for speeding.
Stupid logic either way you look at it. Further proof that judge, lawyers, and police do NOT live in the real world.
how do you know all those observers ... are moving at c? that seems like a big assumption to me.
That's the only speed photons CAN move at. At least according to the Relativity 101 quoted by the parent poster...
You apparently didn't think about that very much.
Actually I did. I can explain my thought process.
With the exception of TV broadcasts, none of the others you listed have enough power nor are transmitted omni-directionally to make it through our atmosphere.
UHF can even bounce off the atmosphere. It all depends on the frequency there.
Sure, we have more TV broadcast, but the largest percentage of even our TV signals comes over a wire. I didn't claim broadcast TV was dead yet or anything, but do you really expect it to survive another hundred years?
I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and TV broadcast will never die. I just can't see how when already it's such a tiny minority for communications use compared to the whole, now and in the past.
But needlessly broadcasting up is just a waste of power, and we now have the technology to reduce that greatly.
But outside of TV, no. That's just silly.
Our satellites don't broadcast out towards space, they broadcast towards the surface.
Same with cellular towers, they broadcast horizontally with nearly no signal going up. Likewise, being directly under a tower or wifi access point you'll note pretty crappy signal strength.
This is because the signal starts out horizontally near the antenna, and slowly spreads outward up and down the further away it gets. It's like a doughnut ring shape with the antenna in the hole.
Bluetooth, wifi, even cell phones will at best go a couple miles up and be absorbed in the atmosphere.
It takes a relatively large amount of directed power to punch through it and even make it to space.
Plus there's the whole annoying inverse square law. Yea I wish that bastard would leave us alone too.
I still hold that there is a very small amount of signal being 'accidentally' transmitted up with enough power to get through the atmosphere, and of course I already specifically excluded signals we send on purpose. TV was about it, and I'm only sure of that with the old analog TV broadcasts. No idea if they upgraded to newer methods when switching to HD (probably not)
Radio waves aren't going away in any infant alive's lifetime, and never will unless we discover something better.
Yes I admit that prediction is my opinion. But I still do believe there is a very real chance it will not be used for another 100 years.
It would need to last for at least then to be "in the middle of this age", and anything less would indeed make us closer to the end than the beginning.
But that's the thing, for quite a large number of purposes we DO have better.
Leaving cables and fiber aside, even the method in which we transmit radio is better.
No longer do we waste tons of power broadcasting in a sphere from the transmitter, knowing no one directly above or below would need that signal.
Instead we can broadcast directionally with a much lower power output for the same range. Alternately the same power output for a much further range.
Of course this falls into the category of "on purpose", but our long-range space probe communications network and ground based transmitters would have the highest chance of being detectable from another star system.
Broadcast TV, the next strongest thing sent straight up, will be quite the difficult signal to pick out of the noise much too far away from Earth.
it's einstein's relativity 101. no event appears "simultaneous" to two observers moving at different speeds.
Ok, but we are discussing 10^87 observers that are all moving at the same speed (C)
therefore there is no such thing as the 'beginning of the universe' common to all reference frames.
Therefore if you start with proven incorrect assumptions, you will only get proven incorrect answers.
For systems only 100 ly away it would take at least 200 years for a reply and there is no guarantee that they are listening in the microwave or visible spectrum. They may be so advanced that radio or laser communication would be the equivalent of trying to communicate with smoke signals.
If they are that advanced, they should be able to still see "smoke signals" and recognize a pattern in the signal to realize it is not naturally occurring.
In other words, they may no longer use broadcast EM for their own communications, but that has little to nothing to do with looking for signs of life not on your own planet.
If they are looking at all, they will still see and recognize our signal. If they are attempting to be found, there is no reason not to broadcast at the lowest common denominator just to be safe.
All we can hope to do is catch the brief couple centuries where a civilization passes through the radio age and belches out a bunch of EM before switching to something else. Which is exactly what we are trying.
Some might argue that humanity itself is getting near the end of the radio age.
We broadcast much less now, and communicate more via light over fiber or EM over a conductive cable. If that trend continues, we will become dark to any other civilization that might be looking. At which time there will only be a ~200 year bubble of EM noise being sent out, and then silence.
However if that does happen, there is no reason to think SETI will give up and shut down. Humanity will still be listening for EM from the stars, even if we no longer use it for our own communications.
Yeay, it's car analogy time!
So imagine a new rule is passed for a particular road which that states "Only motorized vehicles of car size or larger are permitted"
While the rule of "motorized" is arbitrarily drawn, arguing pluto is still a planet is akin to arguing that your roller skates should be allowed because they both have wheels and the human body is a motor.
You then follow by presenting evidence your roller skates should be labeled a motor vehicle because they are technically more like a jeep, and the line between a jeep and a car is so small as to not be worth mentioning... All the while not realizing the scale of difference between roller skates, and either a car or a jeep.
I'll be worried when ... the last part of the course is 'how to love' and 'question whether or not the unit has a soul'.
Installation of a soul is trivially easy, but the licensing costs are outrageous!
Two LBX20's and 4 cStreak6's are pretty hefty firepower though. Even for a Clan heavy. Also, 12 tons of ammo? That is enough for 45 turns of non-stop firing, most matches do not even last 16!
I don't think he intended to take that mech into battle. He's probably just upset at the neighbors dog and wanted to teach it a lesson. I have the same instinctive response with cats and areal vehicles for some reason *shrug*
The "outrage" was expressed in:
Why don't we just buy locked-down graphical terminals with no local storage and hurry up on our way to giving all our data up to "the cloud".
And which said outrage is being posted to a website using a web browser that is stored on a server not local to you...
The irony, it drips with it!
so the FRC employs people to scan shows and find things that they can be offended at, and then provide their membership with a form letter they can use to bombard the latest victim with complaints from people who never watched what they've been told to be offended about.
The best part about their form letters is that after getting and ignoring the first one, it's pretty easy to add a spam filter rule to block literally every last complaint from their members.
They are such a teeny tiny minority, I have a hard time believing a boycott from them would even show up on the quarterly profit reports.
Remember that other than the head person, we are talking about people who have proven they can not think for themselves and have absolutely no will power of their own. Any person having those abilities would not be a participant in the first place, since they can make up their own mind what offends them and what doesn't.
If one of these sheep sees an item at the store they want, they will make up any lie to themselves they need to justify the purchase. The others were not going to be customers anyway, so there is really no loss.
It's almost like the threat of all Slashdotters boycotting Sony. We are what, a fraction of a percent of their customers, at best?
I just can't see why EA would even take it seriously, let alone respond.
Let them bitch about boycotting their advertizers. They won't remember for long, and will not adjust their purchasing habits one bit anyway.
Not to mention the research on the theory started very long ago.
My personal favorite book on the subject is Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler.
(The original from 1986 available online.)
The late Robert Bradbury also wrote quite a few related papers with more technical details, such as "Nano assembly of an aircraft carrier", "Planetary Dissembly", and "Molecular Construction Limits"
Exactly how small is possible, and numerous methods to go about it once we are able to construct items that small, and even the planning ahead to prevent the obvious (and not so obvious) disasters related to such technology have already been addressed and answered by many scientists over the last century.
It's not the universities and researchers we need to keep an eye on, they've had their day here. The next major breakthrough will come from the manufacturing sector, and they have quite a ways to go to meet let alone catch up to current theory.
I'll be excited once a similar announcement comes from Intel or IBM or the like, once they have a working prototype.
Funny enough timing wise, just last week at work we had a hardware failure in an old OS/2 computer that controls one of our radial insertion machines on the production line. I too ran into similar issues with replacement hardware.
In my case, the PC has a custom ISA card that acts as a controller to the machine hardware.
I found a product called isa2usb from a company called Arstech combined with VirtualBox that did a good job getting that custom controller board working with newer hardware.
VirtualBox has decent support, and the guest tools work great under both warp 4.5 and eComStation.
I used Linux underneath VirtualBox just due to licensing, but the isa2usb works under Linux as well as Windows.
You can install the OS/2 drivers for generic vga (gengradd) and sound blaster 16, make a 2gb image file for the HD, and allows for much easier backups of the entire VM instead of worrying about what boot CD of the day will work in under 256mb ram.
Just set the VM to auto-start with the host OS and go full screen, and no re-training of employees required.
It might seem like a waste of hardware, but it's still much cheaper than finding a complete replacement solution to remove a perfectly working system out of the mix.
Might be something worth looking into.
How long was your umbilical cord? You'd be hard pressed to get enough stem cells out of a few vials of blood to build new lungs. The chances are that by the time they can get these stem cells to replicate, they'll understand enough about cell manipulation to grow completely viable stem cells from adult tissue....
Having an equal number of stem cells as there are cells in a lung or two would indeed be difficult. However even in that case, the process used to tell the stem cells to convert into whatever cells has it's own set of problems.
Current state-of-the-art in organ printing only involves a tiny amount of initial stem cells. They use a special solution that becomes the organs scaffolding, to which the stem cells can attach and multiply, giving exponential growth.
Here is an interesting article on the topic that seems to have been posted just today.
http://www.tech-faq.com/organ-growing.html
A quick google search for "3d organ printing stem cells" turns up a bunch of medical and scientific papers on how far this field is advancing in the past year alone.
Despite the successful organ growth and organ printing that has already been done, it's just not yet ready for mass production.
I have a 2.5 (mine) and a 1.5 year old (foster child) and to me if you would need this I think they would probably have an indication of it before the kid is born
The state of the art in organ printing requires both stem cells and cells from a damaged organ to re-grow. This is insanely useful (or will be soon anyway) for accidental injury later in life as well.
Imagine getting replacement lungs, a new heart, and another kidney or two, all after age 40. ;}
Especially so if those replacements are required due to say a horrible car accident or something. Those are still a little bit hard to detect with an ultrasound before birth
Imagine where this technology will be 20 years time from now! Common place and more affordable. Much safer than a transplant as far as potential compatibility/rejection, plus not having to deal with the waiting list.
Not to mention the possibilities afforded to you after 80, 90, or 100 years of age, and after an equal number of years of medical advancements.
"I'm sorry sir, your lungs were damaged when you were blind sided by that car. They are filled with inflammatory tissue which is unreversible. We have put you on an organ transplant list, but the wait time is currently 2 years. Would you mind holding your breath for a little bit?"
Compared to
"While your lungs were damaged after you were hit by that car, we do have good news! Using your own stem cells put in storage after your birth, we can grow a new set of lungs for transplant, with zero percent chance of rejection, and we have already started the printing process, with only 2 hours remaining."
This type of thing is already well past the theoretical stages and being used in the lab successfully. That is right now. Adding additional organ types is a matter of details, and improving the speed, accuracy, and cost is just an engineering problem.
With luck similar results will be obtainable from adult stem cells extracted from your body when the time arises, and if so this type of storage may be rendered unneeded. But the technology is just in its infancy right now so it isn't unwise to plan ahead to side-step certain advances being needed, just in case they turn out problematic or out right impossible.
You know how when you build out a storage server with a crap load of hard drives, you generally get one or two extra drives of the same capacity to sit on a shelf as spares? That way when a drive dies you can pop in the spare and let the RAID do its thing without losing data while waiting on a part to be shipped.
Pretty much the same thing. Only this is backup spare components for the human body!
Just like we dread the feeling of placing a hard drive order for your degraded array, only to discover they are permanently out of stock and you need to find a suitable replacement, it would be equally unnerving to find your child has a medical condition that could be fixed if only they had compatible stem cells to use.
Similarly, there has been huge strides in printing organs using a mixture of stem cells, cells from the damaged organ, and other solutions that encourage it all to hold together. A 3D printer of sorts then creates a biological organ pattern with that mixture, and the stem cells end up recreating the original organ. 100% biologically compatible so no chance of rejection, and no need to stress over the news about how long you would be on the organ transplant waiting list.
This type of planning ahead would give your child that much more of a head start on the process if they develop problems later in life after this technology matures further.
It's the gift to your child that keeps on giving!
The first "real-world" tricorder was developed by a Canadian company called the Vital Technologies Corporation in 1996. The scanner was called the TR-107 Mark 1; Vital Technologies sold 10,000 of them before going out of business in 1997. The TR-107 could scan EM radiation, temperature, and barometric pressure.
http://treknostalgia.blogspot.com/2009/04/trek-tech-tricorder-mark-1.html
More detailed description plus larger pictures of the device, even the back of the box.
Sure looks like one expensive but awesome toy!
The second was "wait, there are phones that can be remotely BRICKED? 8-( "
Some carriers load up their own software, such as Verizon. Some also include(d) carrier-IQ in the smartphone, so it is possible to have enabled backdoor functions. Bricking is technically possible, even if they never did it.
Additionally if your phones unique ID was in a "stolen phone" database then it really shouldn't be allowed back on the cellular network. This is just one of those common sense things to expect, it's a bit surprising to find out the police had to request this, let alone had their request denied.
Of course that isn't "bricked", but doesn't appear to be the original request made since they only wanted the phones be banned from the network.
The original article doesn't mention the fact a smartphone can still be used without cellular service. Basically an iPhone becomes an iPod. An Android becomes a.. er, a really tiny tablet? Well, still a useful device!
So there is still some incentive to steal these phones.
But if they are banned from cellular service, they would be much less useful and a bit less desirable to steal.
I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun."
The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids
Too true. Except unfortunately they will just up the minimum requirement to be 24 years or more worth of education in those 12 years.
At least it will prepare them for corporate life, where HR demands 10 years experience with a software package that has only existed for 4 years before they will hire you.
With any luck, by then they will have expanded the day to have more hours in it, and then the whole cycle can start anew!
In answer, there is nothing special about the atoms in your eyeball that are doing the absorbing of the photon.
Where a single hydrogen atom absorbing the photon simply goes into a higher energy state (aka, it gets warmer), the many many atoms in your eye that form a cone or rod will both get warmer as well as fire off an electrochemical signal.
The photon absorption happens a very very long time before that signal leaves your eye, let alone reaches your brain.
Our bodies chemical systems are pretty slow, but even the electrical systems have resistance and signal slower than the speed of light through the atmosphere.
QM states the wave form for that photon is collapsed the moment it gets absorbed by something.
Note that if the atom then proceeds to re-emit another photon, the process starts again. However that very act of absorption/reemitting is called a measurement. The photon affects the atom, even if it is nothing more than warming it up.
Consciousness does not even come into play on this scale. Nor is it a word used in the mathematics of QM.
Well, according to the most popular view of QM, a wave function doesn't collapse until an observation is made. So unless there are alien species that live closer to it and watch the skies, it has spent the last 40My in a superposition of "went nova" and "didn't go nova". So in some sense it "happened" just now.
No not quite. The word is "measurement" not "observation".
Once the photon gets absorbed by Anything, it has been measured, or as you call it "observed". This can be a spec of dust floating in space, or a bit of rock or gas on a dead world. It could be next to anything that absorbs that photon to collapse its wave, and that something does not need to be alive or conscious or more than just a simple little atom of hydrogen.
Also with relativity you can not use "when something happens" alone as a metric. No such thing exists. The question is "when something happens, from what point of view"
From the stars point of view, yes it happened long ago and our part of the universe is just now being affected by it and seeing it.
From our point of view, the light just made it here, so it just happened.