It saddens me when I hear this. Especially when I think of my 8 year old son. He can't be getting so old that I need to start rehearsing my "birds and the bees" speech! It can't be! It's not possible! Noooooooooo!
Luckily, he's a lot like me so that should buy me some additional time.
I think a better option than Mars is the Moon. Let's face it, we haven't gone anywhere beyond Low Earth Orbit for quite awhile. There are going to be glitches. It'd be much better to work some of those glitches out during a Moon mission than during a months-long Mars mission. Want to try an extended trip? Make a Moon landing last for 2 weeks. Figure out how to house, feed, protect the astronauts through that and you should be better prepared for a Mars trip.
Let's assume for a second that alien life doesn't kill itself out at a certain point by definition. Even if the aliens were transmitting "We are here" messages and even if they were transmitting them in an ever expanding sphere (and not a narrowly focused beam that could miss us by lightyears), we would need to be inside that sphere to hear them. This would mean we would need to be no more than N light years away, where N is the number of years since they started transmitting.
Less advanced than us and the aliens wouldn't be transmitting.
If they had a level of technology approximately equal to ours, we would need to be about 100 light years away. This limits the candidate stars and potentially excludes civilizations equal to us in technology.
More advanced than us and they may have sent the message when we didn't have the technology to hear it. It wouldn't matter if they sent "We are here" when our technological pride and joy was the movable type printing press. Nobody here would have known that an alien civilization was trying to initiate contact. By the time we had the right technology, they might have moved to something either beyond our ability to detect or to focused beam transmissions which, since they miss us by lightyears, effectively render the civilization invisible to us.
Then, of course, there's the problem of decrypting the message. If I gave you ten recordings, nine of which were gibberish and the tenth was some language (but didn't tell you which) encoded in some schema (but didn't tell you what that was), would you be able to a) figure out which was the message and b) decode it? Now, make the language an alien language and your job's difficulty has just skyrocketed.
This isn't to say there are or aren't aliens. Just that lack of messages from an alien civilization doesn't mean none exist. It just means we haven't found any yet.
Phil had a post just last week about how to choose your words in order to reduce misunderstandings when explaining science: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/19/scientists-are-from-mars-the-public-is-from-earth/
For example, if a scientist says "We have to manipulate the data", another scientist hears "We need to process the data using certain scientific techniques." Meanwhile, a layperson might hear "We have to tamper with the data to hide what we don't like and promote what we like."
Politicians would probably also get the treatment. You thought it was bad when 85 year old Ted Stevens was in the Senate? Wait until Senators and Representatives start living to 130 before they retire!
Perhaps if they are bored, but still have the body that an average 40 year old today has, you might see the rise of "Old Age Extreme Sports." In the quest to find some enjoyment out of life, Grandpa (age 130) takes up skydiving from orbit while Grandma (age 134) decides to race rocket-cars. It would make for an interesting culture shift. Kids would see extreme sports as an old person's activity and take on quiet past-times. Meanwhile, old folks would see these quiet kids as foolish for not taking advantage of every thrill life has to offer.
As first world life expectancy increases, the birth rate seems to be declining. People no longer need to have 20 children just to make sure that one of them gets married and has kids of their own. Also, assuming that your "childbearing years" are extended from the current 20-45 (complete estimate on my part but getting pregnant later typically is considered high risk) to something like 20-100, people will likely wait longer before having kids. You could get married at 30, spend 30 years living together with just the two of you, and then have some kids with time to spare. People might also get married later as there won't be a big pressure to settle down so quickly.
As for "how long until you get sick of life", if you had 70 more years you could do things you didn't have time to do beforehand. You could take a decade off to travel the world. You could go back to school to learn some new things and reinvent yourself. Twice. You wouldn't just go to school, get a job, work for 50 years, retire and die.
Of course, this all assumes that the "live until 150" drug extends your "youthful" years until 130 or so and doesn't just extend your "old age" years from their current time until your 150's. If it is the latter, I don't think many would choose to live as old men/women for 75 more years. If it is the former, I think people would jump at the chance.
The **AA's don't need long living authors to extend copyright. They already have company-owned copyrights lasting 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first. They just need to have a chat with their friendly neighborhood politicians about how letting works created a century ago slip into Public Domain is "Bad For The Economy And Bad For Artists". Once this is done, they can have 150 year copyrights, 200 year copyrights or more. After all, those are limited, right?
Worst case scenario, corporations are people and they can have copyrights tied to the "life span" of a corporation. Then, they can allow corporations to transfer copyrights and have the term then tied to the new corp's "life span." (This way, a bankrupt company can sell their copyrighted items to a healthy company and keep everything from falling into that evil Public Domain.)
If anything, they probably don't want authors living a long time so long as the authors act like nice little content providers and sign over all rights to the corporation.
Or perhaps people will have multiple careers. You could work at a job you don't really love but pays well for 20 years, work at a job that doesn't pay well, but that you love for 20 years, go back to school for 10 years to learn something new, start and run your own company for 10 years, take 10 years off to travel the world, go back to another "pays well" job for 15 years, find another job that you love for 15 years, retire at 125 and spend the next 25 years relaxing.
Last night, Adam Savage was on a program called Curiosity: Can You Live Forever. It showed a science fiction version of Adam Savage living to 1,000. However, most, if not all, of the tech shown is available today (if only in "testing in the lab" form). The program dances around the issue of cost by apparently making Adam the human guinea pig of an "Office of Scientific Investigation." While watching the program, I began wondering just what the treatments would cost. I could definitely see some sort of stratification occurring where the rich get to live to 150 (and be mostly healthy through that span) while the middle class/poor get some "trickle down" benefits and have a life expectancy of 90. (If you think the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are bad now, just wait until the rich get to live nearly twice as long as the poor!)
If they let this guy keep the camera then they're setting a bad precedent. It would mean that all future astronauts on US manned lunar missions would... oh wait... never mind. Precedent averted due to lack of manned lunar missions.
They've got a zombie in charge of the astronaut corps. He was also quoted as saying: "We need more astronauts. Astronauts with tasty BRRRAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSS!!!!!!"
I actually so have a very good camera (Pentax K-x DSLR). Since moving to this one from my previous point-and-shoot model (the still very nice Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7), I've encountered less child-blur. Still, there are times when they seem to beat out the camera's shutter.
I hereby challenge them. Their software versus my fast moving kids who often show up in photos as blurs. I think kids have built in sensors to let them know precisely when a camera is going off, thus enabling them to move at the exact moment to blur and/or ruin the photo.
Actually, in America at least, they can't even order you to delete the photos you've taken. Once you've taken the photo, it is under your copyright. They can order you to stop taking photos or leave, and if you refuse or come back they can have you arrested for trespassing. However, they have no authority to order you to delete photos. I believe even officers can't order you to delete photos. Think about it: If they're claiming you've committed a crime (say, by taking a photo of a bridge with your DSLR), then telling you to delete it is ordering you to destroy evidence. If the photo isn't evidence of a crime, then there's no crime done by taking the photo of it.
As always, The Photographer's Rights is the relevant text to consult: http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
Of course then there's the possibility that the Tea Party and religious conservatives will pick a lunatic and this lunatic will actually get elected to be President. There is nobody in the current crop of GOP hopefuls that I think I would vote for except perhaps Jon "We Can't Run From Science But Must Embrace It" Huntsman. Sadly, there are a few in there that actively scare me.
Two words: President Bachmann (*runs away screaming in terror*)
When they announced the Netflix split, most customers thought it was a horrible idea. So, when they announced that the split wouldn't happen, what did Hastings have to say about it?
"There is a difference between moving quickly - which Netflix has done very well for years - and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case." Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-yanks-plan-separate-dvd-246082
Hastings thinks they just moved too fast. In other words, he still thinks a split is a good idea, but they just did it too quickly. The customers say "Don't do this!" and Hastings replies "We're listening to you and will do this slower."
Fighting back may work if it's just Billy vs The Jock. However, if it is Billy vs. The Jock And Seven Of His Friends the result will be Billy beaten up and The Jock laughing about it with his friends. Fighting back isn't a bullying cure-all.
No! Please don't mention the name of that program.... Too late! The flashbacks are starting! The horror! THE HORROR!!!
I actually think that Lotus Notes hides a very well coded AI. Unfortunately, that AI is dedicated to making life hard for you. So just when you think you've figured out the system, the AI recognizes this and subtly changes things to frustrate you more. Curse you, Hidden Lotus Notes AI!!!
That was my thought also. "Billy? You're in the green line? Hey, everyone! Billy's a NEEEERRRRDDDD!!!!" Cue a choice for Billy: 1) Years of torment if he maintains those high grades, or 2) Being left along if he drops his scores back down to average. Way to promote being average instead of pushing yourself to get your best potential.
Not just in Finland. When I was taking the bus (Long Island, NY), it was jocks and popular kids in the back and nerds in the front. I'd often ride in the first row.
I meant via actions like paying your credit card bills on time. Not taking out loans that you can't afford to pay off. That sort of stuff. So when you need to take out a loan (say, to buy a new car), the banks know you'll likely pay it off instead of defaulting. However, if this good credit score is run into the ground by thousands of dollars of credit lines (opened by identity thieves) that aren't paid off and go to collection agencies, your credit rating will be tarnished for a long time to come.
Don't mistake my view of credit agencies, though. I don't like them one bit. I especially hate how they place the blame for and burden of proof to fix identity theft on the victim. I'd like to just liquidate the lot of them and not have to deal with them. (I'm not an economist or a banker or anything, so I won't pretend to know what alternative system should be formed, if any.) However, they are a reality right now and, like it or not, you need to deal with them. So when you've been diligent for years and obtained a good credit record, it's highly frustrating to see it vanish in a matter of weeks thanks to the work of identity thieves.
The thieves get cool new electronics and a very small risk of getting caught. You get years of rebuilding what was lost and fighting with credit agencies and collection agencies. If that's not "losing something", I don't know what is.
My identity was stolen, so I have personal experience here. The thieves had my name, SSN, DOB, and address. They used it to open a credit card in my name. (Curiously, they had my mother's maiden name wrong yet Capital One still approved the online application.) They also requested rush delivery and changed the address on the card from my home to some other location. Unfortunately, for them, Capital One sent the card out BEFORE changing the address and it went to me. I was able to stop the fraud and lock down my credit, but I never found out who stole my personal info or how.
I was lucky. If the card had gone out how they hoped it had, they would have been able to activate it and run up a huge tab under my name. Then, when they didn't pay, the collection agencies would have come knocking down my door. My credit would have been ruined for years as I fixed the damage they did.
Yes, I would have had my credit but it would have been completely trashed.
To use a car analogy (since this *IS* Slashdot), identity theft is like "borrowing" someone's car at night and returning it with the windows smashed, two doors missing, dents all over, paint smeared all over the interior and three tires flat. Sure you have your car to use, but you aren't going to get much actual use out of it until you spend a lot of time and money restoring it. (And unlike the car analogy, you can't just ditch that car and get a new one.)
I'd say depriving someone of the credit that they earned by fraudulently gaining access via stolen personal information is "theft". This isn't a case of someone making a copy of your identity and it not affecting you. The results are real and can affect you for years to come.
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It saddens me when I hear this. Especially when I think of my 8 year old son. He can't be getting so old that I need to start rehearsing my "birds and the bees" speech! It can't be! It's not possible! Noooooooooo!
Luckily, he's a lot like me so that should buy me some additional time.
I think a better option than Mars is the Moon. Let's face it, we haven't gone anywhere beyond Low Earth Orbit for quite awhile. There are going to be glitches. It'd be much better to work some of those glitches out during a Moon mission than during a months-long Mars mission. Want to try an extended trip? Make a Moon landing last for 2 weeks. Figure out how to house, feed, protect the astronauts through that and you should be better prepared for a Mars trip.
Let's assume for a second that alien life doesn't kill itself out at a certain point by definition. Even if the aliens were transmitting "We are here" messages and even if they were transmitting them in an ever expanding sphere (and not a narrowly focused beam that could miss us by lightyears), we would need to be inside that sphere to hear them. This would mean we would need to be no more than N light years away, where N is the number of years since they started transmitting.
Less advanced than us and the aliens wouldn't be transmitting.
If they had a level of technology approximately equal to ours, we would need to be about 100 light years away. This limits the candidate stars and potentially excludes civilizations equal to us in technology.
More advanced than us and they may have sent the message when we didn't have the technology to hear it. It wouldn't matter if they sent "We are here" when our technological pride and joy was the movable type printing press. Nobody here would have known that an alien civilization was trying to initiate contact. By the time we had the right technology, they might have moved to something either beyond our ability to detect or to focused beam transmissions which, since they miss us by lightyears, effectively render the civilization invisible to us.
Then, of course, there's the problem of decrypting the message. If I gave you ten recordings, nine of which were gibberish and the tenth was some language (but didn't tell you which) encoded in some schema (but didn't tell you what that was), would you be able to a) figure out which was the message and b) decode it? Now, make the language an alien language and your job's difficulty has just skyrocketed.
This isn't to say there are or aren't aliens. Just that lack of messages from an alien civilization doesn't mean none exist. It just means we haven't found any yet.
Phil had a post just last week about how to choose your words in order to reduce misunderstandings when explaining science: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/19/scientists-are-from-mars-the-public-is-from-earth/
For example, if a scientist says "We have to manipulate the data", another scientist hears "We need to process the data using certain scientific techniques." Meanwhile, a layperson might hear "We have to tamper with the data to hide what we don't like and promote what we like."
I don't think water does much to counteract spicy food (including hot chilis). A glass of milk would work better.
Politicians would probably also get the treatment. You thought it was bad when 85 year old Ted Stevens was in the Senate? Wait until Senators and Representatives start living to 130 before they retire!
Perhaps if they are bored, but still have the body that an average 40 year old today has, you might see the rise of "Old Age Extreme Sports." In the quest to find some enjoyment out of life, Grandpa (age 130) takes up skydiving from orbit while Grandma (age 134) decides to race rocket-cars. It would make for an interesting culture shift. Kids would see extreme sports as an old person's activity and take on quiet past-times. Meanwhile, old folks would see these quiet kids as foolish for not taking advantage of every thrill life has to offer.
As first world life expectancy increases, the birth rate seems to be declining. People no longer need to have 20 children just to make sure that one of them gets married and has kids of their own. Also, assuming that your "childbearing years" are extended from the current 20-45 (complete estimate on my part but getting pregnant later typically is considered high risk) to something like 20-100, people will likely wait longer before having kids. You could get married at 30, spend 30 years living together with just the two of you, and then have some kids with time to spare. People might also get married later as there won't be a big pressure to settle down so quickly.
As for "how long until you get sick of life", if you had 70 more years you could do things you didn't have time to do beforehand. You could take a decade off to travel the world. You could go back to school to learn some new things and reinvent yourself. Twice. You wouldn't just go to school, get a job, work for 50 years, retire and die.
Of course, this all assumes that the "live until 150" drug extends your "youthful" years until 130 or so and doesn't just extend your "old age" years from their current time until your 150's. If it is the latter, I don't think many would choose to live as old men/women for 75 more years. If it is the former, I think people would jump at the chance.
The **AA's don't need long living authors to extend copyright. They already have company-owned copyrights lasting 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first. They just need to have a chat with their friendly neighborhood politicians about how letting works created a century ago slip into Public Domain is "Bad For The Economy And Bad For Artists". Once this is done, they can have 150 year copyrights, 200 year copyrights or more. After all, those are limited, right?
Worst case scenario, corporations are people and they can have copyrights tied to the "life span" of a corporation. Then, they can allow corporations to transfer copyrights and have the term then tied to the new corp's "life span." (This way, a bankrupt company can sell their copyrighted items to a healthy company and keep everything from falling into that evil Public Domain.)
If anything, they probably don't want authors living a long time so long as the authors act like nice little content providers and sign over all rights to the corporation.
Or perhaps people will have multiple careers. You could work at a job you don't really love but pays well for 20 years, work at a job that doesn't pay well, but that you love for 20 years, go back to school for 10 years to learn something new, start and run your own company for 10 years, take 10 years off to travel the world, go back to another "pays well" job for 15 years, find another job that you love for 15 years, retire at 125 and spend the next 25 years relaxing.
Last night, Adam Savage was on a program called Curiosity: Can You Live Forever. It showed a science fiction version of Adam Savage living to 1,000. However, most, if not all, of the tech shown is available today (if only in "testing in the lab" form). The program dances around the issue of cost by apparently making Adam the human guinea pig of an "Office of Scientific Investigation." While watching the program, I began wondering just what the treatments would cost. I could definitely see some sort of stratification occurring where the rich get to live to 150 (and be mostly healthy through that span) while the middle class/poor get some "trickle down" benefits and have a life expectancy of 90. (If you think the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are bad now, just wait until the rich get to live nearly twice as long as the poor!)
If they let this guy keep the camera then they're setting a bad precedent. It would mean that all future astronauts on US manned lunar missions would... oh wait... never mind. Precedent averted due to lack of manned lunar missions.
The government is bound by the statute of limitations when the government decides it should be bound by the statute of limitations.
They've got a zombie in charge of the astronaut corps. He was also quoted as saying: "We need more astronauts. Astronauts with tasty BRRRAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSS!!!!!!"
I actually so have a very good camera (Pentax K-x DSLR). Since moving to this one from my previous point-and-shoot model (the still very nice Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7), I've encountered less child-blur. Still, there are times when they seem to beat out the camera's shutter.
I hereby challenge them. Their software versus my fast moving kids who often show up in photos as blurs. I think kids have built in sensors to let them know precisely when a camera is going off, thus enabling them to move at the exact moment to blur and/or ruin the photo.
Actually, in America at least, they can't even order you to delete the photos you've taken. Once you've taken the photo, it is under your copyright. They can order you to stop taking photos or leave, and if you refuse or come back they can have you arrested for trespassing. However, they have no authority to order you to delete photos. I believe even officers can't order you to delete photos. Think about it: If they're claiming you've committed a crime (say, by taking a photo of a bridge with your DSLR), then telling you to delete it is ordering you to destroy evidence. If the photo isn't evidence of a crime, then there's no crime done by taking the photo of it.
As always, The Photographer's Rights is the relevant text to consult: http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
Of course then there's the possibility that the Tea Party and religious conservatives will pick a lunatic and this lunatic will actually get elected to be President. There is nobody in the current crop of GOP hopefuls that I think I would vote for except perhaps Jon "We Can't Run From Science But Must Embrace It" Huntsman. Sadly, there are a few in there that actively scare me.
Two words: President Bachmann (*runs away screaming in terror*)
When they announced the Netflix split, most customers thought it was a horrible idea. So, when they announced that the split wouldn't happen, what did Hastings have to say about it?
Hastings thinks they just moved too fast. In other words, he still thinks a split is a good idea, but they just did it too quickly. The customers say "Don't do this!" and Hastings replies "We're listening to you and will do this slower."
Can we get someone with a clue in there?
Fighting back may work if it's just Billy vs The Jock. However, if it is Billy vs. The Jock And Seven Of His Friends the result will be Billy beaten up and The Jock laughing about it with his friends. Fighting back isn't a bullying cure-all.
No! Please don't mention the name of that program.... Too late! The flashbacks are starting! The horror! THE HORROR!!!
I actually think that Lotus Notes hides a very well coded AI. Unfortunately, that AI is dedicated to making life hard for you. So just when you think you've figured out the system, the AI recognizes this and subtly changes things to frustrate you more. Curse you, Hidden Lotus Notes AI!!!
That was my thought also. "Billy? You're in the green line? Hey, everyone! Billy's a NEEEERRRRDDDD!!!!" Cue a choice for Billy: 1) Years of torment if he maintains those high grades, or 2) Being left along if he drops his scores back down to average. Way to promote being average instead of pushing yourself to get your best potential.
Not just in Finland. When I was taking the bus (Long Island, NY), it was jocks and popular kids in the back and nerds in the front. I'd often ride in the first row.
I meant via actions like paying your credit card bills on time. Not taking out loans that you can't afford to pay off. That sort of stuff. So when you need to take out a loan (say, to buy a new car), the banks know you'll likely pay it off instead of defaulting. However, if this good credit score is run into the ground by thousands of dollars of credit lines (opened by identity thieves) that aren't paid off and go to collection agencies, your credit rating will be tarnished for a long time to come.
Don't mistake my view of credit agencies, though. I don't like them one bit. I especially hate how they place the blame for and burden of proof to fix identity theft on the victim. I'd like to just liquidate the lot of them and not have to deal with them. (I'm not an economist or a banker or anything, so I won't pretend to know what alternative system should be formed, if any.) However, they are a reality right now and, like it or not, you need to deal with them. So when you've been diligent for years and obtained a good credit record, it's highly frustrating to see it vanish in a matter of weeks thanks to the work of identity thieves.
The thieves get cool new electronics and a very small risk of getting caught. You get years of rebuilding what was lost and fighting with credit agencies and collection agencies. If that's not "losing something", I don't know what is.
My identity was stolen, so I have personal experience here. The thieves had my name, SSN, DOB, and address. They used it to open a credit card in my name. (Curiously, they had my mother's maiden name wrong yet Capital One still approved the online application.) They also requested rush delivery and changed the address on the card from my home to some other location. Unfortunately, for them, Capital One sent the card out BEFORE changing the address and it went to me. I was able to stop the fraud and lock down my credit, but I never found out who stole my personal info or how.
I was lucky. If the card had gone out how they hoped it had, they would have been able to activate it and run up a huge tab under my name. Then, when they didn't pay, the collection agencies would have come knocking down my door. My credit would have been ruined for years as I fixed the damage they did.
Yes, I would have had my credit but it would have been completely trashed.
To use a car analogy (since this *IS* Slashdot), identity theft is like "borrowing" someone's car at night and returning it with the windows smashed, two doors missing, dents all over, paint smeared all over the interior and three tires flat. Sure you have your car to use, but you aren't going to get much actual use out of it until you spend a lot of time and money restoring it. (And unlike the car analogy, you can't just ditch that car and get a new one.)
I'd say depriving someone of the credit that they earned by fraudulently gaining access via stolen personal information is "theft". This isn't a case of someone making a copy of your identity and it not affecting you. The results are real and can affect you for years to come.