At the risk of being modded redundant, a more indepth explanation of this phenomenon:
What you are seeing is an example of "price control." Price control is a relatively common practice, especially for companies that create higher-end products and have limited (or no) direct-to-customer distribution. Essentially, Apple has the ultimate discretion as to which retailers it will sell iPods too. In order to qualify to carry an iPod, that retailer, be it Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other, must enter into a binding agreement with Apple as to the pricing of the unit. Under that agreement, discounting of the units is generally either completely disallowed, or allowed only with manufacturer approval. Thus, the Best Buys and Circuit City stores HAVE to sell the iPod at whatever price Apple tells them to.
Where it starts to get shady is when a retailer that hasn't signed a price control agreement with the manufacturer gets their hands on the price controlled units, and starts selling them at a price below the manufacturer's price point. This generally happens when a retailer that has an agreement with the manufacturer unloads some overstock or demo units, when a retailer goes bankrupt, or when a shipment "falls off of a truck." Many manufacturers that use price controls get very, very unhappy when this happens. Most price controlling manufacturers will cut off sales of product to retailers that sell overstock to discounters. This can lead to shady, under-the-table dealing, units with serial numbers ground off so the manufacturer can't trace who sold it to whom, and general malaise. Most manufacturers won't honor the warranties on items purchase through third-party discounters.
If you think Apple's price controls are nasty, take a look at the high-end watch world. Companies like Rolex won't even allow retailers to advertise the prices of their watches AT ALL. Take a look at a jeweler's ad in the newspaper for Rolexes- they'll always say something to the effect of "call or visit for pricing." Watch companies are also well known for forbidding internet sales. And they put out propaganda to the effect that all watches sold by discounters are counterfeit.
It's the manufacturer's world. We're just here to consume.
There seems to be this weird misconception going on here....
These "GloFish" DO NOT glow in the dark. They fluoresce red under a black light (UV radiation, for those of us who care). But from everything I've read, they don't emit any light at all in the absence of external UV. None. So, that pretty much makes them "Glow-in-the-LIGHT fish."
Now, I'm not entirely suprised that the NYTimes doesn't understand that difference, but slashdotters should be able to.
Not only are they resisting the jackboots, they're also one of the few modern non-scientific entities I've heard using "datum." So many people today think that "data" is singular/plural. It's infuriating- one wonders if schools even teach grammar any more.
I have indeed used Namiki products. The Namiki vanishing point is, in my opinion, the finest retractable fountain pen made today. The fixed nib Namikis I have used have all been very fine pens as well. The nib seems a little less responsive than my treasured Pelikans, and a bit more prone to scratching (moving over the paper with no ink coming out). Most of the Namiki pens I've seen have had cartridge/converter fills, and I have a very strong preference for piston filling pens, but that's just a matter of personal preference.
I should note that I have not used any of the very high end Namikis, such as the Yukari or Emperor pens. I classify pens like that as "Art Pens," pens obviously intended for display or collection rather than use. As far as my personal collection goes, I'm not interested in that sort of pen. Again, simply a matter of personal preference.
I'm a pen snob. And I'm not ashamed of it. In most situations, I write with a Pelikan Souveran 800 fountain pen. The nib is the most repsonsive of all of the fountain pens I've ever used, and the ink flow is superb. My two 800s are the best pens I have ever used.
In situations demanding a more durable pen, the Rotring 600 series have never failed me. They're made of solid brass, and are almost invincible. The list of potentially deadly situations my 600s have survived is long.
As a collector, user, and frequent gift-giver of high quality writing instruments, I have found Joon, a company based in New York, to be without match in all of my pen purchase needs. Check them out on the web at www.joon.com. For Timothy, they carry the entire line of Lamy inks and refills.
And just an aside- I've noticed some folks above me in this topic talking about Levenger. DON'T buy pens or ink from Levenger. They put a markup on their pens so high it's absurd, and their ink is shite. If I wanted to write with colored water, I'd buy food coloring.
Can't test for creatine- it's in the body naturally. There was some talk a few years ago of testing for elevated levels of creatine in athletic competitions, but it just wouldn't work. The levels fluctuate too much naturally for any test to provide good data.
Besides, people have been experimenting with the various "smart drugs" for years and years, and the various academic testing boards couldn't care less. I don't think amount or type of chemical assitance could realiably provide an increase in the reasoning skills these exams test.
Perhaps ljb is running his bit-flipping script on The Neo Project....
On, Off, On, Off.....
Re:They need geography lessons !
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Earth as Art
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· Score: 1
Perhaps, but maybe you should use a slightly more up-to-date textbook.
Greenland was granted self-goverment in 1978 by the Dutch parliament. Granted, Denmark retains control of Greenland's foreign relations, but c'mon now, how many foreign relations does Greenland have?
As an aside, I beleive most geographers would agree that Greenland is a portion of the North American Continent.
Good god, but i'm glad i'm not the only person who saw the article title that way. It's nice to see i'm not the only superhero-name-hallucinating slashdotizen.
i've never coded a piece of software in my life, let alone opensourced one, but i can tell you right now the single major objection or concern you will face.
The dialouge will go something like this:
Coder: Let's open source this after you pay me to write it.
Buyer: Wait. So once we pay you to produce this for us, you want us to let you open source it, in effect giving it away for free?
Coder: Yeah. It's neat. Information wants to be free.
Buyer: But you want to be paid.
Coder: Yeah, I gots ta get paid.
Buyer: They don't require computer science majors to take economics, do they?
Seriously here. A buyer who is paying to get a custom piece of software made for them will be very very reluctant to let the rest of the world have that software for free once they have it. Especially if they have competitors. Especially if that software is mission critical at all.
In summary, best of luck. But perhaps opensource idealism should get a bit more used to taking a back seat to harsh economic reality.
"The problem is you generally need the context to get a good translation,"
This is very, very true. Any competent translator can tell you that it's almost impossible to get a fully accurate translation from just a few lines or words... context is absolutely imperative. This looks a lot like vaporware to me.
And then what about when the smart-ass teenaged year old kid signs up, gets bored and starts translating to obscene or nonsensical results? They'll need some sort of moderation system, if this is to work at all.
Thanks, newscientist, for bringing us another well researched and peer-reviewed story, maintaining the image that a "new scientist" is one who has forgotten about the scientific method.
the universe isn't infinite in size nor mass. it has a well defined energy quatization. however, it is so large that the total effect is near infinite. the very idea that the composition of the universe is unknowable is a fallacy. the idea of unknowable fact is a holdover from 19th century mysticism. humanity traditionally reacts to the difficulty of comprehension by labeling something unknowable, obscure, occult. this kind of mysticism is the greatest obstacle to true comprehension of the universe.
heck, even in your original metaphor, the onion has a center. it'll take a lot of tears to get to the center, but if you keep working at it, you can get there.
Well, it took 4 hours to install 2 covers... dontcha know they were doing some sightseeing out there
erm. it's SPACE. sure, they did some sightseeing. but things take a LONG TIME to do in space. it's a side effect of things like there being no air and very little gravity. y'know. it would take you a long time wrap a blanket around a motor if you were weightless and wearing a bulky space suit.
Carl Sagan was one of the greatest popularizers of the science of astronomy and cosmography. His efforts, while not always rigidly scientifically valid, were some of the strongest towards the popularization of true science in the modern world. Anyone who doubts his dedication should read his work In the Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark. One of my favorite books. I like to give it as a present to psuedoscience beleivers.
the point is moot. you can't proove that infinite size entails that the limit as x approaches the lowest end of the set is infinite by presenting examples of cases in which it does.
explain your logic. i fail to see how infinite size inhertently causes infite iteration of component particles.
sounds more like pothead/hippy/new scientist reader logic to me than real science. the set all x {x>1} is iherently infinte, but does not iterate infinitely at the small end... it ends at one.
I don't see anywhere in the article how much power they expect this to generate. It will have to be a good amount per unit, though. This looks to be a rather large investment, I'd like to see some cost/return data. Is Australia really so thirstry for electricity that they need to resort to this?
Also, what happens when the wind cuts out? Winds are rather unpredicable... The sight of a whole flight of these things plummetting to the ground before their rotors can shift from generate mode to motor mode would be rather amusing, but not very profitable. There's some possibility that they could use autorotation to do a controlled descent, like helicopters, but I think the ground-connection cable might hinder that.
It's kinda funny that the world is so desperate for power that schemes like this get cooked up on a monthly basis, but we're still terrified of nice, cheap, clean nuclear fission power.
This has been discussed many a time before, but the same problem always arises. This method can be used to put the "capsules" into one orbit, and one orbit only. Once the capsule was in that orbit, there would have to be a pre-existing orbital infrastructure to position it into a new orbit.
Also, the strain on the capsule and it's contents would be IMMENSE. This method would pretty much be suitable only for delivering durable, non-mission critical, components to orbit.
That said, this would still be of immense use for delivering structural components to orbit, like strusses for the ISS. But think of the logistics of this. The "barrel," the initial propulsion corridor, would have to be parallel to the equator, to avoid complications with the rotation of the earth perturbing the trajectory of the projectile. To avoid complications arising because of the curvature of the earth, you would want to construct it as close to the equator as possible. This means south america, or africa. Areas that have neither the infrastructure nor the political stability to bear a two to five mile long shaft, propelling by some means, a capsule.
Add that to the fact that the area immediately under the barrel's mouth, and the area under the capsule's flight path until it reached high atmosphere, would be regularly devastated by the sonic boom, and the fact that the elictricity neccesary to power such a maglev tunnel would be prohibitively expensive, and you'll find that this plan, while it sounds nice at first, is not going to fly. It's been being batted around since Jules Verne used a cannon to shoot a man to the moon in one of his stories, but the sad truth is that the future of orbital transport does not lie with the cannon.
We can always use nano or chemistry or physics to make fucking spider silk.
We can? Wow. Golly, look at me with egg on my face, the physical chemist who's working on nanoscale structures, and not knowing that in the last few days we've made exponential leaps in "nano or chemistry or physics." I mean, it seems like only a few months ago that we were using "nano" to make the first forced molecular bond, to make a simple little biphenyl. It's amazing that we can all of a sudden make an amazingly complex polymer like spidersilk.
Oh wait. That's right. We can't. Biotechnology is the next natural step in the technology chain. First we let nature make things for us. Then we learn how to tell nature to make the things for us, so we have more. Then we learn how nature does it, and do it ourselve, and we never run out. We are NOWHERE NEAR being able to crank out spidersilk with nano-manufacturing. We're nowhere near being able to crank out ANYTHING with nanoscale manufacturing.
Leave telling us what science can to to the scientists.
You're civilly liable if you leave your car door unlocked and someone steals your car and causes property or personal damage with it. You're liable if someone sneaking onto your property at night falls into an open well, or steps in a hidden beartrap you left out.
Now, I admit I'm not a lawyer. I'm physicist, and a mere student at that. However, I come from a long line of lawyers. So, I'm going to call you out on this one. While in the direct word of the law, one might be able to force a civil liability case for a car theft; I'm going on very expert advice here that it would be thrown out of the court. According to my advisors, all of whom are partners at major firms across the nation, civil liability like this would not fly when the item is feloniously acquired.
You're liable if someone sneaking onto your property at night falls into an open well, or steps in a hidden bear trap you left out.
These analogies are entirely irrelevant! The computer itself causes no harm... you can't fall down a computer; you can't have your leg mangled by a computer. The harm is caused by the person using the device to commit harm. And I don't think that if some thugs chose to throw a person down my well, or if someone took, my bear trap and put it in someone else's path, that any court in the nation would prosecute me.
In my admittedly limited experience, civil social liability like this is only applicable in certain specific cases, such as parents allowing teens to drive while intoxicated, and failure to take reasonable means to secure firearms. However, even in these cases, if reasonable means are taken, and the teen still drives, or the gun is still stolen, liability ceases.
But there is clear precedent, and a lot of sensibility, in the argument that you should be held liable for damage caused by computer crimes that were facilitated by your negligence.
Quote me one relevant case or ruling in the American justice system, and I will shut directly up. But I don't think you can. There really isn't sufficient precedent to draw the conclusion you want. In fact, I don't know that there is any precedent.
We're not talking about leaving the hypothetical houses door unlocked here, people. We are talking about failing to purchase the utmost in super bank vault doors, and spend the hundreds or even thousands of man-hours such a security system would require to maintain. We're talking about buying a cheap master lock, and maybe a deadbolt, and being confident that no one's going to really try to force your lock, because you live way out in the 'burbs.
Oh, and the universe isn't gray. It's black and white, and a whole bunch of colors, too. We just can't tell for sure which color it is at any given time.
If it was absolutely impossible to catch thieves, and they could break into your house from the other side of the world, and then break into other people's houses once they had got into yours... there probably would be penalties for not keeping your front door locked.
No. No, there would not be. This is neither logical nor feasible What you're saying is tantamount to suggesting that a crime is the fault of the victim. If we adopt this stance in relation to one type of crime, then it could be extended over time to every sort of crime. The foundation of justice systems, since the beginning of recorded law, has been laying the fault for the crime with the criminal. We can't turn around now and start saying "it's your fault i hacked/cracked/whatever-ed your box- you didn't have tight enough security." That is ludicrous. It is the fault of the criminal who gains illegal and unauthorized access to a resource, not the person who fails to control sufficiently that resource.
Following in your logic, we would soon reach the point of "it's your fault i shot you... i was just firing my gun around at random, and you stepped in front of my bullets. and you weren't wearing bulletproof armor. i'm not to blame." I can't stress this enough... crime is, and always will be, solely the fault of the criminal parties.
What you're saying is essentially that computer crime should not be a crime if the box is not secure enough. Essentially, you seem to think that if the crime is too easy, it shouldn't be a crime. That's absurd. Think about what you are saying. Read some law. Apply the laws of logic. Then rethink your opinion. Just because there is a new paradigm doesn't mean we have to change the basic laws of justice and morality. Humans are still the same... the basic codes of justic that human society has been following for millenia will be too.
ah. BSE as in bovine spongioform encephalopathy. i was thinking BSE as in biological systems engineering, and the controversy it has caused amongst environmental activists, especially in locations like the florida everglades.
in that case, i readily admit that BSE is a major problem. as a non-infected prion carrier myself, i'm quite familiar with the ramifications of the disease.
however, that brings up the point that, as far as i've seen, BSE is a naturally occuring disease, a consequence not of unchecked science but rather of evolution and natural selection. admittedly, the practice of using offal in animal feed is repugnant, but it has been in use for centuries. blaming science for BSE is tantamount to blaming meteorologists because people can be struck by lightning. it seems to me that science should be congratulated for their progress, not shamed for the existence of nature. i remember when i was living in europe, in the late 80s and early 90s, they didn't even know what caused BSE. at least now with the discovery of prions, the progress of the disease can be checked to some degree, and a cure can be researched.
Since the beginning of the serious pursuit of modern science, the luddites have been among us. You, sir, although you may deny it most strenuosly, associate yourself with them most strongly in your words. You speak of the GM food scare and the BSE crisis like these are actual problems, as opposed to media-generated false-crises spread by blatantly incorrect propoganda from luddite radicals. Luddite radicals with whom you ally yourself in this post.
It is attitudes like those you express here that hold the scientific community back from its true potential. The concept you propose, that science should be governed by the whims of the uneducated masses, is preposterous. The establishment of a "watchdog body" to "inform the public properly" would be both ineffective and crippling to the science. Regardless of how the watchdog body acts, the media is going to portray any new scientific developement in the way that will get the best reaction from their audiences, most of whom are uneducated and given to shock journalism and sensationalism. Your hypothetical watchdog body can trumpet the positives of nanotechnology all you want, but the media will still seize upon the minute possibility that something could go wrong, simply because this is the best story. Look at the media play last year, regarding the possible generation of a "strangelet" at the large hadron particle collider. If this event happened, i don't debate that it could end life as we know it. But the probability of a strangelet generation event is so absurdly low it is incalculable. Not only did the media blatantly ignore scientific fact put to it by multitudes of physicists around the world, they pushed the story so hard that the collider is loosing funding. Is this what you want for nanotechnology, one of the most intrigueing and potentially world changing developements ever?
In essence, you blame science for something that is not at all science's fault. If you want to establish a watchdog group, make it watch, not the scientists, but rather the media that distorts and lies about what science is doing. It is not the fault of science that the public is uneducated and the media is adept at exploiting that. It is not the fault of science that the media is willing to conjure facts out of nothing, to accept the ideas of un-accredited "experts" above those of researching scientists. The corruption of media is not the fault of science. Science should not be made to suffer for the stupidity of the masses.
note: yep, that's an elitist opinion. it's also the truth. live with it.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are seeing is an example of "price control." Price control is a relatively common practice, especially for companies that create higher-end products and have limited (or no) direct-to-customer distribution. Essentially, Apple has the ultimate discretion as to which retailers it will sell iPods too. In order to qualify to carry an iPod, that retailer, be it Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other, must enter into a binding agreement with Apple as to the pricing of the unit. Under that agreement, discounting of the units is generally either completely disallowed, or allowed only with manufacturer approval. Thus, the Best Buys and Circuit City stores HAVE to sell the iPod at whatever price Apple tells them to.
Where it starts to get shady is when a retailer that hasn't signed a price control agreement with the manufacturer gets their hands on the price controlled units, and starts selling them at a price below the manufacturer's price point. This generally happens when a retailer that has an agreement with the manufacturer unloads some overstock or demo units, when a retailer goes bankrupt, or when a shipment "falls off of a truck." Many manufacturers that use price controls get very, very unhappy when this happens. Most price controlling manufacturers will cut off sales of product to retailers that sell overstock to discounters. This can lead to shady, under-the-table dealing, units with serial numbers ground off so the manufacturer can't trace who sold it to whom, and general malaise. Most manufacturers won't honor the warranties on items purchase through third-party discounters.
If you think Apple's price controls are nasty, take a look at the high-end watch world. Companies like Rolex won't even allow retailers to advertise the prices of their watches AT ALL. Take a look at a jeweler's ad in the newspaper for Rolexes- they'll always say something to the effect of "call or visit for pricing." Watch companies are also well known for forbidding internet sales. And they put out propaganda to the effect that all watches sold by discounters are counterfeit.
It's the manufacturer's world. We're just here to consume.
These "GloFish" DO NOT glow in the dark. They fluoresce red under a black light (UV radiation, for those of us who care). But from everything I've read, they don't emit any light at all in the absence of external UV. None. So, that pretty much makes them "Glow-in-the-LIGHT fish."
Now, I'm not entirely suprised that the NYTimes doesn't understand that difference, but slashdotters should be able to.
Not only are they resisting the jackboots, they're also one of the few modern non-scientific entities I've heard using "datum." So many people today think that "data" is singular/plural. It's infuriating- one wonders if schools even teach grammar any more.
I have indeed used Namiki products. The Namiki vanishing point is, in my opinion, the finest retractable fountain pen made today. The fixed nib Namikis I have used have all been very fine pens as well. The nib seems a little less responsive than my treasured Pelikans, and a bit more prone to scratching (moving over the paper with no ink coming out). Most of the Namiki pens I've seen have had cartridge/converter fills, and I have a very strong preference for piston filling pens, but that's just a matter of personal preference.
I should note that I have not used any of the very high end Namikis, such as the Yukari or Emperor pens. I classify pens like that as "Art Pens," pens obviously intended for display or collection rather than use. As far as my personal collection goes, I'm not interested in that sort of pen. Again, simply a matter of personal preference.
I'm a pen snob. And I'm not ashamed of it. In most situations, I write with a Pelikan Souveran 800 fountain pen. The nib is the most repsonsive of all of the fountain pens I've ever used, and the ink flow is superb. My two 800s are the best pens I have ever used.
In situations demanding a more durable pen, the Rotring 600 series have never failed me. They're made of solid brass, and are almost invincible. The list of potentially deadly situations my 600s have survived is long.
As a collector, user, and frequent gift-giver of high quality writing instruments, I have found Joon, a company based in New York, to be without match in all of my pen purchase needs. Check them out on the web at www.joon.com. For Timothy, they carry the entire line of Lamy inks and refills.
And just an aside- I've noticed some folks above me in this topic talking about Levenger. DON'T buy pens or ink from Levenger. They put a markup on their pens so high it's absurd, and their ink is shite. If I wanted to write with colored water, I'd buy food coloring.
Can't test for creatine- it's in the body naturally. There was some talk a few years ago of testing for elevated levels of creatine in athletic competitions, but it just wouldn't work. The levels fluctuate too much naturally for any test to provide good data.
Besides, people have been experimenting with the various "smart drugs" for years and years, and the various academic testing boards couldn't care less. I don't think amount or type of chemical assitance could realiably provide an increase in the reasoning skills these exams test.
Perhaps ljb is running his bit-flipping script on The Neo Project....
On, Off, On, Off.....
Perhaps, but maybe you should use a slightly more up-to-date textbook.
Greenland was granted self-goverment in 1978 by the Dutch parliament. Granted, Denmark retains control of Greenland's foreign relations, but c'mon now, how many foreign relations does Greenland have?
As an aside, I beleive most geographers would agree that Greenland is a portion of the North American Continent.
Good god, but i'm glad i'm not the only person who saw the article title that way. It's nice to see i'm not the only superhero-name-hallucinating slashdotizen.
i've never coded a piece of software in my life, let alone opensourced one, but i can tell you right now the single major objection or concern you will face.
The dialouge will go something like this:
Coder: Let's open source this after you pay me to write it.
Buyer: Wait. So once we pay you to produce this for us, you want us to let you open source it, in effect giving it away for free?
Coder: Yeah. It's neat. Information wants to be free.
Buyer: But you want to be paid.
Coder: Yeah, I gots ta get paid.
Buyer: They don't require computer science majors to take economics, do they?
Seriously here. A buyer who is paying to get a custom piece of software made for them will be very very reluctant to let the rest of the world have that software for free once they have it. Especially if they have competitors. Especially if that software is mission critical at all.
In summary, best of luck. But perhaps opensource idealism should get a bit more used to taking a back seat to harsh economic reality.
*ends post, dons flame proof suit*
From the article:
"The problem is you generally need the context to get a good translation,"
This is very, very true. Any competent translator can tell you that it's almost impossible to get a fully accurate translation from just a few lines or words... context is absolutely imperative. This looks a lot like vaporware to me.
And then what about when the smart-ass teenaged year old kid signs up, gets bored and starts translating to obscene or nonsensical results? They'll need some sort of moderation system, if this is to work at all.
Thanks, newscientist, for bringing us another well researched and peer-reviewed story, maintaining the image that a "new scientist" is one who has forgotten about the scientific method.
the universe isn't infinite in size nor mass. it has a well defined energy quatization. however, it is so large that the total effect is near infinite. the very idea that the composition of the universe is unknowable is a fallacy. the idea of unknowable fact is a holdover from 19th century mysticism. humanity traditionally reacts to the difficulty of comprehension by labeling something unknowable, obscure, occult. this kind of mysticism is the greatest obstacle to true comprehension of the universe.
heck, even in your original metaphor, the onion has a center. it'll take a lot of tears to get to the center, but if you keep working at it, you can get there.
erm. it's SPACE. sure, they did some sightseeing. but things take a LONG TIME to do in space. it's a side effect of things like there being no air and very little gravity. y'know. it would take you a long time wrap a blanket around a motor if you were weightless and wearing a bulky space suit.
Carl Sagan was one of the greatest popularizers of the science of astronomy and cosmography. His efforts, while not always rigidly scientifically valid, were some of the strongest towards the popularization of true science in the modern world. Anyone who doubts his dedication should read his work In the Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark. One of my favorite books. I like to give it as a present to psuedoscience beleivers.
the point is moot. you can't proove that infinite size entails that the limit as x approaches the lowest end of the set is infinite by presenting examples of cases in which it does.
doh. i meant all x (x>=1).
explain your logic. i fail to see how infinite size inhertently causes infite iteration of component particles.
sounds more like pothead/hippy/new scientist reader logic to me than real science. the set all x {x>1} is iherently infinte, but does not iterate infinitely at the small end... it ends at one.
i can confirm that as of 22:00, the air force is still at threatcon delta.
Also, what happens when the wind cuts out? Winds are rather unpredicable... The sight of a whole flight of these things plummetting to the ground before their rotors can shift from generate mode to motor mode would be rather amusing, but not very profitable. There's some possibility that they could use autorotation to do a controlled descent, like helicopters, but I think the ground-connection cable might hinder that.
It's kinda funny that the world is so desperate for power that schemes like this get cooked up on a monthly basis, but we're still terrified of nice, cheap, clean nuclear fission power.
Also, the strain on the capsule and it's contents would be IMMENSE. This method would pretty much be suitable only for delivering durable, non-mission critical, components to orbit.
That said, this would still be of immense use for delivering structural components to orbit, like strusses for the ISS. But think of the logistics of this. The "barrel," the initial propulsion corridor, would have to be parallel to the equator, to avoid complications with the rotation of the earth perturbing the trajectory of the projectile. To avoid complications arising because of the curvature of the earth, you would want to construct it as close to the equator as possible. This means south america, or africa. Areas that have neither the infrastructure nor the political stability to bear a two to five mile long shaft, propelling by some means, a capsule.
Add that to the fact that the area immediately under the barrel's mouth, and the area under the capsule's flight path until it reached high atmosphere, would be regularly devastated by the sonic boom, and the fact that the elictricity neccesary to power such a maglev tunnel would be prohibitively expensive, and you'll find that this plan, while it sounds nice at first, is not going to fly. It's been being batted around since Jules Verne used a cannon to shoot a man to the moon in one of his stories, but the sad truth is that the future of orbital transport does not lie with the cannon.
We can? Wow. Golly, look at me with egg on my face, the physical chemist who's working on nanoscale structures, and not knowing that in the last few days we've made exponential leaps in "nano or chemistry or physics." I mean, it seems like only a few months ago that we were using "nano" to make the first forced molecular bond, to make a simple little biphenyl. It's amazing that we can all of a sudden make an amazingly complex polymer like spidersilk.
Oh wait. That's right. We can't. Biotechnology is the next natural step in the technology chain. First we let nature make things for us. Then we learn how to tell nature to make the things for us, so we have more. Then we learn how nature does it, and do it ourselve, and we never run out. We are NOWHERE NEAR being able to crank out spidersilk with nano-manufacturing. We're nowhere near being able to crank out ANYTHING with nanoscale manufacturing.
Leave telling us what science can to to the scientists.
Now, I admit I'm not a lawyer. I'm physicist, and a mere student at that. However, I come from a long line of lawyers. So, I'm going to call you out on this one. While in the direct word of the law, one might be able to force a civil liability case for a car theft; I'm going on very expert advice here that it would be thrown out of the court. According to my advisors, all of whom are partners at major firms across the nation, civil liability like this would not fly when the item is feloniously acquired.
These analogies are entirely irrelevant! The computer itself causes no harm... you can't fall down a computer; you can't have your leg mangled by a computer. The harm is caused by the person using the device to commit harm. And I don't think that if some thugs chose to throw a person down my well, or if someone took, my bear trap and put it in someone else's path, that any court in the nation would prosecute me.
In my admittedly limited experience, civil social liability like this is only applicable in certain specific cases, such as parents allowing teens to drive while intoxicated, and failure to take reasonable means to secure firearms. However, even in these cases, if reasonable means are taken, and the teen still drives, or the gun is still stolen, liability ceases.
Quote me one relevant case or ruling in the American justice system, and I will shut directly up. But I don't think you can. There really isn't sufficient precedent to draw the conclusion you want. In fact, I don't know that there is any precedent.
We're not talking about leaving the hypothetical houses door unlocked here, people. We are talking about failing to purchase the utmost in super bank vault doors, and spend the hundreds or even thousands of man-hours such a security system would require to maintain. We're talking about buying a cheap master lock, and maybe a deadbolt, and being confident that no one's going to really try to force your lock, because you live way out in the 'burbs.
Oh, and the universe isn't gray. It's black and white, and a whole bunch of colors, too. We just can't tell for sure which color it is at any given time.
No. No, there would not be. This is neither logical nor feasible What you're saying is tantamount to suggesting that a crime is the fault of the victim. If we adopt this stance in relation to one type of crime, then it could be extended over time to every sort of crime. The foundation of justice systems, since the beginning of recorded law, has been laying the fault for the crime with the criminal. We can't turn around now and start saying "it's your fault i hacked/cracked/whatever-ed your box- you didn't have tight enough security." That is ludicrous. It is the fault of the criminal who gains illegal and unauthorized access to a resource, not the person who fails to control sufficiently that resource.
Following in your logic, we would soon reach the point of "it's your fault i shot you... i was just firing my gun around at random, and you stepped in front of my bullets. and you weren't wearing bulletproof armor. i'm not to blame." I can't stress this enough... crime is, and always will be, solely the fault of the criminal parties.
What you're saying is essentially that computer crime should not be a crime if the box is not secure enough. Essentially, you seem to think that if the crime is too easy, it shouldn't be a crime. That's absurd. Think about what you are saying. Read some law. Apply the laws of logic. Then rethink your opinion. Just because there is a new paradigm doesn't mean we have to change the basic laws of justice and morality. Humans are still the same... the basic codes of justic that human society has been following for millenia will be too.
in that case, i readily admit that BSE is a major problem. as a non-infected prion carrier myself, i'm quite familiar with the ramifications of the disease.
however, that brings up the point that, as far as i've seen, BSE is a naturally occuring disease, a consequence not of unchecked science but rather of evolution and natural selection. admittedly, the practice of using offal in animal feed is repugnant, but it has been in use for centuries. blaming science for BSE is tantamount to blaming meteorologists because people can be struck by lightning. it seems to me that science should be congratulated for their progress, not shamed for the existence of nature. i remember when i was living in europe, in the late 80s and early 90s, they didn't even know what caused BSE. at least now with the discovery of prions, the progress of the disease can be checked to some degree, and a cure can be researched.
It is attitudes like those you express here that hold the scientific community back from its true potential. The concept you propose, that science should be governed by the whims of the uneducated masses, is preposterous. The establishment of a "watchdog body" to "inform the public properly" would be both ineffective and crippling to the science. Regardless of how the watchdog body acts, the media is going to portray any new scientific developement in the way that will get the best reaction from their audiences, most of whom are uneducated and given to shock journalism and sensationalism. Your hypothetical watchdog body can trumpet the positives of nanotechnology all you want, but the media will still seize upon the minute possibility that something could go wrong, simply because this is the best story. Look at the media play last year, regarding the possible generation of a "strangelet" at the large hadron particle collider. If this event happened, i don't debate that it could end life as we know it. But the probability of a strangelet generation event is so absurdly low it is incalculable. Not only did the media blatantly ignore scientific fact put to it by multitudes of physicists around the world, they pushed the story so hard that the collider is loosing funding. Is this what you want for nanotechnology, one of the most intrigueing and potentially world changing developements ever?
In essence, you blame science for something that is not at all science's fault. If you want to establish a watchdog group, make it watch, not the scientists, but rather the media that distorts and lies about what science is doing. It is not the fault of science that the public is uneducated and the media is adept at exploiting that. It is not the fault of science that the media is willing to conjure facts out of nothing, to accept the ideas of un-accredited "experts" above those of researching scientists. The corruption of media is not the fault of science. Science should not be made to suffer for the stupidity of the masses.
note: yep, that's an elitist opinion. it's also the truth. live with it.