If I have it set to auto-update as soon as the update is available, it's hard to argue I'm being irresponsible. If it takes longer to get the update to everyone than it takes the attacker to create a new exploit, that's a problem -- and not one that users can solve.
What would the new system look like? The best I have so far is something that distributes the patch, encrypted, and then releases the key some time later when many systems already have the patch downloaded and can install it immediately. Of course, I'm not sure how much that improves over just using bittorrent to distribute the whole thing with much higher aggregate bandwidth.
Something can be owned by society, but have restrictions on it, like copyright. The copyright can be owned by an individual. I see no need to have the specific work itself be owned in order for copyright to function; in fact, that's how the law is written currently.
Why do you need ownership of the idea, as opposed to a limited term copyright, in order to make money by writing software, music, or books? I also see no need for copyrights to be anywhere near as long as they currently are -- only a very, very tiny fraction of works are still profitable after that long, and that payoff has very little incentive value at the time the work is created.
Why do you assume I'm trying to justify piracy? Nowhere in here have I said I'm against compensating authors for their work. I'm in favor of such compensation, but I'm also against both the current copyright system and the ownership of ideas that the original poster seems to be advocating.
It has been codified. Look at the form of the copyright and patent laws -- they don't grant ownership of the idea at all. Look at the justification in the Constitution -- the premise is that copyright and patent require explicit permission from the constitution to exist at all, since they go *against* the natural way of doing things (ie ideas owned by society). Look at the writing of the founders discussing the matter, and you see the same concept -- patents and copyrights are limited term monopolies, granted because it is useful to do so, not because of any inherent right of ownership.
The views I espouse form the very core of our copyright and patent systems; they have merely been forgotten by the public, while a very well-funded campaign attempts to dismantle them entirely. Perhaps it has succeeded, and we as a society have changed our minds -- but if that is the case, it needs to be expressed in very forceful terms -- specifically, a constitutional amendment permitting unlimited term copyright.
The right shield is probably a very thin shield, well in advance of the craft, and then a heavy shield -- the dust spec explodes on contact with the thin shield, and then has some time to disperse before hitting the actual armor. Note that a 1mg dust spec at 1% c has the energy content of 1kg of TNT. The armor should be doable, but it's not trivial -- and as you get much faster, it gets *really* nontrivial.
No, ideas and physical objects are fundamentally different. I see nothing wrong with limited term copyrights -- 20 years, maybe less. Tell me, in what way would your incentive to create software be diminished if you could only hold the copyright for 20 years? Do you have any belief that you can make money from the 20 year old version of your software? If not, why shouldn't it pass into the public domain?
Ownership of physical objects makes sense because if I take your car, then you no longer have a car. If I copy your software... you still have your software. So there's no fundamental moral argument for the ownership of software. There is, however, a strong practical (not moral or ethical) argument for ownership of limited term copyrights, intended to promote creation of such works.
No, that's not what I want. Current estimates put maximum Isp for closed cycle gas core rockets low -- perhaps 2000s or so, maximum. That's far better than chemicals, certainly, but not anywhere near what the other designs are capable of. The open cycle designs also spew radioactive exhaust.
For the first stage, chemical rockets will do just fine. Once you're out of the atmosphere, the high-Isp nuclear designs are fine -- just make sure the flamey stuff misses the Earth, which is a relatively trivial trajectory constraint, and it'll leave the solar system.
There are, of course, nontrivial issues about reliability and accidents and such. Those, along with some significant engineering headaches, will keep any of these designs from becoming reality for quite some time yet.
Gee, what a coincidence. I do make my money by selling ideas. It just happens that I've found ways to do it that don't require me to indefinitely claim ownership of them. After all, that's what solving engineering and software problems on contract amounts to, right?
As should be clear from my original post, I'm not against copyright in an appropriately limited form (ditto patents). I am, however, quite strongly against the idea that copyrightable works are in any way "ownable" by an individual. The copyright is owned by the author, and grants some monopoly privileges; the work is owned by society once created. (Obviously a single copy of the work, as a physical object, is owned by its owner.)
You're changing the argument again. Stop it, it's disingenuous at best. Is your complaint about gambling? Or is it about entertainment? Or, as you would now state, is it that the system by which we choose who to give money to is so badly broken that we're giving money to people who are better off than those we're taking it from?
So, let's return to my previous, as yet unanswered, question: Are you trying to say that people who receive federal aid should be barred from entertaining themselves? In other words, do you truly believe entertainment should be the privilege of the wealthy alone?
And, to return to the original question: If the poor are allowed to entertain themselves like everyone else, why is it worse to spend $10 on gambling than it is to spend that same $10 on going to a movie?
No, the argument works fine with "film" in place as long as you read "Films are part of what make up our culture," etc. The incentive to create does not require ownership. It doesn't even require any real quantity of control (see Shakespeare), but I think it's pretty clear that a modest amount of control vastly increases the incentive. But I fail to see how the differential incentive to create a film from providing 100 years of control instead of 20 is enough to justify the loss to society.
While I agree with you wholeheartedly, the claim that people are sharing with a few thousand of their closest friends on the internet rings a bit hollow.
Ideas are owned by society. They are what make up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let their creator exercise some limited degree of control over them. That does not mean any one person can own an idea any more than they can own a sunset.
You're still conflating the two issues I was distinguishing between in my post. Issue one: is gambling immoral enough that we should ban it? Issue two: is spending money on entertainment cause for revoking federal aid? Responsibly enjoying gambling costs about the same as other forms of entertainment -- if it's costing much more than that, it's probably not responsible. So, if one person goes to the movies, and the other gambles, why is one more or less deserving of federal aid than the other?
Of course, you've also made a remarkably transparent attempt to confuse the issue by implying that some unrelated person's decision to work longer than required at cost to their personal life somehow has any bearing whatsoever on whether an act by our hypothetical aid recipient is moral. The relevance there is, of course, exactly zero.
So which is it: is gambling so immoral that it should be banned? Or is entertainment the privilege of the wealthy alone? Or is it just that you feel some special right to dictate how other people live their lives?
It all depends how you do the math. In the reference frame of the magnetic field, there is a direct force on the moving charged particle, and no electric field is present beyond what the charged particle itself creates. In the frame of the particle, the magnetic field shows up as partially an electric field, which is where the force comes from (since the particle isn't moving in its own reference frame). See special relativity and the Lorentz transformation.
The 3.8 day half-life might cause some difficulty. Not to mention that the short half-life implies a high radiation output. Generally, it's a good thing not to have your propellant tanks glow on their own.
Besides, $6000 per milliliter is expensive, even by aerospace standards.
That's ln(m1/m2); units analysis is sufficient to show your version is wrong (you can't take the log of a quantity with units in it).
The problem is that in chemical rocketry, Isp and density Isp matter, but in ion engines energy efficiency matters too. Raising the Isp raises the mass efficiency, but at high Isp the energy efficiency drops. Since the solar cells and power electronics are heavy, energy efficiency matters. For most current applications, ion engines have more Isp than they need, even with xenon. Besides, excessively long burn times add a delta-v penalty for doing too much of the burn high in the gravity well.
The drag problem isn't that clear cut. The reference frame isn't "spacecraft velocity" in any sense you'd normally think of it -- it's the solar wind, at ~500,000 km/s. In interstellar space it slows enough that fusion engines could easily have a higher exhaust speed, up to several % c spacecraft velocity. The problem becomes one of collecting enough hydrogen, and getting it to fuse. In-system, though, you can use the solar wind drag to your advantage, at least if you want to head outbound. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the issues involved.
It's more complicated than that. To good approximation, ion engines add energy, not momentum or velocity, to the particles they accelerate. So heavier ions leave slower, resulting in lower Isp. Thus, Xenon has relatively low Isp. However, it has the huge advantage of being easy to ionize, a gas, and nontoxic (mercury manages the first two but not the third (at ion engine pressures it's a gas), and adds the downside of tending to dissolve the engine too much).
However, for most ion engine applications, Isp isn't the primary concern -- thrust is. Ion engines easily manage more Isp than they need, but the solar cells to power them are heavy. It would be simpler and produce a shorter flight time to lower the Isp, not to mention reducing the delta-v required (orbital transfers using very long burns, as with ion engines, pay a penalty in delta-v for doing some of their burn higher in the gravity well than they have to; this can be as much as 50% iirc).
In short, Xenon is chosen because it's easy to work with and not too expensive; the heavy mass is a plus in many applications, but the reasons are more complicated than most people realize.
What kind of mission delta-v did you have in mind, exactly? Some of the modern nuclear engine proposals can get single-stage delta-v over 1% c (nuclear salt water rocket and fission fragment rocket, for example). There is some debate about whether going even that fast in interstellar space is feasible, I believe. Besides, modern analysis indicates that there isn't enough hydrogen in the local neighborhood for Bussard's proposal to work, even if you manage to build a functioning fusion reactor for it.
Alas, the energy requirements are tough. About the only option is some form of nuclear propulsion -- though there are a number of interesting varieties of nuclear. The original Orion concept is an interesting one -- I've been reading some of the original cost estimates (pdf), and they get quite interesting -- $3.30 per kg for a Jupiter mission, assuming reasonable costs for the plutonium. (Not 2008 dollars, and I don't know what the actual price of plutonium is these days.)
More modern interesting proposals include the nuclear salt-water rocket and the fission fragment rocket. Of course, neither of these is particularly well suited to in-atmosphere work, and you have to be careful where you point the exhaust (but since it's moving faster than solar escape velocity, that's a relatively simple problem).
I still want a law that puts casino patrons on a public assistance black list.
Why? There are people who gamble responsibly. What's worse about that than other forms of entertainment? If you're being responsible about it, it costs about the same. Or are you one of those people that believes any quantity of entertainment should only be for the wealthy?
So let me try one, from a fully human perspective but that a computer might plausibly find. As a tech geek (you read/.) and a NASCAR fan, odds are at least decent you'll be interested in Rocket Racing. Well, once they actually start having races and stuff.
I highly recommend some sort of battery charge controller. I happen to have used and like the MorningStar SunSaver models, but there are a wide variety out there. At $50 or so, they're not that expensive, and they'll make your battery last a lot longer, especially if you deep cycle it and let it charge completely often. A simple diode will work, but it will overcharge the battery and shorten its lifespan. Longer battery life will easily pay for the charge controller for most usage patterns.
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If I have it set to auto-update as soon as the update is available, it's hard to argue I'm being irresponsible. If it takes longer to get the update to everyone than it takes the attacker to create a new exploit, that's a problem -- and not one that users can solve.
What would the new system look like? The best I have so far is something that distributes the patch, encrypted, and then releases the key some time later when many systems already have the patch downloaded and can install it immediately. Of course, I'm not sure how much that improves over just using bittorrent to distribute the whole thing with much higher aggregate bandwidth.
Something can be owned by society, but have restrictions on it, like copyright. The copyright can be owned by an individual. I see no need to have the specific work itself be owned in order for copyright to function; in fact, that's how the law is written currently.
Why do you need ownership of the idea, as opposed to a limited term copyright, in order to make money by writing software, music, or books? I also see no need for copyrights to be anywhere near as long as they currently are -- only a very, very tiny fraction of works are still profitable after that long, and that payoff has very little incentive value at the time the work is created.
Why do you assume I'm trying to justify piracy? Nowhere in here have I said I'm against compensating authors for their work. I'm in favor of such compensation, but I'm also against both the current copyright system and the ownership of ideas that the original poster seems to be advocating.
It has been codified. Look at the form of the copyright and patent laws -- they don't grant ownership of the idea at all. Look at the justification in the Constitution -- the premise is that copyright and patent require explicit permission from the constitution to exist at all, since they go *against* the natural way of doing things (ie ideas owned by society). Look at the writing of the founders discussing the matter, and you see the same concept -- patents and copyrights are limited term monopolies, granted because it is useful to do so, not because of any inherent right of ownership.
The views I espouse form the very core of our copyright and patent systems; they have merely been forgotten by the public, while a very well-funded campaign attempts to dismantle them entirely. Perhaps it has succeeded, and we as a society have changed our minds -- but if that is the case, it needs to be expressed in very forceful terms -- specifically, a constitutional amendment permitting unlimited term copyright.
The right shield is probably a very thin shield, well in advance of the craft, and then a heavy shield -- the dust spec explodes on contact with the thin shield, and then has some time to disperse before hitting the actual armor. Note that a 1mg dust spec at 1% c has the energy content of 1kg of TNT. The armor should be doable, but it's not trivial -- and as you get much faster, it gets *really* nontrivial.
No, ideas and physical objects are fundamentally different. I see nothing wrong with limited term copyrights -- 20 years, maybe less. Tell me, in what way would your incentive to create software be diminished if you could only hold the copyright for 20 years? Do you have any belief that you can make money from the 20 year old version of your software? If not, why shouldn't it pass into the public domain?
Ownership of physical objects makes sense because if I take your car, then you no longer have a car. If I copy your software... you still have your software. So there's no fundamental moral argument for the ownership of software. There is, however, a strong practical (not moral or ethical) argument for ownership of limited term copyrights, intended to promote creation of such works.
No, that's not what I want. Current estimates put maximum Isp for closed cycle gas core rockets low -- perhaps 2000s or so, maximum. That's far better than chemicals, certainly, but not anywhere near what the other designs are capable of. The open cycle designs also spew radioactive exhaust.
For the first stage, chemical rockets will do just fine. Once you're out of the atmosphere, the high-Isp nuclear designs are fine -- just make sure the flamey stuff misses the Earth, which is a relatively trivial trajectory constraint, and it'll leave the solar system.
There are, of course, nontrivial issues about reliability and accidents and such. Those, along with some significant engineering headaches, will keep any of these designs from becoming reality for quite some time yet.
Gee, what a coincidence. I do make my money by selling ideas. It just happens that I've found ways to do it that don't require me to indefinitely claim ownership of them. After all, that's what solving engineering and software problems on contract amounts to, right?
As should be clear from my original post, I'm not against copyright in an appropriately limited form (ditto patents). I am, however, quite strongly against the idea that copyrightable works are in any way "ownable" by an individual. The copyright is owned by the author, and grants some monopoly privileges; the work is owned by society once created. (Obviously a single copy of the work, as a physical object, is owned by its owner.)
You're changing the argument again. Stop it, it's disingenuous at best. Is your complaint about gambling? Or is it about entertainment? Or, as you would now state, is it that the system by which we choose who to give money to is so badly broken that we're giving money to people who are better off than those we're taking it from?
So, let's return to my previous, as yet unanswered, question: Are you trying to say that people who receive federal aid should be barred from entertaining themselves? In other words, do you truly believe entertainment should be the privilege of the wealthy alone?
And, to return to the original question: If the poor are allowed to entertain themselves like everyone else, why is it worse to spend $10 on gambling than it is to spend that same $10 on going to a movie?
No, the argument works fine with "film" in place as long as you read "Films are part of what make up our culture," etc. The incentive to create does not require ownership. It doesn't even require any real quantity of control (see Shakespeare), but I think it's pretty clear that a modest amount of control vastly increases the incentive. But I fail to see how the differential incentive to create a film from providing 100 years of control instead of 20 is enough to justify the loss to society.
While I agree with you wholeheartedly, the claim that people are sharing with a few thousand of their closest friends on the internet rings a bit hollow.
Ideas are owned by society. They are what make up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let their creator exercise some limited degree of control over them. That does not mean any one person can own an idea any more than they can own a sunset.
You are, of course, correct. That should be m/s.
You're still conflating the two issues I was distinguishing between in my post. Issue one: is gambling immoral enough that we should ban it? Issue two: is spending money on entertainment cause for revoking federal aid? Responsibly enjoying gambling costs about the same as other forms of entertainment -- if it's costing much more than that, it's probably not responsible. So, if one person goes to the movies, and the other gambles, why is one more or less deserving of federal aid than the other?
Of course, you've also made a remarkably transparent attempt to confuse the issue by implying that some unrelated person's decision to work longer than required at cost to their personal life somehow has any bearing whatsoever on whether an act by our hypothetical aid recipient is moral. The relevance there is, of course, exactly zero.
So which is it: is gambling so immoral that it should be banned? Or is entertainment the privilege of the wealthy alone? Or is it just that you feel some special right to dictate how other people live their lives?
It all depends how you do the math. In the reference frame of the magnetic field, there is a direct force on the moving charged particle, and no electric field is present beyond what the charged particle itself creates. In the frame of the particle, the magnetic field shows up as partially an electric field, which is where the force comes from (since the particle isn't moving in its own reference frame). See special relativity and the Lorentz transformation.
The 3.8 day half-life might cause some difficulty. Not to mention that the short half-life implies a high radiation output. Generally, it's a good thing not to have your propellant tanks glow on their own.
Besides, $6000 per milliliter is expensive, even by aerospace standards.
That's ln(m1/m2); units analysis is sufficient to show your version is wrong (you can't take the log of a quantity with units in it).
The problem is that in chemical rocketry, Isp and density Isp matter, but in ion engines energy efficiency matters too. Raising the Isp raises the mass efficiency, but at high Isp the energy efficiency drops. Since the solar cells and power electronics are heavy, energy efficiency matters. For most current applications, ion engines have more Isp than they need, even with xenon. Besides, excessively long burn times add a delta-v penalty for doing too much of the burn high in the gravity well.
The drag problem isn't that clear cut. The reference frame isn't "spacecraft velocity" in any sense you'd normally think of it -- it's the solar wind, at ~500,000 km/s. In interstellar space it slows enough that fusion engines could easily have a higher exhaust speed, up to several % c spacecraft velocity. The problem becomes one of collecting enough hydrogen, and getting it to fuse. In-system, though, you can use the solar wind drag to your advantage, at least if you want to head outbound. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the issues involved.
It's more complicated than that. To good approximation, ion engines add energy, not momentum or velocity, to the particles they accelerate. So heavier ions leave slower, resulting in lower Isp. Thus, Xenon has relatively low Isp. However, it has the huge advantage of being easy to ionize, a gas, and nontoxic (mercury manages the first two but not the third (at ion engine pressures it's a gas), and adds the downside of tending to dissolve the engine too much).
However, for most ion engine applications, Isp isn't the primary concern -- thrust is. Ion engines easily manage more Isp than they need, but the solar cells to power them are heavy. It would be simpler and produce a shorter flight time to lower the Isp, not to mention reducing the delta-v required (orbital transfers using very long burns, as with ion engines, pay a penalty in delta-v for doing some of their burn higher in the gravity well than they have to; this can be as much as 50% iirc).
In short, Xenon is chosen because it's easy to work with and not too expensive; the heavy mass is a plus in many applications, but the reasons are more complicated than most people realize.
What kind of mission delta-v did you have in mind, exactly? Some of the modern nuclear engine proposals can get single-stage delta-v over 1% c (nuclear salt water rocket and fission fragment rocket, for example). There is some debate about whether going even that fast in interstellar space is feasible, I believe. Besides, modern analysis indicates that there isn't enough hydrogen in the local neighborhood for Bussard's proposal to work, even if you manage to build a functioning fusion reactor for it.
Alas, the energy requirements are tough. About the only option is some form of nuclear propulsion -- though there are a number of interesting varieties of nuclear. The original Orion concept is an interesting one -- I've been reading some of the original cost estimates (pdf), and they get quite interesting -- $3.30 per kg for a Jupiter mission, assuming reasonable costs for the plutonium. (Not 2008 dollars, and I don't know what the actual price of plutonium is these days.)
More modern interesting proposals include the nuclear salt-water rocket and the fission fragment rocket. Of course, neither of these is particularly well suited to in-atmosphere work, and you have to be careful where you point the exhaust (but since it's moving faster than solar escape velocity, that's a relatively simple problem).
I still want a law that puts casino patrons on a public assistance black list.
Why? There are people who gamble responsibly. What's worse about that than other forms of entertainment? If you're being responsible about it, it costs about the same. Or are you one of those people that believes any quantity of entertainment should only be for the wealthy?
So let me try one, from a fully human perspective but that a computer might plausibly find. As a tech geek (you read /.) and a NASCAR fan, odds are at least decent you'll be interested in Rocket Racing. Well, once they actually start having races and stuff.
I highly recommend some sort of battery charge controller. I happen to have used and like the MorningStar SunSaver models, but there are a wide variety out there. At $50 or so, they're not that expensive, and they'll make your battery last a lot longer, especially if you deep cycle it and let it charge completely often. A simple diode will work, but it will overcharge the battery and shorten its lifespan. Longer battery life will easily pay for the charge controller for most usage patterns.
Then.. Umm... It wasn't bricked. If you can fix it from software, aka without having to pull the bios chip off the motherboard, it's not bricked.
Broken, sure. But we have a term for that, and it's not "bricked." It's "broken."