Right. The idea was that the Cylons hadn't been heard from in 40+ years, and so protecting against them was no longer the primary purpose of the Colonial fleet (what was? Putting down rebellions? Fighting space pirates?). Thus, the benefits of features like networking and sliding doors would start to outweigh the perceived threat (or, more likely, the defense contractors building the ships wanted to make them shiny). There's a bit of this suggested in Baltar's first scene, where he's giving an interview advocating the elimination of bans regarding AI research.
If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon? My line of reasoning here is something similar to one I've heard about airplanes: in many senses, if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.
I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.
Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?
Would classifying broadband providers as common carriers not be an effective solution to this as well? There's a WhiteHouse.gov petition circulating that so far has surprisingly little support.
I'm fine with this as a solution, but the S3 is hardly a flagship any more, and I haven't seen a version for the Moto X, HTC One or Nexus 4/5 (and I will never buy another Samsung after my horrible experiences with the Galaxy Relay--essentially an S3 with a keyboard).
Hell, considering no flagship phone has sported a physical keyboard in years, I'm likely sold anyway. I was seriously debating getting a Nexus 5, but I actually prefer Cyanogenmod over stock Android.
I've read about solutions to that (electromagnetic repulsion, laser targeting systems, coating your ship in plasma). The best option is probably just use the incoming material as fuel, which also potentially solves your fuel woes.
Actually, at the time I worked this out, and at the time I wrote that comment, I was completely unaware this was a "thing" for relativistic travel--I'd seen it used once or twice for short distances, but nothing going any considerable fraction of c. I guess there's really nothing new under the sun (or any other suns for that matter).
That's what I remember, too. Although that only applies to the "chronology" of 3001. Clarke has explicitly stated that 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 all exist in separate but similar universes (read: he was too lazy to worry about continuity issues across novels).
I worked out this whole interstellar travel problem years ago. Also solves the problem of the negative effects of zero gee in space.
All you need is to have your ship accelerate at a constant rate of one gee, do that for half the trip, then turn the ship around and decelerate at the same speed until you get to your final destination.
The acceleration solves all your artificial gravity woes, and relativity solves all your lifespan worries--by my calculations, a trip to anywhere in the universe using this method would only take about two years for the passenger.
Of course, you need a way to fuel a ship that's accelerating/decelerating at one gee for two years, but that's just an engineering problem.
There was the second season Babylon 5 episode, "The Long Dark" in which a Sleeper ship carrying some early human colonists drifts into B5 space. Frankly, I think if your species develops FTL capabilities, the first order of business should really be to "warp" to all those generational/sleeper ships and pick 'em up.
All the developers I know smoke 2+ packs a day and take weeks off to go to gaming/comic conventions. Maybe if they didn't do that, they could put away a bit more money.
I'd be pretty useless post-apocalypse, outside of teaching professions (PhD in physics, working as a data scientist, very dependent on computers), but my wife, despite working in IT for a decade, currently works as a production weaver, is an expert knitter, can work a letterpress (and does her own type-setting), knows how to can and makes soap, candles and bread from scratch. Even assuming a Revolution-style apocalypse (no electricity whatsoever), she's got enough useful skills to float the both of us, easy.
My boss has started using this, because he knows that if I see an email come in at 10pm, I will open it on my phone, read it, and then promptly forget about it before I get to work the next morning.
The balloon analogy of course begs the question: what's inside the balloon? Is there actually a "center" of the universe, somehow outside our 3D* hypersurface? I've seen the related question posed a lot by cosmologists asking what's "outside" the universe (see: multiverse), but I'd think "inside" would be the more interesting question.
*I intentionally did not include time in the dimensional count, since it's not a "spatial" dimension, but I'm not sure about how the other seven string theory dimensions factor in. I very intentionally did not go into that branch of physics.
The irony is, of course, that this principle derives from Galilean relativity. So the only way to scientifically justify his "Galileo was Wrong" assertion is if Galileo was Right.
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Right. The idea was that the Cylons hadn't been heard from in 40+ years, and so protecting against them was no longer the primary purpose of the Colonial fleet (what was? Putting down rebellions? Fighting space pirates?). Thus, the benefits of features like networking and sliding doors would start to outweigh the perceived threat (or, more likely, the defense contractors building the ships wanted to make them shiny). There's a bit of this suggested in Baltar's first scene, where he's giving an interview advocating the elimination of bans regarding AI research.
If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon? My line of reasoning here is something similar to one I've heard about airplanes: in many senses, if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.
Erm, link fail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7
I wonder how many modern hackers would be able to make sense of, say, a PDP-7 if given physical access.
I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.
Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?
Would classifying broadband providers as common carriers not be an effective solution to this as well? There's a WhiteHouse.gov petition circulating that so far has surprisingly little support.
The divestments, mostly in the U.S. Midwest, would deliver about $19.5 billion in value to Comcast shareholders, the companies said.
So yeah, they're "divesting" flyover states.
Let's ignore for a minute how it is to navigate the internet through Tor. Let's also ignore for a minute that the FBI has compromised roughly half of Tor sites and that they control a fair number of Tor nodes. Why do you think masking your IP will help you at all when you log onto Facebook and *give them* all your personal data?
I'm fine with this as a solution, but the S3 is hardly a flagship any more, and I haven't seen a version for the Moto X, HTC One or Nexus 4/5 (and I will never buy another Samsung after my horrible experiences with the Galaxy Relay--essentially an S3 with a keyboard).
Hell, considering no flagship phone has sported a physical keyboard in years, I'm likely sold anyway. I was seriously debating getting a Nexus 5, but I actually prefer Cyanogenmod over stock Android.
I've read about solutions to that (electromagnetic repulsion, laser targeting systems, coating your ship in plasma). The best option is probably just use the incoming material as fuel, which also potentially solves your fuel woes.
Actually, at the time I worked this out, and at the time I wrote that comment, I was completely unaware this was a "thing" for relativistic travel--I'd seen it used once or twice for short distances, but nothing going any considerable fraction of c. I guess there's really nothing new under the sun (or any other suns for that matter).
Einstein also thought Quantum Mechanics was a pile of shit. See: Clarke's First Law. Coined, almost certainly, with him (or Bohr) in mind.
That's what I remember, too. Although that only applies to the "chronology" of 3001. Clarke has explicitly stated that 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 all exist in separate but similar universes (read: he was too lazy to worry about continuity issues across novels).
I worked out this whole interstellar travel problem years ago. Also solves the problem of the negative effects of zero gee in space.
All you need is to have your ship accelerate at a constant rate of one gee, do that for half the trip, then turn the ship around and decelerate at the same speed until you get to your final destination.
The acceleration solves all your artificial gravity woes, and relativity solves all your lifespan worries--by my calculations, a trip to anywhere in the universe using this method would only take about two years for the passenger.
Of course, you need a way to fuel a ship that's accelerating/decelerating at one gee for two years, but that's just an engineering problem.
There was the second season Babylon 5 episode, "The Long Dark" in which a Sleeper ship carrying some early human colonists drifts into B5 space. Frankly, I think if your species develops FTL capabilities, the first order of business should really be to "warp" to all those generational/sleeper ships and pick 'em up.
Thank you! My experience is in central Ohio, Austin and DC.
All the developers I know smoke 2+ packs a day and take weeks off to go to gaming/comic conventions. Maybe if they didn't do that, they could put away a bit more money.
Not Google. Google's Washington lobbying office.
I'd be pretty useless post-apocalypse, outside of teaching professions (PhD in physics, working as a data scientist, very dependent on computers), but my wife, despite working in IT for a decade, currently works as a production weaver, is an expert knitter, can work a letterpress (and does her own type-setting), knows how to can and makes soap, candles and bread from scratch. Even assuming a Revolution-style apocalypse (no electricity whatsoever), she's got enough useful skills to float the both of us, easy.
If they could, they wouldn't be working in a coal mine.
PDF Warning. Coal miners make upwards of $80k/year in most of the states listed. That's a lot more than most programmers I know. js.
My boss has started using this, because he knows that if I see an email come in at 10pm, I will open it on my phone, read it, and then promptly forget about it before I get to work the next morning.
NASA says the balloon analogy sucks.
The balloon analogy of course begs the question: what's inside the balloon? Is there actually a "center" of the universe, somehow outside our 3D* hypersurface? I've seen the related question posed a lot by cosmologists asking what's "outside" the universe (see: multiverse), but I'd think "inside" would be the more interesting question.
*I intentionally did not include time in the dimensional count, since it's not a "spatial" dimension, but I'm not sure about how the other seven string theory dimensions factor in. I very intentionally did not go into that branch of physics.
The irony is, of course, that this principle derives from Galilean relativity. So the only way to scientifically justify his "Galileo was Wrong" assertion is if Galileo was Right.