There are still seasons in the tropics, even if the lengths of the days don't change that much. Rainfall patterns are one thing that changes a lot between seasons. Beyond that, it's one big ol' earth, and any one part is affected by the seasons in another part.
I live in the temperate zone and I've been trying to get a Michelia tree to flower indoors for several years. The plant is healthy, but it needs a particular combination of tropical rainfall patterns, temperature and light at just the right time of year to flower (and thus, reproduce). If it were in Hong Kong it'd be doing that every year. Seasons are important to just about everything on earth - the fact that humans are less directly affected by them just means we're less likely to immediately notice the subtle ways they affect everybody else on the planet (many of whom we would like to eat, like french fry beasts and chocolate truffle plants).
I found that pretty funny too - so the possible presence of huge amounts of water, stuff of life, is a *bad* thing? Plus by the time we get there we'll be all about hydrogen power - besides the obvious benefits of not having to drink your own urine, here's a ready source of hydrogen for power and oxygen to breathe. It's practically a frozen candy store.
Actually, life doesn't expand to fill niches so much as create them. Initial life strategies are pretty generalist because a lifeless planet is pretty bleak and uniform. There no herbivore niches to "fill" until there are plants; there are no carnivore niches until there are herbivores. Of all the niches for life one might choose to abstractly classify, the vastest majority were created by other life.
Life begets life, just because it does. That doesn't make it a moral imperative to spread an reproduce (even if you're a fundamentalist christian, it actually only says "spread across the EARTH" or something equivalent). We have a choice of where and whether we should go. For instance, it would probably be naughty to go terraform Europa, but you might say the same of anywhere. Who's to say there won't be like on Mars one day? Maybe the swelling, dying sun will warm it enough for a whole new biosphere to evolve - unless we get there first and reshape it in our own planet's image. There are niches at all points in the future - which ones should we fill and which should we leave alone?
I don't really have an opinion on that, just offering it up.;)
I wouldn't change that name, but I'd sure love to know where it came from. I picture someone centuries ago whose peculiar gastrointestinal tract was capable of producing the most heavenly perfume. People came from miles around just to bathe in the splendiferous scent. He (assuming a patriarchal name bequeathment) was showered with gifts of beans and garlic, and never went hungry. His fingers were red from laughing, playing children constantly pulling them.
Not at all. The cheapening of human life (and other life, really) is a product of industrialisation. It really is the rise of the machine.
It's also one of the products of overpopulation. That has happened before, but never so commonly before the 20th century. In a small community, each individual life has a great impact. In an anonymous society that's no longer true.
In fact the entire notion of a "value" to human life is a modern one. Think about it. At one time the life of a person (albeit where "person" was variously defined but often meant "male of the correct racial ancestry") wasn't something you'd compare to goods; people weren't a commodity. Nowadays they absolutely are. Cotter pin that prevents gas tank explosions? Too expensive a unit cost - we'll settle the lawsuits. There was a time when this wouldn't even have made sense. So the final reason why human life has become cheap is because of the notion that currency can be used to evaluate anything. Not just human lives but entire ecosystems.
We still have vestiges of the older system of thought; murder is still held to be qualitatively different from property crime (though the attendant civil cases with cash damages will gradually erode that). But I don't think we'll see a return to that way of thinking until the end of money - and while I do think that's inevitable, it's probably gonna get worse before it gets better.
You can argue that Hiroshima ended a war that would have worn on, all right. What's not clear is whether the first bomb needed to be dropped on a populated area, let alone a city full of civilians. Most shows of superior force begin with a warning shot.
More clear is that Nagasaki was an obscene weapons test. Different bomb, different terrain, let's see what happens to *these* live targets.
Nagasaki sort of undoes the whole argument that the main intent of these events was to convince the Japanese to surrender. I've never seen any argument that they were even given the chance to after Hiroshima.
Beyond that, it was sort of a bluff anyway - at least I sure hope it was. Say they hadn't surrendered - would the US really have vaporised every city in Japan to reduce American troop losses? Could the American psyche really reconcile all those schools and hospitals and homes with shortening the war? It's an interesting question, especially given that there was still a strong idea then of rules of engagement. Killing massive numbers of unarmed civilians to protect armed troops is generally supposed to be not ok. But that is in fact what was done, not once but twice. Granted their was a much stronger presence of racism in the thought of the time and the Japanese had been demonised (they were indeed vicious in war, but then so is vaporising a city - war is always a constant escalation of viciousness).
I really feel the "wouldn't have surrendered otherwise" argument was constructed after the fact when the US government and people realised the scale of exactly what they'd done. The bombs weren't dropped in anything near so rational and calculating a manner. They were dropped because they were going to be dropped, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. This is why the full political and personal background (as previous posters have noted in other books) is absolutely essential to an understanding of these events.
In what way is it terrible? It is what it is. How good are you at converting photons into electrovoltaic potential with your skin?
It supplies a certain amount of power on average from a certain surface area. It'll be sufficient for some needs, insufficient for others. Beyond that, it doesn't have to stand alone anyway - it can simply reduce your use of mains power, not replace it. It's still a win, and once installed it lasts damn near forever.
If you think this is inefficient, you should really take a look at the crap in your house you can't power with it - your incandescent lights, TV set, refrigerator, hair dryer, computer. Is the problem really in supply or demand?
Another point people seldom make is that absorbing solar energy on the outside of a house saves cooling costs. At least 11% of the energy that would be absorbed as heat is instead being borne away as electricity. That's actually not a bad insulator (though dedicated solar heating & cooling schemes can do far better).
Personally I think wind power is going to achieve commercial success before solar power does, but this material is still a notable milestone. I played with silicon solar cells when I was a kid, and the one thing they were above all else was rigidly fragile.;)
I do understand that; I still think it's possible to write an image in regular data with a standard CD-R burner. It might be fainter than the Yamaha drive produced, but it would be visible in the right light or at the right angle.
The trick is to construct a dictionary so that writing large repeating sequences of pits or lands represents data while also building the picture - for instance twenty pits and a land would be one entry, thirty pits and a land would be another. Like I said, not necessarily any more efficient than simply dedicating part of the disc, but a neater hack.;)
It occurs to me now that the built-in error correction and block structure could create some issues, though.
Where do they even find these idiot self-proclaimed "expert" pundits?
From the original CNN article:
The poor quality of the photo NASA displayed last week has led some experts to suggest that better photographs of Columbia's final moments are being withheld for security reasons.
"It may represent the worst available image that shows the relevant phenomenon," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.
Or, you might be an idiot conspiracy theorist with nothing useful to offer.
The thing is that the quality of pundit commentary is always exactly this stupid - it's just usually not exposed. So why do they bother talking to these empty spaces? Because it's the easiest way to lend the appearance that the article writer actually talked to someone about it. By-the-numbers journalism.
I can't decide who I'd prefer to have a late-falling piece of shuttle landing gear land on their head, the useless pundit or the useless journalist. The latter should know better to than to ask idiot questions of people unqualified to offer a useful opinion. The former should know better than to answer.
Yup - but what would be really interesting is an encoding scheme to munge the data so that the chosen image would be produced across the entirety of the (full) disc, while still preserving a reasonable percentage of the optimal storage capacity. The details of doing that would resemble a compression scheme, though more likely with the opposite effect.
Offhand I don't see a reason why this couldn't be accomplished in software (by a modified Linux CD driver, for instance). Has anyone already done something like this?
It wouldn't be very efficient, of course (either in storage or in access speed - it might actually require caching the entire CD contents in order to extract the data), but then it's not like wanting to get an image on the CD in the first place makes that much sense anyway.;)
In my experience people who say things like "humans are greedy" (or "selfish") are themselves looking for an excuse to be greedy (or selfish). Funny how appeals to destiny relieve one of personal responsibility.
Ethology is an interesting study with all sorts of viewpoints on hawk/dove strategies in nature. But there's nothing natural about a wireless network, or a town, or an information economy. If people are going to design this system they can make it work and buffer it from exploitation. It just might take a bit more cleverness and creativity. Appealing to "natural" greed is just a way to avoid the issue, and really cheats the people who could offer those solutions as well as those who could benefit from them.
The aggregate value of their index is their product. One of the inputs to that index is these public domain case files (another is the hired attorneys you mention).
Right now they can use the cases to help build their index. Note that his is subtly distinct from incorporating the data itself, because the index is a separate entity. In doing so they derive tremendous value from those cases - the value of their product is based entirely on its size, and a big contributor to that is the contents (which they did not create, but derive value from).
To date those cases have been (I think?) public domain, which lets anyone make any derivative work they want and distribute or restrict it any way they want. That's the status quo, but that doesn't make it magically correct. It may not serve the people who paid for the original cases, for instance.
What if the case law had never been public domain, but had instead been released with a licence that says "you can use this all you like to enhance your database, but you always must make it publically and freely/cheaply available. Otherwise don't use it."? You can see the analogy to the GPL. Taxpayers may indeed be better served by releasing their work (the cases) on those terms. This may require the database company to get more creative in how they control access to their search tools, as well as actual document delivery. If they don't like it or can't make money that way, then they can't make money using the public case law - end of story. But it wouldn't come to that, because this doesn't really affect their actual value-laden product (the index) anyway. People are still going to pay a lot for their ability to discover data, even if they don't pay for the data itself. I do realise this is a very complicated distinction (in particular, how much and what kind of searching is necessary for public access?).
The thing is that a data index like Lexis is actually more about the interrelationships between data than the data itself. It does take hard work to establish that wealth, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily then be able to dictate terms of access. That they can now is more a historical accident than anything else.
But harder than what? Put two kids together and they'll immediately invent some little game along the lines of rock-scissors-paper. I really think abstract games have an innate appeal to people in this culture and just about any other. The earliest game I know of is Awari (aka Mancala) which is a wholly abstract application of some pebbles and dirt, probably many tens of thousands of years old. Arguably people were playing tag and hide-and-seek before that, but probably not by much in the scheme of things.
I do think you've raised an interesting and fairly deep issue, though - is there any point making games seem more "real"? If you do, does it even make the game any less abstract (being that it is, in the end, a false depiction)? I think you're saying "yes", but I probably wouldn't. It's a fascination of the industry, but I'm really not that sure it makes such a big difference to game players. Board games aren't becoming less popular lately, they're undergoing a German-led renaissance. Abstract entertainment will always be very, very popular, and so will real-world recreation. In many ways they're apples and orange anyway.
Good page (Quit Slashdot). Everyone here should read it.;)
Funny thing from the Al Gore critique critiqued page it links to - Gore is accused of "mispronouncing" the word [packet] router as "rooter". But I'm an experienced system and network admin, and that's how I pronounce it. A "rowter" is a woodworking tool; on the other hand, I pronounce it "root 66" (as I think Bob Dylan did).
I do realise that a lot of people say "router" with an ow, but a significant number I've talked to also don't. Is this because I'm Canadian? What do other non-Americans asy?
I nearly always use double quotes to search for phrases. It works extremely well with google. You can also combine multiple phrases, and unquoted terms as well.
In fact, I'm surprised no one else mentioned that searching for "pictures of mountains" (quotes included) yields 1320 hits, which are likely to be much more useful than the other 998,690 or so. Though in this case I really would have searched for "pictures of mountains" OR "mountain pictures" (or done two searches).
If you're not going to use the quotes, there's precious little point including the word "of" in the query.
There are other useful tricks for the google search field listed on the help page, but double quotes is by far the most useful overall.
(another handy trick if you're using Mac IE is to hack the app's resource fork so the '?' address bar shortcut goes to google instead of MSN - a trick expanded on in iCab's built in URL expansion)
Are you talking about how there is no global energy conservation due to time asymmetry and Noether's theorem?
I was thinking of it in vaguer terms - if energy is spontaneously created in some way that depends on the existing distribution (as quantum theory would suggest) and the medium into which it's being created is uniform, the new energy will also be uniform on a large scale. It could still be usable in the way that Dyson describes harnessing it indefinitely though.
If you want to be more formal I'd guess Noether's theorem underlies it, like all symmetry. Way ahead of her time, that one.
It is quite possible that what you're suggesting exceeds the limits of my understanding of physics.;)
Well, I'm being pretty loose in my interpretations. I figure that's ok, though, because the one thing I definitely got from the University Buddhism classes I audited was that there's pretty much a variant for everyone.
I have definitely seen end states described where everyone reaches Nirvana. I suspect this comes from the simple desire for a happy ending. It also more resembles endings in Christianity so that could be an influence too (but without the "hell" component, which is ongoing in most Buddhist conceptions anyway, whether you're a desire-ridden human or a hungry ghost). The alternative has infinite creation of new entities, but then you need a source for them, which kind of undoes the fact that it's an entirely reincarnation-based belief system (as with its roots in Hinduism).
It's all pretty metaphorical anyway; I also glossed over having multiple planes of existence in many or most Buddhist strains, of which this dying universe would only be one. But it beats watching TV.;)
A critique from a real Buddhist theologian would certainly be interesting.
(grin) You know, this is actually a good point (as well as funny, since my favourite science to make fun of is weather prediction;). The reason cosmologists feel justified is that their predictions are on such a ridiculously grand scale. It's like a weather prediction of "tomorrow, there will be weather".
I think that Buddhist Nirvana sort of does; entities that become enlightened are never returned to the wheel of life, so there's a constant drain of energy "lost" by the world to nothingness. The peace of Nirvana always seemed something like a perfectly uniform universe to me. Eventually everyone on every plane is enlightened and everything is just sort of frozen (which is a way of looking at heat death, complete equilibrium being equivalent to no motion at all).
On the other hand Taoism would propose a universe that expands back into the original version of itself, since everything proceeds through an extreme, into and through its opposite, and back into itself. That's broad enough that you could fit either a big-bang-big-crunch, or a heat death where something about the uniform state causes the return of extreme nonuniformity (which is entirely possible, see below).
One of the things I find provocative about the heat death and "big egg" fates is that they're at some level indistinguishable. Once the universe is uniform, both time and space becomes meaningless, just as they do after a big crunch. So the Taoist view makes sense to me - the universe really does find its opposite (and a rebirth) at the extreme ends of time.
Oh well. I really have things I should be doing today besides discussing cosmology, if I'm to be able to afford to keep converting free energy myself.;)
It's kind of a funny term. Heat death is actually the complete conversion of all the free energy in a system (in this case, of all systems) into the corresponding entropy. It's the victory of the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that all the energy goes away, but that it becomes so evenly spread that no further work is possible - there are no more free energy gradients to traverse. So it's not the death of heat, it's a death in heat - literally a tepid cosmos.;)
As I noted in another message, an infinitely expanding universe means that the temperature of the heat-dead cosmos will constantly drop as the volume increases. It will asymptotically approach absolute zero.
Some others have noted that there are theories where energy and/or matter are spontaneously created in empty space. These can coexist with the heat death fate if the new energy is also evenly spread, which it probably would be in such a uniformly boring heat-dead universe. Still no way to create a new free energy gradient.
I find this an interesting fate because it's also reflected in some religions and philosophies, where everything becomes one at the end of time.
You got it, though "wiped out" isn't really the term I'd use (more like "stretched out"). It lowers the heat death temperature so that it approaches absolute zero, since the space occupied would constantly expand. Also, it's a rather lonely future even before then, as galaxies grow so far apart that you eventually can't see anything but your own big front yard.
I wouldn't get too excited, though. There are virtually no "facts" in cosmology that haven't been overthrown multiple times. This one will be no different.
Well, there's always another level to a complete appraisal. Many people object to.Net because promulgating it furthers goals of Microsoft's which they object to. That's a perfectly reasonably objection, and by that yardstick your observation that it works well for some purposes is largely irrelevant. Don't assume that mere dogma underlies every opinion opposed to yours.
The main thing people don't understand about "human nature" is that there's no such thing as human nature.
Humans have evolved to be flexible; in fact, human bodies and brains evolved in concert with human societies. That's why people can adapt to live in a highly socialist system, or a highly capitalist one, or any of a million other alternatives.
What you seem to be calling human nature is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Create an economic system that depends entirely on the pursuit of self-interest, and people will behave in self-interested ways. Create one where people work together, and they'll work together. Pretty obvious really.
Socialist systems have all sorts of problems, but exploitation by the selfish or lazy rather notably isn't one of them, precisely because that sort of behaviour isn't fostered. Capitalist systems have a whole other set of problems, many of which are related to selfish behaviour, because that's the basis of the whole system.
There's ample room for criticism of any system, but to think you can live immersed in one world and be able to reasonably comment on the people and workings in another is absurd. Go live in Sweden for a few years and your point of view might be worth listening to. You'll certainly have a better conception of "human nature".
Credit cards cost even more than debits - you just pay a different way. The fee for using a credit card is 3% MINIMUM, and only a large retailer can get that rate. For small businesses it's more like 10%! That goes directly into the prices you pay.
The only reason more people aren't aware of this is that government has been in the pocket of the credit card companies for a long time - that's why it's illegal for the retailer to actually put the amount you're paying to Visa or Mastercard on the bill, where it belongs. Some have gotten around that by offering a "cash discount", but it's a legal grey area.
Credit card companies are the worst of finance industry, and that's really saying something.
There's overhead to maintaining a cash system too, of course, borne by the government that prints the cash (and polices counterfeiting, etc). But I really wonder how much extra we'll be paying in assorted "service charges" with every new electronic-cash scheme that comes along. If it's coming from banks and other financial empires, you can assume you're being bilked, because the only reason they ever have to offer a new service is to find a new way to skim your money.
People complain about paying taxes all the time; what I object to is bank charges. And the "take your business elsewhere" is ridiculous - they're all the same (even credit unions are only marginally better these days).
Slashdot Mirror
There are still seasons in the tropics, even if the lengths of the days don't change that much. Rainfall patterns are one thing that changes a lot between seasons. Beyond that, it's one big ol' earth, and any one part is affected by the seasons in another part.
I live in the temperate zone and I've been trying to get a Michelia tree to flower indoors for several years. The plant is healthy, but it needs a particular combination of tropical rainfall patterns, temperature and light at just the right time of year to flower (and thus, reproduce). If it were in Hong Kong it'd be doing that every year. Seasons are important to just about everything on earth - the fact that humans are less directly affected by them just means we're less likely to immediately notice the subtle ways they affect everybody else on the planet (many of whom we would like to eat, like french fry beasts and chocolate truffle plants).
I found that pretty funny too - so the possible presence of huge amounts of water, stuff of life, is a *bad* thing? Plus by the time we get there we'll be all about hydrogen power - besides the obvious benefits of not having to drink your own urine, here's a ready source of hydrogen for power and oxygen to breathe. It's practically a frozen candy store.
Actually, life doesn't expand to fill niches so much as create them. Initial life strategies are pretty generalist because a lifeless planet is pretty bleak and uniform. There no herbivore niches to "fill" until there are plants; there are no carnivore niches until there are herbivores. Of all the niches for life one might choose to abstractly classify, the vastest majority were created by other life.
;)
Life begets life, just because it does. That doesn't make it a moral imperative to spread an reproduce (even if you're a fundamentalist christian, it actually only says "spread across the EARTH" or something equivalent). We have a choice of where and whether we should go. For instance, it would probably be naughty to go terraform Europa, but you might say the same of anywhere. Who's to say there won't be like on Mars one day? Maybe the swelling, dying sun will warm it enough for a whole new biosphere to evolve - unless we get there first and reshape it in our own planet's image. There are niches at all points in the future - which ones should we fill and which should we leave alone?
I don't really have an opinion on that, just offering it up.
I wouldn't change that name, but I'd sure love to know where it came from. I picture someone centuries ago whose peculiar gastrointestinal tract was capable of producing the most heavenly perfume. People came from miles around just to bathe in the splendiferous scent. He (assuming a patriarchal name bequeathment) was showered with gifts of beans and garlic, and never went hungry. His fingers were red from laughing, playing children constantly pulling them.
I want to make a TV movie of this.
Not at all. The cheapening of human life (and other life, really) is a product of industrialisation. It really is the rise of the machine.
It's also one of the products of overpopulation. That has happened before, but never so commonly before the 20th century. In a small community, each individual life has a great impact. In an anonymous society that's no longer true.
In fact the entire notion of a "value" to human life is a modern one. Think about it. At one time the life of a person (albeit where "person" was variously defined but often meant "male of the correct racial ancestry") wasn't something you'd compare to goods; people weren't a commodity. Nowadays they absolutely are. Cotter pin that prevents gas tank explosions? Too expensive a unit cost - we'll settle the lawsuits. There was a time when this wouldn't even have made sense. So the final reason why human life has become cheap is because of the notion that currency can be used to evaluate anything. Not just human lives but entire ecosystems.
We still have vestiges of the older system of thought; murder is still held to be qualitatively different from property crime (though the attendant civil cases with cash damages will gradually erode that). But I don't think we'll see a return to that way of thinking until the end of money - and while I do think that's inevitable, it's probably gonna get worse before it gets better.
You can argue that Hiroshima ended a war that would have worn on, all right. What's not clear is whether the first bomb needed to be dropped on a populated area, let alone a city full of civilians. Most shows of superior force begin with a warning shot.
More clear is that Nagasaki was an obscene weapons test. Different bomb, different terrain, let's see what happens to *these* live targets.
Nagasaki sort of undoes the whole argument that the main intent of these events was to convince the Japanese to surrender. I've never seen any argument that they were even given the chance to after Hiroshima.
Beyond that, it was sort of a bluff anyway - at least I sure hope it was. Say they hadn't surrendered - would the US really have vaporised every city in Japan to reduce American troop losses? Could the American psyche really reconcile all those schools and hospitals and homes with shortening the war? It's an interesting question, especially given that there was still a strong idea then of rules of engagement. Killing massive numbers of unarmed civilians to protect armed troops is generally supposed to be not ok. But that is in fact what was done, not once but twice. Granted their was a much stronger presence of racism in the thought of the time and the Japanese had been demonised (they were indeed vicious in war, but then so is vaporising a city - war is always a constant escalation of viciousness).
I really feel the "wouldn't have surrendered otherwise" argument was constructed after the fact when the US government and people realised the scale of exactly what they'd done. The bombs weren't dropped in anything near so rational and calculating a manner. They were dropped because they were going to be dropped, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. This is why the full political and personal background (as previous posters have noted in other books) is absolutely essential to an understanding of these events.
In what way is it terrible? It is what it is. How good are you at converting photons into electrovoltaic potential with your skin?
;)
It supplies a certain amount of power on average from a certain surface area. It'll be sufficient for some needs, insufficient for others. Beyond that, it doesn't have to stand alone anyway - it can simply reduce your use of mains power, not replace it. It's still a win, and once installed it lasts damn near forever.
If you think this is inefficient, you should really take a look at the crap in your house you can't power with it - your incandescent lights, TV set, refrigerator, hair dryer, computer. Is the problem really in supply or demand?
Another point people seldom make is that absorbing solar energy on the outside of a house saves cooling costs. At least 11% of the energy that would be absorbed as heat is instead being borne away as electricity. That's actually not a bad insulator (though dedicated solar heating & cooling schemes can do far better).
Personally I think wind power is going to achieve commercial success before solar power does, but this material is still a notable milestone. I played with silicon solar cells when I was a kid, and the one thing they were above all else was rigidly fragile.
I do understand that; I still think it's possible to write an image in regular data with a standard CD-R burner. It might be fainter than the Yamaha drive produced, but it would be visible in the right light or at the right angle.
;)
The trick is to construct a dictionary so that writing large repeating sequences of pits or lands represents data while also building the picture - for instance twenty pits and a land would be one entry, thirty pits and a land would be another. Like I said, not necessarily any more efficient than simply dedicating part of the disc, but a neater hack.
It occurs to me now that the built-in error correction and block structure could create some issues, though.
Where do they even find these idiot self-proclaimed "expert" pundits?
From the original CNN article:
Or, you might be an idiot conspiracy theorist with nothing useful to offer.
The thing is that the quality of pundit commentary is always exactly this stupid - it's just usually not exposed. So why do they bother talking to these empty spaces? Because it's the easiest way to lend the appearance that the article writer actually talked to someone about it. By-the-numbers journalism.
I can't decide who I'd prefer to have a late-falling piece of shuttle landing gear land on their head, the useless pundit or the useless journalist. The latter should know better to than to ask idiot questions of people unqualified to offer a useful opinion. The former should know better than to answer.
Yup - but what would be really interesting is an encoding scheme to munge the data so that the chosen image would be produced across the entirety of the (full) disc, while still preserving a reasonable percentage of the optimal storage capacity. The details of doing that would resemble a compression scheme, though more likely with the opposite effect.
;)
Offhand I don't see a reason why this couldn't be accomplished in software (by a modified Linux CD driver, for instance). Has anyone already done something like this?
It wouldn't be very efficient, of course (either in storage or in access speed - it might actually require caching the entire CD contents in order to extract the data), but then it's not like wanting to get an image on the CD in the first place makes that much sense anyway.
In my experience people who say things like "humans are greedy" (or "selfish") are themselves looking for an excuse to be greedy (or selfish). Funny how appeals to destiny relieve one of personal responsibility.
I wrote about this at greater length somewhere else.
Ethology is an interesting study with all sorts of viewpoints on hawk/dove strategies in nature. But there's nothing natural about a wireless network, or a town, or an information economy. If people are going to design this system they can make it work and buffer it from exploitation. It just might take a bit more cleverness and creativity. Appealing to "natural" greed is just a way to avoid the issue, and really cheats the people who could offer those solutions as well as those who could benefit from them.
The aggregate value of their index is their product. One of the inputs to that index is these public domain case files (another is the hired attorneys you mention).
Right now they can use the cases to help build their index. Note that his is subtly distinct from incorporating the data itself, because the index is a separate entity. In doing so they derive tremendous value from those cases - the value of their product is based entirely on its size, and a big contributor to that is the contents (which they did not create, but derive value from).
To date those cases have been (I think?) public domain, which lets anyone make any derivative work they want and distribute or restrict it any way they want. That's the status quo, but that doesn't make it magically correct. It may not serve the people who paid for the original cases, for instance.
What if the case law had never been public domain, but had instead been released with a licence that says "you can use this all you like to enhance your database, but you always must make it publically and freely/cheaply available. Otherwise don't use it."? You can see the analogy to the GPL. Taxpayers may indeed be better served by releasing their work (the cases) on those terms. This may require the database company to get more creative in how they control access to their search tools, as well as actual document delivery. If they don't like it or can't make money that way, then they can't make money using the public case law - end of story. But it wouldn't come to that, because this doesn't really affect their actual value-laden product (the index) anyway. People are still going to pay a lot for their ability to discover data, even if they don't pay for the data itself. I do realise this is a very complicated distinction (in particular, how much and what kind of searching is necessary for public access?).
The thing is that a data index like Lexis is actually more about the interrelationships between data than the data itself. It does take hard work to establish that wealth, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily then be able to dictate terms of access. That they can now is more a historical accident than anything else.
But harder than what? Put two kids together and they'll immediately invent some little game along the lines of rock-scissors-paper. I really think abstract games have an innate appeal to people in this culture and just about any other. The earliest game I know of is Awari (aka Mancala) which is a wholly abstract application of some pebbles and dirt, probably many tens of thousands of years old. Arguably people were playing tag and hide-and-seek before that, but probably not by much in the scheme of things.
I do think you've raised an interesting and fairly deep issue, though - is there any point making games seem more "real"? If you do, does it even make the game any less abstract (being that it is, in the end, a false depiction)? I think you're saying "yes", but I probably wouldn't. It's a fascination of the industry, but I'm really not that sure it makes such a big difference to game players. Board games aren't becoming less popular lately, they're undergoing a German-led renaissance. Abstract entertainment will always be very, very popular, and so will real-world recreation. In many ways they're apples and orange anyway.
Good page (Quit Slashdot). Everyone here should read it. ;)
Funny thing from the Al Gore critique critiqued page it links to - Gore is accused of "mispronouncing" the word [packet] router as "rooter". But I'm an experienced system and network admin, and that's how I pronounce it. A "rowter" is a woodworking tool; on the other hand, I pronounce it "root 66" (as I think Bob Dylan did).
I do realise that a lot of people say "router" with an ow, but a significant number I've talked to also don't. Is this because I'm Canadian? What do other non-Americans asy?
I nearly always use double quotes to search for phrases. It works extremely well with google. You can also combine multiple phrases, and unquoted terms as well.
In fact, I'm surprised no one else mentioned that searching for "pictures of mountains" (quotes included) yields 1320 hits, which are likely to be much more useful than the other 998,690 or so. Though in this case I really would have searched for "pictures of mountains" OR "mountain pictures" (or done two searches).
If you're not going to use the quotes, there's precious little point including the word "of" in the query.
There are other useful tricks for the google search field listed on the help page, but double quotes is by far the most useful overall.
(another handy trick if you're using Mac IE is to hack the app's resource fork so the '?' address bar shortcut goes to google instead of MSN - a trick expanded on in iCab's built in URL expansion)
I was thinking of it in vaguer terms - if energy is spontaneously created in some way that depends on the existing distribution (as quantum theory would suggest) and the medium into which it's being created is uniform, the new energy will also be uniform on a large scale. It could still be usable in the way that Dyson describes harnessing it indefinitely though.
If you want to be more formal I'd guess Noether's theorem underlies it, like all symmetry. Way ahead of her time, that one.
It is quite possible that what you're suggesting exceeds the limits of my understanding of physics. ;)
Well, I'm being pretty loose in my interpretations. I figure that's ok, though, because the one thing I definitely got from the University Buddhism classes I audited was that there's pretty much a variant for everyone.
;)
I have definitely seen end states described where everyone reaches Nirvana. I suspect this comes from the simple desire for a happy ending. It also more resembles endings in Christianity so that could be an influence too (but without the "hell" component, which is ongoing in most Buddhist conceptions anyway, whether you're a desire-ridden human or a hungry ghost). The alternative has infinite creation of new entities, but then you need a source for them, which kind of undoes the fact that it's an entirely reincarnation-based belief system (as with its roots in Hinduism).
It's all pretty metaphorical anyway; I also glossed over having multiple planes of existence in many or most Buddhist strains, of which this dying universe would only be one. But it beats watching TV.
A critique from a real Buddhist theologian would certainly be interesting.
(grin) You know, this is actually a good point (as well as funny, since my favourite science to make fun of is weather prediction ;). The reason cosmologists feel justified is that their predictions are on such a ridiculously grand scale. It's like a weather prediction of "tomorrow, there will be weather".
I think that Buddhist Nirvana sort of does; entities that become enlightened are never returned to the wheel of life, so there's a constant drain of energy "lost" by the world to nothingness. The peace of Nirvana always seemed something like a perfectly uniform universe to me. Eventually everyone on every plane is enlightened and everything is just sort of frozen (which is a way of looking at heat death, complete equilibrium being equivalent to no motion at all).
On the other hand Taoism would propose a universe that expands back into the original version of itself, since everything proceeds through an extreme, into and through its opposite, and back into itself. That's broad enough that you could fit either a big-bang-big-crunch, or a heat death where something about the uniform state causes the return of extreme nonuniformity (which is entirely possible, see below).
One of the things I find provocative about the heat death and "big egg" fates is that they're at some level indistinguishable. Once the universe is uniform, both time and space becomes meaningless, just as they do after a big crunch. So the Taoist view makes sense to me - the universe really does find its opposite (and a rebirth) at the extreme ends of time.
Oh well. I really have things I should be doing today besides discussing cosmology, if I'm to be able to afford to keep converting free energy myself. ;)
It's kind of a funny term. Heat death is actually the complete conversion of all the free energy in a system (in this case, of all systems) into the corresponding entropy. It's the victory of the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that all the energy goes away, but that it becomes so evenly spread that no further work is possible - there are no more free energy gradients to traverse. So it's not the death of heat, it's a death in heat - literally a tepid cosmos. ;)
As I noted in another message, an infinitely expanding universe means that the temperature of the heat-dead cosmos will constantly drop as the volume increases. It will asymptotically approach absolute zero.
Some others have noted that there are theories where energy and/or matter are spontaneously created in empty space. These can coexist with the heat death fate if the new energy is also evenly spread, which it probably would be in such a uniformly boring heat-dead universe. Still no way to create a new free energy gradient.
I find this an interesting fate because it's also reflected in some religions and philosophies, where everything becomes one at the end of time.
You got it, though "wiped out" isn't really the term I'd use (more like "stretched out"). It lowers the heat death temperature so that it approaches absolute zero, since the space occupied would constantly expand. Also, it's a rather lonely future even before then, as galaxies grow so far apart that you eventually can't see anything but your own big front yard.
I wouldn't get too excited, though. There are virtually no "facts" in cosmology that haven't been overthrown multiple times. This one will be no different.
Well, there's always another level to a complete appraisal. Many people object to .Net because promulgating it furthers goals of Microsoft's which they object to. That's a perfectly reasonably objection, and by that yardstick your observation that it works well for some purposes is largely irrelevant.
Don't assume that mere dogma underlies every opinion opposed to yours.
Well, that explains the name.
The main thing people don't understand about "human nature" is that there's no such thing as human nature.
Humans have evolved to be flexible; in fact, human bodies and brains evolved in concert with human societies. That's why people can adapt to live in a highly socialist system, or a highly capitalist one, or any of a million other alternatives.
What you seem to be calling human nature is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Create an economic system that depends entirely on the pursuit of self-interest, and people will behave in self-interested ways. Create one where people work together, and they'll work together. Pretty obvious really.
Socialist systems have all sorts of problems, but exploitation by the selfish or lazy rather notably isn't one of them, precisely because that sort of behaviour isn't fostered. Capitalist systems have a whole other set of problems, many of which are related to selfish behaviour, because that's the basis of the whole system.
There's ample room for criticism of any system, but to think you can live immersed in one world and be able to reasonably comment on the people and workings in another is absurd. Go live in Sweden for a few years and your point of view might be worth listening to. You'll certainly have a better conception of "human nature".
Credit cards cost even more than debits - you just pay a different way. The fee for using a credit card is 3% MINIMUM, and only a large retailer can get that rate. For small businesses it's more like 10%! That goes directly into the prices you pay.
The only reason more people aren't aware of this is that government has been in the pocket of the credit card companies for a long time - that's why it's illegal for the retailer to actually put the amount you're paying to Visa or Mastercard on the bill, where it belongs. Some have gotten around that by offering a "cash discount", but it's a legal grey area.
Credit card companies are the worst of finance industry, and that's really saying something.
There's overhead to maintaining a cash system too, of course, borne by the government that prints the cash (and polices counterfeiting, etc). But I really wonder how much extra we'll be paying in assorted "service charges" with every new electronic-cash scheme that comes along. If it's coming from banks and other financial empires, you can assume you're being bilked, because the only reason they ever have to offer a new service is to find a new way to skim your money.
People complain about paying taxes all the time; what I object to is bank charges. And the "take your business elsewhere" is ridiculous - they're all the same (even credit unions are only marginally better these days).