"How easy would it be to duplicate Facebook, if not the exact code? Pretty easy." Yea, it's not actually that easy. For every big idea, there's a half dozen notable failed attempts.
Oh save this for the IT magazines and politicians. facebook hasn't or hadn't necessary a great code base (If I want to be cynical, it's PHP, it can't be anywhere near greate:) ). In fact, it wasn't even the first social network. It was launched in the right place, for the right people and the rest is networking effect. Nothing to do with the code. Not even to he core idea.
There has been plenty of software out there that does exactly the same as facebook. And it is again the idea of some half informed journo and politico type that a software won the election for anybody. The software perhaps provided an efficient communication platform to bring together the network of supporters but that is more or less the point of facebook, or gmail. Add a few customized widget with up-to-date statistics, media-watch and such to diaspora and you have a great tool for organized campaigning. Extend it with a few spammer scripts that plagues facebook, google plus, slashdot, the porn ads, etc., and use the social tool to organize the supporter base to flock the interwebs and rl forums with Obama For America, and voilà, you have your secret weapon.
You may realize the the major point in all this is social engineering. The rest is well known methods of communication over the existing channels.
As for the first point: You may be right of the day-to-day engineering challenges, but the physical understanding how a nuclear weapon works is out in the sun almost since its inception. Sure, if an open source software is available it doesn't mean that it will work fine in the given circumstances where you would like to deploy it, but it means that the bare-bones are known and done and you have to customize it for your self. Thus, perhaps some special tech in the nuclear weapons manufacturing could be a serious head-ache and worth to spy for it, or make deals on the information, but generally speaking, nobody would earn much money selling the information about how nuclear weapons work in general (Look at some poor physics profs).
Ideas are responses to certain challenges. Given similar challenges, people get similar ideas. I'll give it to you, that more people work out ideas at a faster rate (though not linearly to their numbers), and presumably North Korea has less nuclear physicist, rocket engineer, etc. than the USA for figuring out the nuances of manufacturing A-bombs, but it doesn't mean that it is not there to figure out. If that was the case, science would not make much sense.
That's why I feel deeply disturbed by "geeks" who are fan of Star Trek and alike. It has so many disagreements with reality that suspension of belief for a person with a simple grasp of science and physics is impossible.
Gravitation, photon torpedo, navigational problems, SR/GR, biology, culture, social relations.... everything is broken in that universe.
I think this is the weak point of many popular explanation of SR/GR. The speed of light is presented as a speed limit but since there's a principle of relativity at work, I don't think it is particularly good way to look at it.
The speed of light looks the same for any observer in any reference frame. When going through the motions of special relativity, this comes with a number of consequential statements, such as that observers performing uniform motion in respect to each other would find that time passes for the other at different rate from their own. Or that, if an object is accelerating toward the speed of light in respect to the observer, you will see the same invested force causes less and less increase in the object's kinematic energy.
This is interpreted as a speed limit indeed, because to reach the speed of light, you would have to see infinite amount of energy dumped in to the kinetic energy of the object which leads us to a mathematical impasse, singularity. Hence anything that needs kinetic energy to move, must be accelerated by an infinite amount of force to reach this speed, or in other words, it's resistance to move grows by the increasing velocity of the object in respect to the observer. However, two observer would disagree with the amount of this energy depending on their relative speed to the observed object. Hence, it is in the infinity/speed of light where these observation would meet anyway.
The reason why people don't like to accept this because it sounds severely limiting how our species could spread in the universe. This is a partial misconception. Since the effect of time dilation, if we would accelerate just a bit under 99% of c, it would mean that time aboard would pass 7 times slower than on earth. As you approach the speed of light in respect to Earth (which has very low speed in respect to the rest of the stars and galaxies we would like to conquer compared to our ship, Leonora Christine), the twin paradox will get more and more extreme, to the point where the traveller would loose any hope to get in touch with the original Earth and human civilization that sent him away, nevertheless will see herself passing light year distances even perhaps in matter of seconds, because from his point of view the time dilation looks like that the universe in the direction of her heading goes through length contraction, thus the space to cover looks radically shortened compared to the measure made on Earth. Thus it is theoretically possible to coast the known universe in a single human lifetime without discovering completely new set of physics. Well, at least in regards to relativity, because I'm not sure if there's physical possibility to construct such a spaceship that can be accelerated with only interstellar medium and also keep the travellers alive.
OK, but I hope I get some understanding if someone does answer these few question to me:
How do we know whether it is the space expanding, rather than stuff actually moving faster than light? To me, the principle of relativity makes this idea basically interchangeable. Moving space == space moving around us. I understand the current theory is, that empty space tend to expand, that is it's inherent physical property. But how can you make a distinction, let's say, below the speed of light? Let's say you spot a star, or galaxy rather to get some perceivable results, calculate of its red-shift and we can come up with it's speed/velocity. How do you split this single value to space expansion and speed?
Furthermore, the same goes to warp drive. It is mentioned in many pop-sci tv program, and it is said that it doesn't violate GR, though it is mere speculation that we could actually build one. So, from the point of view of GR, warp-drive is viable concept for FTL. I would not call it misnomer, because if you light a torch and than move space around you faster than light, than you literally will end up at your destination before the light ray reaches the spot. In the case of hypothetical warp drive, sitting in the ship, you can say easily the universe speeds past you. For an external observer, you would look coasting with a normal speed, assuming that you don't go fater than c and the observer would not be able to tell that you're using an warp-drive.
While I don't deny the possibility of the future you drew up above, I think the chances are quite good to avoid it.
First, the population growth will continue for a while, however I've already gave two aspects that points to a possible reversal: One is the ongoing trend that the rate of population grow is shrinking for the last 40 years. With the wiki's predictions to which I gave the link above, it looks as if converging to zero. Again, in my view, the population growth that is controlled by the technological development is the desirable state, and would not lead to your bleak vision of future. The second argument is that this trend of declining birthrate is possibly due to the evolutionary strategy of survival. The increase in comfort and stability leads to declining birthrate, in fact, in the case of Europe it lead to declining populations as well.
You say that the current technological means are "not sustainable" and you have a point there. That was sort of the major point in my last comment as I believe that it can be changed. Sustainability of course, from an engineering point of view will always be a problem, because there are no 100% recycling systems, hence it is the case that we need to adjust our growth rate to match with our sustainability rates. It is a dynamical problem, not a static, which people who are advocating the population reduction (based on the "close system" problem described above), hence it needs continuous analysis and global cooperation.
With that we've arrived to your major point, and that is about the social and political aspects of the problem. I grant you that it is true that with the current political and economical establishment your future vision seems quite likely. However history provides us with the idea that all aspects of our social structure, including the morals, attitudes, economical cooperation or political understanding is in constant change. The current establishment of mass production is crispy new, only dates back a few decades. The social implications of the mass industrial world produced already quite a few waves of political and economical changes, and we can easily deduce that as the whole mode of production, being now a few hundred years old will also change in time. In fact, we're just starting to see what the implications are of the communication networks that now include more and more people, and became truly world-wide. As I mentioned by original post, I see already the changes perception of the "strangers" the "others". These categories started to erode with the explosion of means of fast communication and had major effect on the acceptance of war, constituting a world-wide that is not defined by national, ethnic, geographical limits. There is still a long way to go, but I find the prospects quite encouraging. The fact that we're talking about this matters on the side of on ongoing discussion about the new generation of nuclear reactors, where people from all over the world contribute their knowledge makes me quite optimistic.
Space migration wasn't the main point of my idea. I was talking about controlled growth in lock step with expansion. There's space on this planet and if we are distributing the wealth and education more equally, we might have a population that is partner in controlled growth.
The other idea is, that before we start seriously expand through the solar system (which is many magnitude bigger living space than Earth), we have to learn to create habitats with minimal environmental impact, here on earth. We need to learn how to make cities from the sand of the Sahara and other deserts, we need to learn build habitats under the oceans. We're still long way to recycle water, air, organics in sufficient manner on Earth, and then we'll be ready to make the transition. What this process needs is well informed and committed, educated people.
As a side note, if you have read about evolutionary strategies, it seems quite obvious that the largest breeders are species whose life expectancy is low. If we look at human demographics, it comes quite clear that something similar going on with us as well. In socio-economical environments where the survival of the individual is far from being granted in terms of jobs, income, or in healthy living, the women are giving birth much earlier than in countries where we have the prospects for a life lasting 70-80 years with quite good chances. Once the _security_ of the individual is provided, the need for early breeding will diminish. Now it does probably take time to adjust to a new social-economical, and technological environment. In terms of historical scale, it wasn't that long ago when it was perfectly normal in Europe to have 8+ children, especially in rural areas.
The rate of population growth already decreased significantly world wide, and I argue that even bigger populations can be supported by our current technological level, so it is completely unreasonable to advocate reducing the population if we agree on the this. I'm convinced that reducing the population would actually throw us back in time terms of development.
A bit off-topic, but I would like to object to your population reduction criteria. Not your fault, this comes essentially the general economic and ecological perception of our potential as a "closed system". On the other hand, given the large amount of material that is available about geography, agriculture, space exploration, etc., I have to still mark it as naive.
Uncontrolled population growth could be indeed catastrophic but that is now less of a danger than ever. With the current efficiency of agriculture, this planet can feed much larger numbers than we are today. We have more hands and heads than ever to figure out new ways to maintain ourselves and improve our lives. If you hear about starving and dying children, it is more likely due to war, economic embargoes, or unfortunate but not unpredictable disasters that could be avoided by different social organisation. (For example, living next to an active volcano as a permanent settlement is probably a bad idea.)
War is typically the case in point: though the number of casualties in wars is steadily declining, the economical damage caused by wars is crippling sometimes entire populations' life-support. The materials, industrial capacity, and the energy used for building weapons and maintain armies are much higher than ever, even though we're living increasingly peaceful times. I admit though, that there's no evidence that this trend will continue, but it's a good extrapolation given the increased means of communication and the intellectual and emotional bondages connecting people over the continents. Yet we build bigger and more bad ass weaponry and armies.
The other enormous drain is the ideological commitment to not to keep our collective industrial capacity under control under the auspices of "free market". People do make a lot of waste by competing for individual gains, we produce large heaps of crap every year just to sell more crap next year. The population of Earth does not need the "western" lifestyle choices about products to be happy, productive and increasingly well off. Not to mention the distribution issues that arise from the market-controlled distribution: the food often would be rather sold for being waste in the so-called developed world than for feeding the actually needy producers. Interesting to see the global extent of the food waste, which largely accounted not even to the consumer but the retail process.
All in all, the prosperity of the Earth's population is not due to our numbers, but our social structures, being disorganised, holding to stone-age morals when it comes to population growth considerations. A well-informed and educated individual can be partner to society to moderate the population growth and set it to levels that is fit to our current technological limits and also is capable of extending those limits. It is more important to bring the entire human population to a higher level of understanding than anything. Growth, both in longevity and the population did only good for our development and would do more good if our social structures are also designed to serve this purpose.
I don't live in the USA, but I can confirm how security works nowadays. I had been insulted by bouncers for being cheerfully drunk, though I did not cause any trouble at all, I was in control of my actions, no broken property, no fights, no nothing. Just being big (I'm around 6.6 ft and about 100kgs) makes me essentially an instant threat to the security, since they already in the mindset, how to handle me if I go wild. For the record, I'm in my early 30's and the last time I had a fight was when I was 17 or so.
The police and the security guards with their obstructive behaviour however can be real pain in the ass, and you can see how with their inert and empty language (I'm living in the UK now) it is nothing more but making the "subject" upset enough to justify the further actions. Once the "subject" is only a notch louder, they play out the "non-compliant" card. Many times I had spent hours bargaining with the security guards to at least let me get my coat from the cloaking room, because they didn't want to let me in after having a cigarette outside the club. With no precedence of shouting, fighting or being completely wasted.
I remember in 2009, when the G20 was in London, I was heading to the Dockland Yards with my mate when we got surrounded by 3 van load of cops and has been thoroughly searched, ruled by section 60. While I think that the use of such a legislation is already offensive in case of a previously registered demonstration, which was predictably peaceful, after the stop'n'search (including our underpants!), we had been hold of by kind and chatty officers questioning about our political ideas and unnecessary talking to their stations for more than an hour, of course by that time only two P.C. was holding us up. Do you think that wouldn't upset the most civil person? Sure it does. But that's the point, it's designed to be a mind game so that they could round you up at the slightest sign of "non-compliance".
I'm genuinely wary of the whole existence of security forces in a civilised society.
However, very few extremely technical users can keeps their windows installation clean and running for years. You certainly can't expect this from the general population, let alone children.
I think you are a bit harsh with your words. Technical users in general can keep their Windows clean not just a few of them. I know this is just matter of terms, but I only call a user 'technical' only in Windows terms, if they can keep their OS clean and functioning without restricting them.
And according to TFA, the point of giving out these laptops to the children is to educate them to use computers. It is my firm position, that any operating system, including Windows can be also kept functional and tidy if you restrict the user. So why not restrict these children, on their school-given laptops, and educate them, so that later these restriction can be removed and they would become the administrator of their own system? This is the natural course in many field of education, so why not do it for the now ubiquitous computer-like devices? The goal would be, that everybody should have the operational knowledge of their own tools, devices.
Windows isn't really more vulnerable to viruses than OSX in a competent hand
I was able to keep my Windows installation completely virus free by using trusted sources of binary software (trusted here means trusted by me). Without any anti-virus. This includes only really handful sites, like MS, NVidia, and open source sites binary downloads (typically sf.net).
After the experiment, I ran 3 different antivirus software, and they found nothing. So yes, in competent hands, it is possible to keep it clean. I don't like Windows, but it is mostly the user habits, that are dangerous, not necessary the system. I mean, until you find out how your system works, it is a good advice to have an even stricter policies: No installation, website browsing policies... this can be imposed on the child-like users (not just children, but many, many adults).
Linux and BSD require no effort to keep malware out. There are none, and the defaults are pretty sane (there aren't plenty of security-holes in default services which run as root).
This is only true to a point. You see, malwares aren't restricted to OS level, many and increasing number focuses on the user land, especially browsers. We are observing a second layer operating system built on the top of the traditional one, that of the web-client. While it is very unlikely that some javascript or similar malware would be able to gain root privileges on a Linux/BSD system, it is fair enough to get in to the shoes of the browsing user most of the time. The real deal with Linux/BSD systems is working mostly from trusted software repositories built from source code, and binaries that are built by the OS maintainers themselves, therefore the natural user habits are to use the main source of the software. Same goes for OSX: Most of the running software is either Apple product or some big shot name that the user recognizes right away. The rest of the software are usually coming from the same source as those to Linux, given that Unix-likeliness.
Sure you can trace back some issues to some technical shortcoming of Windows, but IMHO it is always up to the user habits to keep the everyday garbage out of the door. For this reason, big companies, like MS and Apple sees this as a challenge to nanny over the user all the time, but that is rather the case of the good ol' false dichotomy between security and freedom. My proposal was addressed to the education of the children. Nonetheless, if we're committed to educate our youth to use their devices properly, I would defintely emphasize that the above mentioned "ring of trust" system at its best starts at hw/kernel level. Free software, such as the Linux kernel with openly and publicly editied and moderate source code (along of course the technical details) is the most secure way you can get.
Keep your voice down and we can have a conversation.
Issue #1: The user should be taught how to keep their system clean. Doesn't matter whether it is Linux, Windows or OSX. So they handed out devices without any restriction imposed on the user, the user who is a kid, and is supposed to be restricted they have enough knowledge to be responsible for their own computer-like devices. For the same reason, people having a driver instructor while driving for a while, pass an exam, and only after that they are allowed to drive their own, or other people's car.
Issue #2: All major existing operating system today is capable to restrict the user's actions if they are set up correctly. Now the commercial OSes, like Windows and OSX are advertised as an out-of-the-box solution, and thus people think that they are ready to be deployed in virtually any situations. In practice however, it turns out that when it comes to managing a bunch of devices for predefined goals apart from having fun with personal computing at home, you need a competent administrator or administrator team to handle the set up and the maintenance. Customer support just doesn't cut it for this reason. They off site, and slowly responding, and they don't really know what are the exact requirements for their installation. CS could be handy perhaps in individual cases, where the user works within its competence, but any organization working with computers regularly (as I deduced from the article, the whole point of giving out laptops is to get the education system computerized) need competent maintainer.
Windows isn't really more vulnerable to viruses than OSX in a competent hand, and Linux is just as much stable as any of the commercial operating systems if maintained by skilled administrator. And an competent system administrator would be completely aware of the fact that children are not the most trustworthy users when it comes to downloading and executing software from unknown sources.
So, in my opinion what the school board/administration did is cuting corners on their computer staff, or hired incompetent, unskilled cheap labour for the position. Either way, it isn't really the OS that really matters, it is the person who keeps it running.
It's because using telescopes on such a vast distances corrupts the colour. Remember, that the colours we can see, and appreciate are bound in to a narrow band of frequencies, and taking pictures on a single frequency make better pictures. Of course, you could do 3 distinct images, in the red, green, blue frequency bands, but by that time you make three photos, Cassini changes its position considerably, hence the photos will not cover the same angle. It's fairly big thing to get a single frequency band photograph with proper exposition time. Earth based amateur astronomers do the same thing: take photos of a celestial object with different different filters, and later combine the photos. However, they have the benefit not to observe much large angle change as the Cassini orbiting Saturn.
I always thought the same. Switching between OSes should be more simple, it just need a better boot management: How about a function built in both OS, that saves the memory just like as it was hibernate and switch by memory content? A modern firmware/BIOS should offer this possibility.
For my part, I obviously don't use illegal drugs at work and I'm doing fine. But I can see that most of the programmers, including me, using energy drinks, or shit load of coffee. It seems obvious to me that caffeine is a great drug for programming as much for most of other jobs and activities.
Sometimes at home however, I like to smoke a spliff, read some code on the Github which eventually results in coding my own projects after a while. I have never used any stronger stuff for programming, because it doesn't make much sense for me. While you can get some inspiration, programming is a very focused activity with little room for being dreamy, thus I would say that anything that is stronger than a lightly made joint would be counter-productive for coding.
I suggest, recreational drugs should belong to our recreational time. Many geeks I know has a huge problem with separating from the computer, at least a little recreational time should detach us from the matrix.
Almost immediately after I had finished the 'The God Delusion', I was wonder what is your position on the problem of political activity. Let me expand.
The religious mindset relies on faith at some point. There are people who accept everything that is branded as dear to their religion while others look quite reasonable until you hit some deep spot. One can also make the point that faith generally used as the single most important aspect of politics and oppression. It is not that surprising therefore that the oppressive regimes in human history were bound to some kind of belief system, even if it wasn't explicitly religious, like in the case of the Bolshevik style dictatorships where the cult of the leader, the unquestioned endorsement of the political ideals and actions dictated by the unquestionable source of wisdom replaced the traditional role of the Church. It is not hard to see why even the contemporary politics in the liberal democracies is still struggling with the question of religion.
Do you think that any significant portion of human race will ever be able act on critical assessment rather than blind faith given that there is no demographic, educational and political trend toward a more enlightened society at large (world-level)?
If you have that kind of money, you could just throw at a serious software developer in order to get improvements in GIMP or Inkscape, or whatever. A few donation like that, and there would be no shortage of programmers' time for these products.
We would have not had personal computers as we know them today. We probably would be using 3270 terminals and paying time per hour to dial into a nearby mainframe.
As it has been already told, Xerox developed the first PC with GUI. Apple came second after 6 years, with the head of the Xerox PARC team. The Apple's coders made their contribution the computer GUIs, so did the Microsoft team and many others.
We would still be using CDs instead of MP3 players. Before the iPod, MP3 players were regarded as geek chic if best.
Let me point out my friend that every second person I knew had an MP3 player before iPod. You're just joking around, aren't ya?
We would still be buying music, for $19.00 an album, for that one good song, from crowded CD stores, as opposed to just tapping/clicking twice on iTMS.
And other people just simply ripped&compressed the CD's in to MP3/Vorbis and copied around or shared through DC. The same practice did not fail me ever since, the community is ever larger, and we have more choice to transfer music. Anybody who thinks that the iTunes was anything revolutionary is just an other brainless idiot who would probably even literally mean that the sliced bread was a fuckin' great invention.
We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it.
And yet most of the world still using phones other than iPhones and they still can go about their day. Pocket PCs, and smart phones dating before iPhone, just like ancient Christian sects date before the year 0. Perhaps they saw the Messiah coming...
We would look at tablets as something from Star Trek or something for a niche like inventory control.
And yet the iPhone looks quite different from that design.... oh wait! Please, it's too bad even for trolling!
Jobs has revolutionized the way we do business, interact, communicate, and schedule our daily life. Nobody else in history has made an effect on our lives as radically as him.
Jobs made a shit load of money that's his merit. That's his only merit, just as Bill Gates'. Talented people at Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies do make a difference by their work. They are the ones who deliver you working products, not hyped manager and business owners. You should learn appreciate the true producer of your gadgets and tools: these are engineers, software developers, and workers of all sorts. The most depressing thing about the IT/Tech sector that while it is (as most of the things is life) developing gradually and through hard work of hundreds of thousands of people, it is displayed as a personal power trip of one or an other useless, masturbating billionaire. If you feel to fund a museum for the producers of your favourite gadgets, please pay respect not to Steve Jobs, but the engineers and programmers of the Apple Inc., Samsung, the workers of Foxconn etc.
The Last Question is better. This whole Omega Point crap is nothing but extrapolating the claim of theism of the Intelligent Design argument not that of the currently known science.
I think you missed the exact meaning of the issue. A nuclear power plant in regards of its safety doesn't change whether the government owns or not. Having a nuclear power plant means that you don't want it to blow up. However, if you own a hydrogen bomb, you must be prepare to blow it up. You want to have the power to blow it up.
So, I would more trust a government to have a nuclear power plant than to have a hydrogen bomb or any other nuclear weapon, assured that the nuclear power plant functions only for the sole purpose of energy production and/or scientific research purposes.
As for the safety difference the weapons and the reactors, of course you're right. The nuclear arsenal is at rest: bombs only employ the nuclear chain-reaction when they supposed to blow up. A nuclear power plant on the hand must function to produce electricity. However, so far more people died from nuclear weapons than from nuclear power plants despite the low number of nuclear bombing occurred in history. Deliberate murder caused a number of magnitude bigger pile of dead corps than any nuclear accident.
Good question. Now let's see the reality: Government and corporations are handling virtually everything? And why is the nuclear power plant is more dangerous in the hand of a government than let's say, a hydrogen-bomb? And if the governments and the corporations are the problem, and not the energy source, than people should abolish governments and corporations instead of feeding the politicians with trendy topics, such as this.
Slashdot Mirror
"How easy would it be to duplicate Facebook, if not the exact code? Pretty easy."
Yea, it's not actually that easy. For every big idea, there's a half dozen notable failed attempts.
Oh save this for the IT magazines and politicians. facebook hasn't or hadn't necessary a great code base (If I want to be cynical, it's PHP, it can't be anywhere near greate :) ). In fact, it wasn't even the first social network. It was launched in the right place, for the right people and the rest is networking effect. Nothing to do with the code. Not even to he core idea.
There has been plenty of software out there that does exactly the same as facebook. And it is again the idea of some half informed journo and politico type that a software won the election for anybody. The software perhaps provided an efficient communication platform to bring together the network of supporters but that is more or less the point of facebook, or gmail. Add a few customized widget with up-to-date statistics, media-watch and such to diaspora and you have a great tool for organized campaigning. Extend it with a few spammer scripts that plagues facebook, google plus, slashdot, the porn ads, etc., and use the social tool to organize the supporter base to flock the interwebs and rl forums with Obama For America, and voilà, you have your secret weapon.
You may realize the the major point in all this is social engineering. The rest is well known methods of communication over the existing channels.
As for the first point:
You may be right of the day-to-day engineering challenges, but the physical understanding how a nuclear weapon works is out in the sun almost since its inception. Sure, if an open source software is available it doesn't mean that it will work fine in the given circumstances where you would like to deploy it, but it means that the bare-bones are known and done and you have to customize it for your self. Thus, perhaps some special tech in the nuclear weapons manufacturing could be a serious head-ache and worth to spy for it, or make deals on the information, but generally speaking, nobody would earn much money selling the information about how nuclear weapons work in general (Look at some poor physics profs).
Ideas are responses to certain challenges. Given similar challenges, people get similar ideas. I'll give it to you, that more people work out ideas at a faster rate (though not linearly to their numbers), and presumably North Korea has less nuclear physicist, rocket engineer, etc. than the USA for figuring out the nuances of manufacturing A-bombs, but it doesn't mean that it is not there to figure out. If that was the case, science would not make much sense.
I need time to process it, but thanks for the answers!
That's why I feel deeply disturbed by "geeks" who are fan of Star Trek and alike. It has so many disagreements with reality that suspension of belief for a person with a simple grasp of science and physics is impossible.
Gravitation, photon torpedo, navigational problems, SR/GR, biology, culture, social relations.... everything is broken in that universe.
I think this is the weak point of many popular explanation of SR/GR. The speed of light is presented as a speed limit but since there's a principle of relativity at work, I don't think it is particularly good way to look at it.
The speed of light looks the same for any observer in any reference frame. When going through the motions of special relativity, this comes with a number of consequential statements, such as that observers performing uniform motion in respect to each other would find that time passes for the other at different rate from their own. Or that, if an object is accelerating toward the speed of light in respect to the observer, you will see the same invested force causes less and less increase in the object's kinematic energy.
This is interpreted as a speed limit indeed, because to reach the speed of light, you would have to see infinite amount of energy dumped in to the kinetic energy of the object which leads us to a mathematical impasse, singularity. Hence anything that needs kinetic energy to move, must be accelerated by an infinite amount of force to reach this speed, or in other words, it's resistance to move grows by the increasing velocity of the object in respect to the observer. However, two observer would disagree with the amount of this energy depending on their relative speed to the observed object. Hence, it is in the infinity/speed of light where these observation would meet anyway.
The reason why people don't like to accept this because it sounds severely limiting how our species could spread in the universe. This is a partial misconception. Since the effect of time dilation, if we would accelerate just a bit under 99% of c, it would mean that time aboard would pass 7 times slower than on earth. As you approach the speed of light in respect to Earth (which has very low speed in respect to the rest of the stars and galaxies we would like to conquer compared to our ship, Leonora Christine), the twin paradox will get more and more extreme, to the point where the traveller would loose any hope to get in touch with the original Earth and human civilization that sent him away, nevertheless will see herself passing light year distances even perhaps in matter of seconds, because from his point of view the time dilation looks like that the universe in the direction of her heading goes through length contraction, thus the space to cover looks radically shortened compared to the measure made on Earth. Thus it is theoretically possible to coast the known universe in a single human lifetime without discovering completely new set of physics. Well, at least in regards to relativity, because I'm not sure if there's physical possibility to construct such a spaceship that can be accelerated with only interstellar medium and also keep the travellers alive.
OK, but I hope I get some understanding if someone does answer these few question to me:
How do we know whether it is the space expanding, rather than stuff actually moving faster than light? To me, the principle of relativity makes this idea basically interchangeable. Moving space == space moving around us. I understand the current theory is, that empty space tend to expand, that is it's inherent physical property. But how can you make a distinction, let's say, below the speed of light? Let's say you spot a star, or galaxy rather to get some perceivable results, calculate of its red-shift and we can come up with it's speed/velocity. How do you split this single value to space expansion and speed?
Furthermore, the same goes to warp drive. It is mentioned in many pop-sci tv program, and it is said that it doesn't violate GR, though it is mere speculation that we could actually build one. So, from the point of view of GR, warp-drive is viable concept for FTL. I would not call it misnomer, because if you light a torch and than move space around you faster than light, than you literally will end up at your destination before the light ray reaches the spot. In the case of hypothetical warp drive, sitting in the ship, you can say easily the universe speeds past you. For an external observer, you would look coasting with a normal speed, assuming that you don't go fater than c and the observer would not be able to tell that you're using an warp-drive.
While I don't deny the possibility of the future you drew up above, I think the chances are quite good to avoid it.
First, the population growth will continue for a while, however I've already gave two aspects that points to a possible reversal: One is the ongoing trend that the rate of population grow is shrinking for the last 40 years. With the wiki's predictions to which I gave the link above, it looks as if converging to zero. Again, in my view, the population growth that is controlled by the technological development is the desirable state, and would not lead to your bleak vision of future. The second argument is that this trend of declining birthrate is possibly due to the evolutionary strategy of survival. The increase in comfort and stability leads to declining birthrate, in fact, in the case of Europe it lead to declining populations as well.
You say that the current technological means are "not sustainable" and you have a point there. That was sort of the major point in my last comment as I believe that it can be changed. Sustainability of course, from an engineering point of view will always be a problem, because there are no 100% recycling systems, hence it is the case that we need to adjust our growth rate to match with our sustainability rates. It is a dynamical problem, not a static, which people who are advocating the population reduction (based on the "close system" problem described above), hence it needs continuous analysis and global cooperation.
With that we've arrived to your major point, and that is about the social and political aspects of the problem. I grant you that it is true that with the current political and economical establishment your future vision seems quite likely. However history provides us with the idea that all aspects of our social structure, including the morals, attitudes, economical cooperation or political understanding is in constant change. The current establishment of mass production is crispy new, only dates back a few decades. The social implications of the mass industrial world produced already quite a few waves of political and economical changes, and we can easily deduce that as the whole mode of production, being now a few hundred years old will also change in time. In fact, we're just starting to see what the implications are of the communication networks that now include more and more people, and became truly world-wide. As I mentioned by original post, I see already the changes perception of the "strangers" the "others". These categories started to erode with the explosion of means of fast communication and had major effect on the acceptance of war, constituting a world-wide that is not defined by national, ethnic, geographical limits. There is still a long way to go, but I find the prospects quite encouraging. The fact that we're talking about this matters on the side of on ongoing discussion about the new generation of nuclear reactors, where people from all over the world contribute their knowledge makes me quite optimistic.
Space migration wasn't the main point of my idea. I was talking about controlled growth in lock step with expansion. There's space on this planet and if we are distributing the wealth and education more equally, we might have a population that is partner in controlled growth.
The other idea is, that before we start seriously expand through the solar system (which is many magnitude bigger living space than Earth), we have to learn to create habitats with minimal environmental impact, here on earth. We need to learn how to make cities from the sand of the Sahara and other deserts, we need to learn build habitats under the oceans. We're still long way to recycle water, air, organics in sufficient manner on Earth, and then we'll be ready to make the transition. What this process needs is well informed and committed, educated people.
As a side note, if you have read about evolutionary strategies, it seems quite obvious that the largest breeders are species whose life expectancy is low. If we look at human demographics, it comes quite clear that something similar going on with us as well. In socio-economical environments where the survival of the individual is far from being granted in terms of jobs, income, or in healthy living, the women are giving birth much earlier than in countries where we have the prospects for a life lasting 70-80 years with quite good chances. Once the _security_ of the individual is provided, the need for early breeding will diminish. Now it does probably take time to adjust to a new social-economical, and technological environment. In terms of historical scale, it wasn't that long ago when it was perfectly normal in Europe to have 8+ children, especially in rural areas.
The rate of population growth already decreased significantly world wide, and I argue that even bigger populations can be supported by our current technological level, so it is completely unreasonable to advocate reducing the population if we agree on the this. I'm convinced that reducing the population would actually throw us back in time terms of development.
A bit off-topic, but I would like to object to your population reduction criteria. Not your fault, this comes essentially the general economic and ecological perception of our potential as a "closed system". On the other hand, given the large amount of material that is available about geography, agriculture, space exploration, etc., I have to still mark it as naive.
Uncontrolled population growth could be indeed catastrophic but that is now less of a danger than ever. With the current efficiency of agriculture, this planet can feed much larger numbers than we are today. We have more hands and heads than ever to figure out new ways to maintain ourselves and improve our lives. If you hear about starving and dying children, it is more likely due to war, economic embargoes, or unfortunate but not unpredictable disasters that could be avoided by different social organisation. (For example, living next to an active volcano as a permanent settlement is probably a bad idea.)
War is typically the case in point: though the number of casualties in wars is steadily declining, the economical damage caused by wars is crippling sometimes entire populations' life-support. The materials, industrial capacity, and the energy used for building weapons and maintain armies are much higher than ever, even though we're living increasingly peaceful times. I admit though, that there's no evidence that this trend will continue, but it's a good extrapolation given the increased means of communication and the intellectual and emotional bondages connecting people over the continents. Yet we build bigger and more bad ass weaponry and armies.
The other enormous drain is the ideological commitment to not to keep our collective industrial capacity under control under the auspices of "free market". People do make a lot of waste by competing for individual gains, we produce large heaps of crap every year just to sell more crap next year. The population of Earth does not need the "western" lifestyle choices about products to be happy, productive and increasingly well off. Not to mention the distribution issues that arise from the market-controlled distribution: the food often would be rather sold for being waste in the so-called developed world than for feeding the actually needy producers. Interesting to see the global extent of the food waste, which largely accounted not even to the consumer but the retail process.
All in all, the prosperity of the Earth's population is not due to our numbers, but our social structures, being disorganised, holding to stone-age morals when it comes to population growth considerations. A well-informed and educated individual can be partner to society to moderate the population growth and set it to levels that is fit to our current technological limits and also is capable of extending those limits. It is more important to bring the entire human population to a higher level of understanding than anything. Growth, both in longevity and the population did only good for our development and would do more good if our social structures are also designed to serve this purpose.
I don't live in the USA, but I can confirm how security works nowadays. I had been insulted by bouncers for being cheerfully drunk, though I did not cause any trouble at all, I was in control of my actions, no broken property, no fights, no nothing. Just being big (I'm around 6.6 ft and about 100kgs) makes me essentially an instant threat to the security, since they already in the mindset, how to handle me if I go wild. For the record, I'm in my early 30's and the last time I had a fight was when I was 17 or so.
The police and the security guards with their obstructive behaviour however can be real pain in the ass, and you can see how with their inert and empty language (I'm living in the UK now) it is nothing more but making the "subject" upset enough to justify the further actions. Once the "subject" is only a notch louder, they play out the "non-compliant" card. Many times I had spent hours bargaining with the security guards to at least let me get my coat from the cloaking room, because they didn't want to let me in after having a cigarette outside the club. With no precedence of shouting, fighting or being completely wasted.
I remember in 2009, when the G20 was in London, I was heading to the Dockland Yards with my mate when we got surrounded by 3 van load of cops and has been thoroughly searched, ruled by section 60. While I think that the use of such a legislation is already offensive in case of a previously registered demonstration, which was predictably peaceful, after the stop'n'search (including our underpants!), we had been hold of by kind and chatty officers questioning about our political ideas and unnecessary talking to their stations for more than an hour, of course by that time only two P.C. was holding us up. Do you think that wouldn't upset the most civil person? Sure it does. But that's the point, it's designed to be a mind game so that they could round you up at the slightest sign of "non-compliance".
I'm genuinely wary of the whole existence of security forces in a civilised society.
Sir, I think you misinterpreted my comment.
However, very few extremely technical users can keeps their windows installation clean and running for years. You certainly can't expect this from the general population, let alone children.
I think you are a bit harsh with your words. Technical users in general can keep their Windows clean not just a few of them. I know this is just matter of terms, but I only call a user 'technical' only in Windows terms, if they can keep their OS clean and functioning without restricting them.
And according to TFA, the point of giving out these laptops to the children is to educate them to use computers. It is my firm position, that any operating system, including Windows can be also kept functional and tidy if you restrict the user. So why not restrict these children, on their school-given laptops, and educate them, so that later these restriction can be removed and they would become the administrator of their own system? This is the natural course in many field of education, so why not do it for the now ubiquitous computer-like devices? The goal would be, that everybody should have the operational knowledge of their own tools, devices.
Windows isn't really more vulnerable to viruses than OSX in a competent hand
I was able to keep my Windows installation completely virus free by using trusted sources of binary software (trusted here means trusted by me). Without any anti-virus. This includes only really handful sites, like MS, NVidia, and open source sites binary downloads (typically sf.net).
After the experiment, I ran 3 different antivirus software, and they found nothing. So yes, in competent hands, it is possible to keep it clean. I don't like Windows, but it is mostly the user habits, that are dangerous, not necessary the system. I mean, until you find out how your system works, it is a good advice to have an even stricter policies: No installation, website browsing policies... this can be imposed on the child-like users (not just children, but many, many adults).
Linux and BSD require no effort to keep malware out. There are none, and the defaults are pretty sane (there aren't plenty of security-holes in default services which run as root).
This is only true to a point. You see, malwares aren't restricted to OS level, many and increasing number focuses on the user land, especially browsers. We are observing a second layer operating system built on the top of the traditional one, that of the web-client. While it is very unlikely that some javascript or similar malware would be able to gain root privileges on a Linux/BSD system, it is fair enough to get in to the shoes of the browsing user most of the time. The real deal with Linux/BSD systems is working mostly from trusted software repositories built from source code, and binaries that are built by the OS maintainers themselves, therefore the natural user habits are to use the main source of the software. Same goes for OSX: Most of the running software is either Apple product or some big shot name that the user recognizes right away. The rest of the software are usually coming from the same source as those to Linux, given that Unix-likeliness.
Sure you can trace back some issues to some technical shortcoming of Windows, but IMHO it is always up to the user habits to keep the everyday garbage out of the door. For this reason, big companies, like MS and Apple sees this as a challenge to nanny over the user all the time, but that is rather the case of the good ol' false dichotomy between security and freedom. My proposal was addressed to the education of the children. Nonetheless, if we're committed to educate our youth to use their devices properly, I would defintely emphasize that the above mentioned "ring of trust" system at its best starts at hw/kernel level. Free software, such as the Linux kernel with openly and publicly editied and moderate source code (along of course the technical details) is the most secure way you can get.
You can't be serious. Or they that is.
Keep your voice down and we can have a conversation.
Issue #1: The user should be taught how to keep their system clean. Doesn't matter whether it is Linux, Windows or OSX. So they handed out devices without any restriction imposed on the user, the user who is a kid, and is supposed to be restricted they have enough knowledge to be responsible for their own computer-like devices. For the same reason, people having a driver instructor while driving for a while, pass an exam, and only after that they are allowed to drive their own, or other people's car.
Issue #2: All major existing operating system today is capable to restrict the user's actions if they are set up correctly. Now the commercial OSes, like Windows and OSX are advertised as an out-of-the-box solution, and thus people think that they are ready to be deployed in virtually any situations. In practice however, it turns out that when it comes to managing a bunch of devices for predefined goals apart from having fun with personal computing at home, you need a competent administrator or administrator team to handle the set up and the maintenance. Customer support just doesn't cut it for this reason. They off site, and slowly responding, and they don't really know what are the exact requirements for their installation. CS could be handy perhaps in individual cases, where the user works within its competence, but any organization working with computers regularly (as I deduced from the article, the whole point of giving out laptops is to get the education system computerized) need competent maintainer.
Windows isn't really more vulnerable to viruses than OSX in a competent hand, and Linux is just as much stable as any of the commercial operating systems if maintained by skilled administrator. And an competent system administrator would be completely aware of the fact that children are not the most trustworthy users when it comes to downloading and executing software from unknown sources.
So, in my opinion what the school board/administration did is cuting corners on their computer staff, or hired incompetent, unskilled cheap labour for the position. Either way, it isn't really the OS that really matters, it is the person who keeps it running.
It's because using telescopes on such a vast distances corrupts the colour. Remember, that the colours we can see, and appreciate are bound in to a narrow band of frequencies, and taking pictures on a single frequency make better pictures. Of course, you could do 3 distinct images, in the red, green, blue frequency bands, but by that time you make three photos, Cassini changes its position considerably, hence the photos will not cover the same angle. It's fairly big thing to get a single frequency band photograph with proper exposition time. Earth based amateur astronomers do the same thing: take photos of a celestial object with different different filters, and later combine the photos. However, they have the benefit not to observe much large angle change as the Cassini orbiting Saturn.
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm FTFY The StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void will be release probably two years from now.
I always thought the same. Switching between OSes should be more simple, it just need a better boot management: How about a function built in both OS, that saves the memory just like as it was hibernate and switch by memory content? A modern firmware/BIOS should offer this possibility.
For my part, I obviously don't use illegal drugs at work and I'm doing fine. But I can see that most of the programmers, including me, using energy drinks, or shit load of coffee. It seems obvious to me that caffeine is a great drug for programming as much for most of other jobs and activities.
Sometimes at home however, I like to smoke a spliff, read some code on the Github which eventually results in coding my own projects after a while. I have never used any stronger stuff for programming, because it doesn't make much sense for me. While you can get some inspiration, programming is a very focused activity with little room for being dreamy, thus I would say that anything that is stronger than a lightly made joint would be counter-productive for coding.
I suggest, recreational drugs should belong to our recreational time. Many geeks I know has a huge problem with separating from the computer, at least a little recreational time should detach us from the matrix.
Almost immediately after I had finished the 'The God Delusion', I was wonder what is your position on the problem of political activity. Let me expand.
The religious mindset relies on faith at some point. There are people who accept everything that is branded as dear to their religion while others look quite reasonable until you hit some deep spot. One can also make the point that faith generally used as the single most important aspect of politics and oppression. It is not that surprising therefore that the oppressive regimes in human history were bound to some kind of belief system, even if it wasn't explicitly religious, like in the case of the Bolshevik style dictatorships where the cult of the leader, the unquestioned endorsement of the political ideals and actions dictated by the unquestionable source of wisdom replaced the traditional role of the Church. It is not hard to see why even the contemporary politics in the liberal democracies is still struggling with the question of religion.
Do you think that any significant portion of human race will ever be able act on critical assessment rather than blind faith given that there is no demographic, educational and political trend toward a more enlightened society at large (world-level)?
Coming near to you in 3001.
If you have that kind of money, you could just throw at a serious software developer in order to get improvements in GIMP or Inkscape, or whatever. A few donation like that, and there would be no shortage of programmers' time for these products.
A single word: monopoly. These markets are basically frozen.
In short, bullshit.
We would have not had personal computers as we know them today. We probably would be using 3270 terminals and paying time per hour to dial into a nearby mainframe.
As it has been already told, Xerox developed the first PC with GUI. Apple came second after 6 years, with the head of the Xerox PARC team. The Apple's coders made their contribution the computer GUIs, so did the Microsoft team and many others.
We would still be using CDs instead of MP3 players. Before the iPod, MP3 players were regarded as geek chic if best.
Let me point out my friend that every second person I knew had an MP3 player before iPod. You're just joking around, aren't ya?
We would still be buying music, for $19.00 an album, for that one good song, from crowded CD stores, as opposed to just tapping/clicking twice on iTMS.
And other people just simply ripped&compressed the CD's in to MP3/Vorbis and copied around or shared through DC. The same practice did not fail me ever since, the community is ever larger, and we have more choice to transfer music. Anybody who thinks that the iTunes was anything revolutionary is just an other brainless idiot who would probably even literally mean that the sliced bread was a fuckin' great invention.
We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it.
And yet most of the world still using phones other than iPhones and they still can go about their day. Pocket PCs, and smart phones dating before iPhone, just like ancient Christian sects date before the year 0. Perhaps they saw the Messiah coming...
We would look at tablets as something from Star Trek or something for a niche like inventory control.
And yet the iPhone looks quite different from that design.... oh wait! Please, it's too bad even for trolling!
Jobs has revolutionized the way we do business, interact, communicate, and schedule our daily life. Nobody else in history has made an effect on our lives as radically as him.
Jobs made a shit load of money that's his merit. That's his only merit, just as Bill Gates'. Talented people at Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies do make a difference by their work. They are the ones who deliver you working products, not hyped manager and business owners. You should learn appreciate the true producer of your gadgets and tools: these are engineers, software developers, and workers of all sorts. The most depressing thing about the IT/Tech sector that while it is (as most of the things is life) developing gradually and through hard work of hundreds of thousands of people, it is displayed as a personal power trip of one or an other useless, masturbating billionaire. If you feel to fund a museum for the producers of your favourite gadgets, please pay respect not to Steve Jobs, but the engineers and programmers of the Apple Inc., Samsung, the workers of Foxconn etc.
The Last Question is better. This whole Omega Point crap is nothing but extrapolating the claim of theism of the Intelligent Design argument not that of the currently known science.
I think you missed the exact meaning of the issue. A nuclear power plant in regards of its safety doesn't change whether the government owns or not. Having a nuclear power plant means that you don't want it to blow up. However, if you own a hydrogen bomb, you must be prepare to blow it up. You want to have the power to blow it up.
So, I would more trust a government to have a nuclear power plant than to have a hydrogen bomb or any other nuclear weapon, assured that the nuclear power plant functions only for the sole purpose of energy production and/or scientific research purposes.
As for the safety difference the weapons and the reactors, of course you're right. The nuclear arsenal is at rest: bombs only employ the nuclear chain-reaction when they supposed to blow up. A nuclear power plant on the hand must function to produce electricity. However, so far more people died from nuclear weapons than from nuclear power plants despite the low number of nuclear bombing occurred in history. Deliberate murder caused a number of magnitude bigger pile of dead corps than any nuclear accident.
Good question. Now let's see the reality: Government and corporations are handling virtually everything? And why is the nuclear power plant is more dangerous in the hand of a government than let's say, a hydrogen-bomb? And if the governments and the corporations are the problem, and not the energy source, than people should abolish governments and corporations instead of feeding the politicians with trendy topics, such as this.
FYI, I don't think turning off this service is that important I've just found your argument invalid, a cliché and utterly ridiculous.