I have not read the whole thing yet. Only about 1/3 or so. But the parts I've seen talk of non-software too. For example, even in the very first paragraph of the introduction there is an example of patents slowing down the progress of steam engine technology and the speed of its adaptation. See also page 24+ in chapter two.
The reason why there is so much focus on software in the book might be that that is a field that until recently was free of patents, and so provides us with a very clear example of how a field can proper without them. It also means that one can compare the rate of invention in software and algorithms before and after the introduction of software patents to see if patents serve their intended purpose or not. In other fields, patents were introduced much longer ago, making this more difficult.
It's not easy to follow you when you are so terse. I don't understand what you mean by fourier analysis etc. assuming linearity. The fourier transform is just a change of basis. The transform itself is linear, but that doesn't mean that it assumes that the signal it's applied to is linear - it is general and can be applied to anything.
That hearing is a non-linear function means that the function hearing(sound1+sound2) != hearing(sound1)+hearing(sound2). Nobody disputes that (see below). But that doesn't mean that I can't say freqs=fourier_transform(sound), which implies that sound = inverse_fourier_transform(freqs). So hearing(sound) = hearing(inverse_fourier_transform(freqs)) = freq_hearing(freqs). freq_hearing would be a new non-linear function which describes the ear's response in terms of the fourier representation of the sound rather than in terms of the time representation of the sound. Nothing magical has happened here, and nothing has been assumed. It's just like saying kinetic_energy(speed_in_miles_per_hour) = kinetic_energy(convert_from_km_to_miles(speed_in_km_per_hour)) = kinetic_energy_from_km(speed_in_km_per_hour). kinetic energy is also nonlinear in terms of speed, but that nonlinearity doesn't enter into it at all.
Assuming linearity would instead be saying that hearing(inverse_fourier_transform(freqs)) = inverse_fourier_transform(hearing(freqs)), which is false. But nobody is doing that.
Llet me give some evidence that mainstream sound/hearing science does not assume that the ear's response is linear. 1. Sound strenghts are given in dB, a logarithmic scale, because our experience of sound is more closely approximated as logarithmic than linear. 2. Lossy audio compression relies on the phenomenon of masking, where one sound becomes inaudible when played together with another one. This is a textbook example of nonlinearity.
If I misunderstood what you meant, then please explain what you mean in detail.
Apparently this link hasn't been posted enough times yet. It addresses both your first question (partially) and your second question (in huge detail).
The video you're comparing to is being treated no better than audio. It's simply that human eyes are much better than human ears, so to give a comparable experience much higher bitrates are needed for video than audio.
There is a small bug in the demo: It's using the "draw open path" instead of "draw closed path" command. That leaves a gap (between Athens and Vienna) in what should have been a closed path on the map, since the Traveling Salesman problem is about a salesman going out to sell things, and then returning home in the end. Aside from that, the plot and text output are consistent and correct.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here, but the Traveling Salesman problem is a closed path - the salesman has to return to his starting point in the end. Your solution is only shorter if the salesman is allowed to settle down in Reykjavik in the end. The red line in the plot is misleading because it does not draw the closing line between Athens and Vienna, but that part is included in the path. As far as I can see, the solution shown in the video is the correct one, and the path drawn is correct except for the lack of a closing line.
Only half of that circumference is facing the sun at any given time. Only about 2/3s of that half would have anything near an optimal angle to the sun.
The total factor works out to be 1/pi. We get one factor of 1/2 from the day vs night part. For the day, we get (\int_0^pi sin(x) dx)/(pi-0) = 2/pi. The overall efficiency is therefore 1/2 * 2/pi = 1/pi. Assuming the solar panels handle highly inclined light optimally. So your estimate was pretty accurate.
As I pointed out previously, the number isn't 1.2 MW per square km. The article that number is from talks about building solar cells along roads, and the number is 1.2 MW per km of road. A more realistic number is 130 MW per square km, and that already takes the day/night cycle into account, so you can use the whole area. Also, milli (m) and mega (M) are very different, so don't be sloppy with the case in units. In my reply to your previous, anonymous post, I arrived at 200+ TW of average power after beaming to Earth. That is different from your number by a factor of 200!
You got your units wrong here, I'm afraid. The source you are referring to is not speaking about 1.2 MW per square km. It is speaking about 1.2 MW per km of road. Roads are pretty thin, so installing solar panels along them does not result in many square kilometers per km.
This mistake leads to your result being off by a huge amount. The solar constant is 1.361 GW per square km. Normally this is reduced by 30% by the atmosphere, but that does not apply in space. Neither are there clouds to worry about, so we can pretty much use this number directly, after dividing by pi to account for the lunar day/night cycle, giving us about 0.45 GW per square km. High-end satellite solar cells get up to 29% efficiency. Using that, we get 0.13 GW per square km. With an area of 11,000 km by 200 km = 2.2 million square km (we have already taken the night into account in our numbers), that results in a total production of 286 TW, which is 19 times the world's current total energy use. Of course, one has to get this energy down to earth somehow too. This seems to have an efficiency of about 85% (possibly squared - unclear). That partially negates the advantage of being outside the atmosphere, but we still end up receiving 206-243 TW.
So no, the main objection to this plan isn't that there wouldn't be enough energy available. It is how much resources would be spent making it. I think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches. But I have not read the tehcnical details of their plan.
The return code from the function is "err", which is the result of the last test that was done inside the function. The second goto is only reached if err is 0 (success), so at that point the function returns success.
While I agree that determining the optimal duration of copyright is a difficult problem, much like other similar questions in socity, I think you give up too quickly here. One way of approaching this problem is to see what effect previous extensions of copyright has had on the rate of production of new works. Since copyright duration has been changed several times, one has in effect been performing copyright experiments. These could also be performed in the other direction, to see which effect shorter copyright would have. But in order to reach a steady state situation, each experiment would have to last for a rather long time, making this approach very time-consuming.
Another approach is to attempt to model what makes people produce new creative works, and how beneficial each work is. This requires a lot of work too (probably lots of interviews and comparisons of productivity and usage in different fields with different levels copyright enforcement). But with a good enough model one can then make predictions for how productivity and benefit from works will change when copyright duration is changed.
Some work has been done in this direction, such as this article. That article skips the important empirical checks though, and so the assumptions going into the model are not verified, and most of them would lead one to overestimate the optimal duration. For example, the article assumes that 1. Works are only produced for monetary gain. 2. It is only possible to earn money from a work while it is copyrighted. 3. A smaller public domain due to too long copyright does not make it more difficult to produce new works. 4. Enforcing copyright has zero cost. Despite these unrealistic assumptions, the paper finds an optimal duration of 12 years. It seems very likely that more realistic assumptions would lead to a shorter optimal duration than that (in fact, it would not surprise me if the optimum is 0 years, i.e. that copyright does more harm than good).
Sure, that would be a great improvement compared to the current system. But I didn't list is because it isn't an alternative to copyright, just a better version of copyright. How did you choose 10 years by the way? That seems like a really long period to me. I book you read when you're 10 will still not be public domain by the time you start working. It only seems short in comparison to the ridiculously long copyright we have now.
I think that if one chooses to go with copyright (but as I argue in my original post, I think copyright has problems that can't be fixed by tweaking the duration), one should try to scientifically determine the optimal duration - not just pull a number out of the air.
That is pretty much the same as a similar system in Norway, that I mentioned under point 2 in my original post. The current system is not usage-based, though, but I think that a system of the scope necessary to replace copyright would need some sort of objective metric for determining who gets this salary (and how much they get). Usage was the simplest and most persuasive one I could think of.
As an author one has two interests: That one's works should be widely enjoyed (i.e. the wish to leave a mark on the world, and be popular), and the wish to earn money. In the current system the latter is solved via copyright: Each author has a monopoly on distributing his works for a (very, very long) time, letting him sell copies of his work with little worry of competition. This mechanism works, but it is not optimal because it conflicts with the other goal of authors, which is that one's works should be widely enjoyed. Under copyright, income depends on strict control of copying, and unauthorized copying potentially represents lost sales. The author therefore finds himself trying to stop others from spreading his work, and to limit those who enjoy it to those who bought a copy. His first and second goals are working against each other.
In a perfect system, authors would not have such a conflict of interest with themselves. Several alternatives to copyright exist which solve this problem, but introduce others.
1. Upfront payment (Kickstarter): The author asks for the full payment for his work before he performs it, rather than extracting it gradually over years afterwards. This could be organized in the same manner as the highly successfull Kickstarter: They author creates a Kickstarter page detailing his plan for, say, a new book, with some information about what it would be about, and states a price he wants for writing it (say 50,000€), possibly with some stretch goals (bonus chapter after 100,000€, for example). Potential readers then choose how much money they want to commit. Once enough money to reach the author's price has been reached, he gets the money, and starts working. If too much time passes (time-limit is commonly 90 days with Kickstarter) without the goal being reached, then the potential readers get their money back, and the author must try some other approach.
The advantage of this approach is that since the author has already been paid before he does the work, he does not need to control copying: copies are free, and can be shared freely. The more copies are shared, and the more people who enjoy his work, the easier it will be for him to gather money for his work.
The disadvantage of this system is that it will be hard for unknown authors to find people willing to fund them. Probably, their first book would need to be written for free in order to get enough interested readers for this approach to work. On the other hand, in practice, authors already write their first book for free under the current system (they need something to show the editor in order to be funded), so this is not a serious disadvantage.
Projects of more than $1,000,000 are regularly funded through Kickstarter, and more than 50,000 projects have been funded during the 4 years since its founding. So a Kickstarter-inspired model of up-front payment really looks like it could work.
2. Usage-based payment: In stead of the author selling copies, the state could measure how much his works are used and compensate him accordingly. That would solve his conflict of interest with himself - now it would be in his economic interest to see people share his work with each other. Something similar to this has been in use for some artists in Norway since 1886, though in a much less expansive fashion. An advantage of this approach is that it allows one to make the economic reward non-proportional to the popularity. For example, one could reduce the money per fan per work for the most popular works in order to encourage diversity and avoid super-star effects where a few authors become billionaires while others get nothing (like the current system). A disadvantage of this is that it would require a significant bureaucracy, and there could be difficulties in getting unbiased measurements of popularity of individual works.
3. Donation-based payment: Fans of works could voluntarily donate money to authors. This would make the author's income grow as the number of fans grow, and it would be in authors
The glacier is thinning because its surging. Another way of looking at it is that the glacier is growing in length rapidly, but then that sounds somehow less scary doesn't it?
Yes, intuitively one would think that if a glacier speeds up, it must be growing more quickly. But the world is a complex place, so we should be vary of our intuition. Thankfully people have actually measured the lenght of the glacier, so we con't have to guess:
As the Arctic region warms, Greenland’s glaciers have been thinning and calving icebergs farther and farther inland. This means that even though the glacier is flowing toward the coast and carrying more ice into the ocean, its calving front is actually retreating. In 2012 and 2013, Jakobshavn’s front retreated around 0.6 miles (1 km) each year compared to its position the previous summer.
First of all, I think you're using a nonstandard definition of whistleblower here. Here is a typical dictionary definition:
S: (n) whistle blower, whistle-blower, whistleblower (an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it)
Secondly, isn't the highest authority in a democracy supposed to be the people? So even with your definition, people who alert the people to wrongdoing in the government are whistleblowers.
Thirdly, sure, when they leak information people get hurt. But have you considered that the government's wrongdoings also hurt people? Not just the few who have chosen a dangerous line of work as spies, but potentially everybody. I don't think it's obvious that the harm to the spies outweighs the harm to the rest of the people.
Remember, at the end of the 80's early 90's everyone thought Japan was going to overtake the US, and look where they are now; they haven't recovered yet from their market collapse 20 years ago.
This graph plots the GDP per capita of the USA, the UK, Japan, India and China. You can see what happened to Japan there: they rose rapidly until they roughly caught up with the USA and UK (and other developed countries) in terms of GDP, and then settled in to grow at the same pace as them. This seems pretty reasonable - it is easier to catch up than to lead, since one can benefit from already existing technology and from being cheaper labor-wise (like you point out). It seems reasonable that the same will happen to China. It is currently rising rapidly, just like Japan did, but I expect it to join the rest of the developed countries in their slower growth once it catches up, in the relatively near future (15 years perhaps?).
But all that is about per capita numbers. If China follows the same pattern as Japan, and slows down once its GDP per capita approaches that of the US, then it will still have a total GDP 2-4 times larger than the US. So I think pointing to Japan when arguing that China's economy won't dwarf that of the USA doesn't really work. To avoid that happening, China has to do much worse than Japan, relatively speaking.
Not really. When transforming to the co-rotating coordinate system you will find that you have introduced a gravitational field that just cancels the attraction between the Earth and the Moon. In Newtonian gravity this would be called a fictitious force (the centrifugal force), but in general relativity it is as real a gravitational field as any other, and can be considered to be a sort of frame-dragging set up by all the other objects in the universe, which are also rotating around the Earth in this frame.
So in that sense rotation is relative, just like position and velocity. But it can't be denied that there are some reference frames that make things simpler than others, and by following your thought experiment we can arrive at a frame with a particularly simple metric, which we would call the non-rotating one. In that sense you could call rotation "absolute", I guess. But it is a very weak sense of absolute: The reason why that frame is particularly simple is due to the overall velocity distribution in the universe. This is similar to how we can measure our speed relative to the cosmic microwave background, effectively giving us a "speed relative to the universe", while absolute velocity still does not matter to any physical laws.
You're assuming absolute positions here. In general relativity, it is equally valid to consider the Earth to be at rest, with the rest of the universe moving and rotating in a complicated fashion. But I agree that it doesn't make sense to think of time-travel only in terms of time - it's space-time that matters.
In special relativity, the only way to travel to the past that I'm aware of is through superluminal motion, but general relativity is more flexible, and allows time travel by distorting space-time in inventive ways. Perhaps the most commonly considered time travel thought experiment in GR is via wormhole. Any wormhole potentially allows time travel: even a purely spatial wormhole can be turned into a temporal wormhole by using time dialation (from acceleration or gravity) to make less time pass for one exit from the wormhole than another. So one could, for example, make time machine by making a local wormhole (this step is left as an exercise for the reader), taking one end on a spaceship and making it orbit close to a black hole for a few years, and then bringing it back. If, say, 10 years passed for one end and only 5 years for the other, then entering the "old" end would let you exit 5 years earlier. But interestingly, one could not use this time machine to travel earlier into the past than when the wormhole was first created.
Another interesting way of distorting space that has been investigated is the warp drive, which continuously distorts space around an object. This can be used both for superluminal travel or time travel by changing the parameters. The problem, though, for all these "distort spacetime to travel to the past" approaches is that to get the correct shape for the distortion requires matter with exotic properties such as negative energy density, which has never been observed.
In common for all these time travel mechanisms is that they aren't simply "POOF, and you're there", they all involve continuous trajectories in space-time, and so don't have the problem you mentioned.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my skim through the article, it seems like he only used a single drive of each type. That makes it hard to demonstrate that the differences he saw were real, and not just random. I.e., it may be that all drives have a 75% chance of surviving the test, and that the Intel one just happened to be the lucky one. A more robust test would be to test N copies of each drive. N = 5 should give pretty good significance if this really is completely deterministic.
This is just direct confirmation of what we already knew about.
That paper talks about the possility that one might observe plumes, as one of several possible explanations for the terrain features seen on Europa. Actually observing such plumes is something else entirely.
It's pretty clear Europa probably has some form of life under the ice. The odds are definitely in it's favor. It's just a matter of confirming it, just like these plumes. The really exciting bit will be if it's multicellular or even fish like animals. I really hope I live long enough to see it.
How is that clear? On what do you base the claim that the odds are so good that "it's just a matter of confirming it"? I don't think you would find anybody working in that field willing to make that bold claims.
Slashdot Mirror
I have not read the whole thing yet. Only about 1/3 or so. But the parts I've seen talk of non-software too. For example, even in the very first paragraph of the introduction there is an example of patents slowing down the progress of steam engine technology and the speed of its adaptation. See also page 24+ in chapter two.
The reason why there is so much focus on software in the book might be that that is a field that until recently was free of patents, and so provides us with a very clear example of how a field can proper without them. It also means that one can compare the rate of invention in software and algorithms before and after the introduction of software patents to see if patents serve their intended purpose or not. In other fields, patents were introduced much longer ago, making this more difficult.
This book argues quite convincingly, based on current and historical examples, that copyrights and patents are a net negative to society.
It's not easy to follow you when you are so terse. I don't understand what you mean by fourier analysis etc. assuming linearity. The fourier transform is just a change of basis. The transform itself is linear, but that doesn't mean that it assumes that the signal it's applied to is linear - it is general and can be applied to anything.
That hearing is a non-linear function means that the function hearing(sound1+sound2) != hearing(sound1)+hearing(sound2). Nobody disputes that (see below). But that doesn't mean that I can't say freqs=fourier_transform(sound), which implies that sound = inverse_fourier_transform(freqs). So hearing(sound) = hearing(inverse_fourier_transform(freqs)) = freq_hearing(freqs). freq_hearing would be a new non-linear function which describes the ear's response in terms of the fourier representation of the sound rather than in terms of the time representation of the sound. Nothing magical has happened here, and nothing has been assumed. It's just like saying kinetic_energy(speed_in_miles_per_hour) = kinetic_energy(convert_from_km_to_miles(speed_in_km_per_hour)) = kinetic_energy_from_km(speed_in_km_per_hour). kinetic energy is also nonlinear in terms of speed, but that nonlinearity doesn't enter into it at all.
Assuming linearity would instead be saying that hearing(inverse_fourier_transform(freqs)) = inverse_fourier_transform(hearing(freqs)), which is false. But nobody is doing that.
Llet me give some evidence that mainstream sound/hearing science does not assume that the ear's response is linear. 1. Sound strenghts are given in dB, a logarithmic scale, because our experience of sound is more closely approximated as logarithmic than linear. 2. Lossy audio compression relies on the phenomenon of masking, where one sound becomes inaudible when played together with another one. This is a textbook example of nonlinearity.
If I misunderstood what you meant, then please explain what you mean in detail.
Could you elaborate on this? In what way do they assume that hearing is linear? I have never heard anybody claim hearing is linear before.
Apparently this link hasn't been posted enough times yet. It addresses both your first question (partially) and your second question (in huge detail).
The video you're comparing to is being treated no better than audio. It's simply that human eyes are much better than human ears, so to give a comparable experience much higher bitrates are needed for video than audio.
There is a small bug in the demo: It's using the "draw open path" instead of "draw closed path" command. That leaves a gap (between Athens and Vienna) in what should have been a closed path on the map, since the Traveling Salesman problem is about a salesman going out to sell things, and then returning home in the end. Aside from that, the plot and text output are consistent and correct.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here, but the Traveling Salesman problem is a closed path - the salesman has to return to his starting point in the end. Your solution is only shorter if the salesman is allowed to settle down in Reykjavik in the end. The red line in the plot is misleading because it does not draw the closing line between Athens and Vienna, but that part is included in the path. As far as I can see, the solution shown in the video is the correct one, and the path drawn is correct except for the lack of a closing line.
Only half of that circumference is facing the sun at any given time.
Only about 2/3s of that half would have anything near an optimal angle to the sun.
The total factor works out to be 1/pi. We get one factor of 1/2 from the day vs night part. For the day, we get (\int_0^pi sin(x) dx)/(pi-0) = 2/pi. The overall efficiency is therefore 1/2 * 2/pi = 1/pi. Assuming the solar panels handle highly inclined light optimally. So your estimate was pretty accurate.
As I pointed out previously, the number isn't 1.2 MW per square km. The article that number is from talks about building solar cells along roads, and the number is 1.2 MW per km of road. A more realistic number is 130 MW per square km, and that already takes the day/night cycle into account, so you can use the whole area. Also, milli (m) and mega (M) are very different, so don't be sloppy with the case in units. In my reply to your previous, anonymous post, I arrived at 200+ TW of average power after beaming to Earth. That is different from your number by a factor of 200!
You got your units wrong here, I'm afraid. The source you are referring to is not speaking about 1.2 MW per square km. It is speaking about 1.2 MW per km of road. Roads are pretty thin, so installing solar panels along them does not result in many square kilometers per km.
This mistake leads to your result being off by a huge amount. The solar constant is 1.361 GW per square km. Normally this is reduced by 30% by the atmosphere, but that does not apply in space. Neither are there clouds to worry about, so we can pretty much use this number directly, after dividing by pi to account for the lunar day/night cycle, giving us about 0.45 GW per square km. High-end satellite solar cells get up to 29% efficiency. Using that, we get 0.13 GW per square km. With an area of 11,000 km by 200 km = 2.2 million square km (we have already taken the night into account in our numbers), that results in a total production of 286 TW, which is 19 times the world's current total energy use. Of course, one has to get this energy down to earth somehow too. This seems to have an efficiency of about 85% (possibly squared - unclear). That partially negates the advantage of being outside the atmosphere, but we still end up receiving 206-243 TW.
So no, the main objection to this plan isn't that there wouldn't be enough energy available. It is how much resources would be spent making it. I think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches. But I have not read the tehcnical details of their plan.
The return code from the function is "err", which is the result of the last test that was done inside the function. The second goto is only reached if err is 0 (success), so at that point the function returns success.
While I agree that determining the optimal duration of copyright is a difficult problem, much like other similar questions in socity, I think you give up too quickly here. One way of approaching this problem is to see what effect previous extensions of copyright has had on the rate of production of new works. Since copyright duration has been changed several times, one has in effect been performing copyright experiments. These could also be performed in the other direction, to see which effect shorter copyright would have. But in order to reach a steady state situation, each experiment would have to last for a rather long time, making this approach very time-consuming.
Another approach is to attempt to model what makes people produce new creative works, and how beneficial each work is. This requires a lot of work too (probably lots of interviews and comparisons of productivity and usage in different fields with different levels copyright enforcement). But with a good enough model one can then make predictions for how productivity and benefit from works will change when copyright duration is changed.
Some work has been done in this direction, such as this article. That article skips the important empirical checks though, and so the assumptions going into the model are not verified, and most of them would lead one to overestimate the optimal duration. For example, the article assumes that 1. Works are only produced for monetary gain. 2. It is only possible to earn money from a work while it is copyrighted. 3. A smaller public domain due to too long copyright does not make it more difficult to produce new works. 4. Enforcing copyright has zero cost. Despite these unrealistic assumptions, the paper finds an optimal duration of 12 years. It seems very likely that more realistic assumptions would lead to a shorter optimal duration than that (in fact, it would not surprise me if the optimum is 0 years, i.e. that copyright does more harm than good).
Sure, that would be a great improvement compared to the current system. But I didn't list is because it isn't an alternative to copyright, just a better version of copyright. How did you choose 10 years by the way? That seems like a really long period to me. I book you read when you're 10 will still not be public domain by the time you start working. It only seems short in comparison to the ridiculously long copyright we have now.
I think that if one chooses to go with copyright (but as I argue in my original post, I think copyright has problems that can't be fixed by tweaking the duration), one should try to scientifically determine the optimal duration - not just pull a number out of the air.
That is pretty much the same as a similar system in Norway, that I mentioned under point 2 in my original post. The current system is not usage-based, though, but I think that a system of the scope necessary to replace copyright would need some sort of objective metric for determining who gets this salary (and how much they get). Usage was the simplest and most persuasive one I could think of.
As an author one has two interests: That one's works should be widely enjoyed (i.e. the wish to leave a mark on the world, and be popular), and the wish to earn money. In the current system the latter is solved via copyright: Each author has a monopoly on distributing his works for a (very, very long) time, letting him sell copies of his work with little worry of competition. This mechanism works, but it is not optimal because it conflicts with the other goal of authors, which is that one's works should be widely enjoyed. Under copyright, income depends on strict control of copying, and unauthorized copying potentially represents lost sales. The author therefore finds himself trying to stop others from spreading his work, and to limit those who enjoy it to those who bought a copy. His first and second goals are working against each other.
In a perfect system, authors would not have such a conflict of interest with themselves. Several alternatives to copyright exist which solve this problem, but introduce others.
1. Upfront payment (Kickstarter): The author asks for the full payment for his work before he performs it, rather than extracting it gradually over years afterwards. This could be organized in the same manner as the highly successfull Kickstarter: They author creates a Kickstarter page detailing his plan for, say, a new book, with some information about what it would be about, and states a price he wants for writing it (say 50,000€), possibly with some stretch goals (bonus chapter after 100,000€, for example). Potential readers then choose how much money they want to commit. Once enough money to reach the author's price has been reached, he gets the money, and starts working. If too much time passes (time-limit is commonly 90 days with Kickstarter) without the goal being reached, then the potential readers get their money back, and the author must try some other approach.
The advantage of this approach is that since the author has already been paid before he does the work, he does not need to control copying: copies are free, and can be shared freely. The more copies are shared, and the more people who enjoy his work, the easier it will be for him to gather money for his work.
The disadvantage of this system is that it will be hard for unknown authors to find people willing to fund them. Probably, their first book would need to be written for free in order to get enough interested readers for this approach to work. On the other hand, in practice, authors already write their first book for free under the current system (they need something to show the editor in order to be funded), so this is not a serious disadvantage.
Projects of more than $1,000,000 are regularly funded through Kickstarter, and more than 50,000 projects have been funded during the 4 years since its founding. So a Kickstarter-inspired model of up-front payment really looks like it could work.
2. Usage-based payment: In stead of the author selling copies, the state could measure how much his works are used and compensate him accordingly. That would solve his conflict of interest with himself - now it would be in his economic interest to see people share his work with each other. Something similar to this has been in use for some artists in Norway since 1886, though in a much less expansive fashion. An advantage of this approach is that it allows one to make the economic reward non-proportional to the popularity. For example, one could reduce the money per fan per work for the most popular works in order to encourage diversity and avoid super-star effects where a few authors become billionaires while others get nothing (like the current system). A disadvantage of this is that it would require a significant bureaucracy, and there could be difficulties in getting unbiased measurements of popularity of individual works.
3. Donation-based payment: Fans of works could voluntarily donate money to authors. This would make the author's income grow as the number of fans grow, and it would be in authors
The glacier is thinning because its surging. Another way of looking at it is that the glacier is growing in length rapidly, but then that sounds somehow less scary doesn't it?
Yes, intuitively one would think that if a glacier speeds up, it must be growing more quickly. But the world is a complex place, so we should be vary of our intuition. Thankfully people have actually measured the lenght of the glacier, so we con't have to guess:
As the Arctic region warms, Greenland’s glaciers have been thinning and calving icebergs farther and farther inland. This means that even though the glacier is flowing toward the coast and carrying more ice into the ocean, its calving front is actually retreating. In 2012 and 2013, Jakobshavn’s front retreated around 0.6 miles (1 km) each year compared to its position the previous summer.
Sometimes it pays to read TFA!
Then they changed their mind, though they make it a bit more difficult than usual.
In my experience, you only have to wait for the ads to fail to load, which they do immediately due to adblock.
First of all, I think you're using a nonstandard definition of whistleblower here. Here is a typical dictionary definition:
S: (n) whistle blower, whistle-blower, whistleblower (an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it)
Secondly, isn't the highest authority in a democracy supposed to be the people? So even with your definition, people who alert the people to wrongdoing in the government are whistleblowers.
Thirdly, sure, when they leak information people get hurt. But have you considered that the government's wrongdoings also hurt people? Not just the few who have chosen a dangerous line of work as spies, but potentially everybody. I don't think it's obvious that the harm to the spies outweighs the harm to the rest of the people.
Remember, at the end of the 80's early 90's everyone thought Japan was going to overtake the US, and look where they are now; they haven't recovered yet from their market collapse 20 years ago.
This graph plots the GDP per capita of the USA, the UK, Japan, India and China. You can see what happened to Japan there: they rose rapidly until they roughly caught up with the USA and UK (and other developed countries) in terms of GDP, and then settled in to grow at the same pace as them. This seems pretty reasonable - it is easier to catch up than to lead, since one can benefit from already existing technology and from being cheaper labor-wise (like you point out). It seems reasonable that the same will happen to China. It is currently rising rapidly, just like Japan did, but I expect it to join the rest of the developed countries in their slower growth once it catches up, in the relatively near future (15 years perhaps?).
But all that is about per capita numbers. If China follows the same pattern as Japan, and slows down once its GDP per capita approaches that of the US, then it will still have a total GDP 2-4 times larger than the US. So I think pointing to Japan when arguing that China's economy won't dwarf that of the USA doesn't really work. To avoid that happening, China has to do much worse than Japan, relatively speaking.
Not really. When transforming to the co-rotating coordinate system you will find that you have introduced a gravitational field that just cancels the attraction between the Earth and the Moon. In Newtonian gravity this would be called a fictitious force (the centrifugal force), but in general relativity it is as real a gravitational field as any other, and can be considered to be a sort of frame-dragging set up by all the other objects in the universe, which are also rotating around the Earth in this frame.
So in that sense rotation is relative, just like position and velocity. But it can't be denied that there are some reference frames that make things simpler than others, and by following your thought experiment we can arrive at a frame with a particularly simple metric, which we would call the non-rotating one. In that sense you could call rotation "absolute", I guess. But it is a very weak sense of absolute: The reason why that frame is particularly simple is due to the overall velocity distribution in the universe. This is similar to how we can measure our speed relative to the cosmic microwave background, effectively giving us a "speed relative to the universe", while absolute velocity still does not matter to any physical laws.
You're assuming absolute positions here. In general relativity, it is equally valid to consider the Earth to be at rest, with the rest of the universe moving and rotating in a complicated fashion. But I agree that it doesn't make sense to think of time-travel only in terms of time - it's space-time that matters.
In special relativity, the only way to travel to the past that I'm aware of is through superluminal motion, but general relativity is more flexible, and allows time travel by distorting space-time in inventive ways. Perhaps the most commonly considered time travel thought experiment in GR is via wormhole. Any wormhole potentially allows time travel: even a purely spatial wormhole can be turned into a temporal wormhole by using time dialation (from acceleration or gravity) to make less time pass for one exit from the wormhole than another. So one could, for example, make time machine by making a local wormhole (this step is left as an exercise for the reader), taking one end on a spaceship and making it orbit close to a black hole for a few years, and then bringing it back. If, say, 10 years passed for one end and only 5 years for the other, then entering the "old" end would let you exit 5 years earlier. But interestingly, one could not use this time machine to travel earlier into the past than when the wormhole was first created.
Another interesting way of distorting space that has been investigated is the warp drive, which continuously distorts space around an object. This can be used both for superluminal travel or time travel by changing the parameters. The problem, though, for all these "distort spacetime to travel to the past" approaches is that to get the correct shape for the distortion requires matter with exotic properties such as negative energy density, which has never been observed.
In common for all these time travel mechanisms is that they aren't simply "POOF, and you're there", they all involve continuous trajectories in space-time, and so don't have the problem you mentioned.
That was supposed to be 75% chance of failing the test, of course. Not that it matters much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my skim through the article, it seems like he only used a single drive of each type. That makes it hard to demonstrate that the differences he saw were real, and not just random. I.e., it may be that all drives have a 75% chance of surviving the test, and that the Intel one just happened to be the lucky one. A more robust test would be to test N copies of each drive. N = 5 should give pretty good significance if this really is completely deterministic.
We've known about the plumes for a long time:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/LPSC99/pdf/1603.pdf
This is just direct confirmation of what we already knew about.
That paper talks about the possility that one might observe plumes, as one of several possible explanations for the terrain features seen on Europa. Actually observing such plumes is something else entirely.
It's pretty clear Europa probably has some form of life under the ice. The odds are definitely in it's favor. It's just a matter of confirming it, just like these plumes. The really exciting bit will be if it's multicellular or even fish like animals. I really hope I live long enough to see it.
How is that clear? On what do you base the claim that the odds are so good that "it's just a matter of confirming it"? I don't think you would find anybody working in that field willing to make that bold claims.