Why aren't they using airships/blimps? Better payload, which allows larger batteries = longer runtime, larger range and larger amount of drugs so more destinations per trip, less expensive than quadcopters, won't "fall out of the sky" like quadcopters, rain will not hurt a blimp as much as it would quadcopter.
Blimps do get blown around a bit but I'm sure these hand-held quadcopters don't do well in heavy wind either, and a blimp is far less likely to crash than a quadcopter. Blimp would be larger but it doesn't sound like size is a huge concern, this isn't a spy drone to see enemy positions, it's a efficient delivery system.
Quadcopter would be nice for a once-in-awhile delivery or when seconds count making speed is crucial, but a blimp would be better for daily use or when you can wait a few minutes for the drugs to arrive.
I think there is a basic flaw in the idea of a large, undefended, slow moving target carrying medical supplies. I mean, I'm no African warlord, but I would see this as a really good idea, if I were...
not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
Really? Why don't you try using your imagination, instead of echoing tired-ass, discredited memes? Oh wait, you are an AC. The day/night argument against solar power goes away when you put the collector in orbit and use microwaves to transfer the energy. The day/night argument is fucking stupid and has been for about half a century, now.
Putting a solar collection/conversion facility in a Lissajous near the L2 Lagrangian and beaming the energy to where you need it on the surface of the Moon/Mars solves all the problems you associate with solar power, elegantly and simply. Bonus points for assembling the power station in situ at the L2. Imagination is a really cool thing, you know -- more important than knowledge, according to a certain egghead...
If you are curious about the mathematical tools necessary to deploy GR effectively, The Road to Reality is your book. It was written by Roger Penrose, one of the foremost mathematicians of our time.
But it has neither the software support nor the peripherals to be a computer, rather than just another media player.
What? Did you really just assert that the raspberry pi is not a computer because it doesn't have software support or peripherals? Did you even look at the video? I saw a keyboard, mouse and monitor plugged into it, and some of my favorite software *ever* running on it at triple digit framerates. I know some people don't read the actual articles here, but seriously, dude -- at least most people here know what a computer is.
seizing anything that is suspected of being used for criminal activity has been perfectly legal for hundreds of years. and there is no excuse that you were running some service or other and didn't know what other people were doing. if the cops get a hunch they will seize your stuff to look for evidence and impound it if there is evidence of a crime
No, no, and no. Your notions about search and seizure don't work the way you think they do on the net, as I'm sure other people will point out to you in excruciating detail. I'll just stick to your obvious ignorance about anonymizers in general, and TOR in particular. Do you really understand what a TOR route is, and the function of entry and exit nodes? It's like a blind drop, to borrow a phrase from espionage. The traffic that exits TOR back onto the internet can't be associated reliably with the address that it entered TOR from. Law enforcement agencies like ICE understand this -- they know that evidence that leads them to TOR is a dead end.
What is interesting here is that ICE decided to intimidate the TOR operator by seizing his equipment anyway, warning him explicitly when they gave him back his gear that they might take it away again.
Fwiw, I think the TOR operator has a case that his fourth amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search and seizure were violated, and that ICE actually communicated a threat to him. I hope like hell EFF encourages him to pursue it.
...and science doesn't get to help. In fact, I would submit that it really doesn't matter whether AGW is confirmed or not in step two. When it comes to making policy in step three, financially vested interests will determine what is best for their profits, and will instruct policy makers in government on what course to set. Would that it were otherwise, but science can't compete with the corporate bottom line.
This is nothing more than a clever restatement of epistemological nihilism. Basically restated it says, "Because we cannot produce a perfect theory, we can have no theory whose predictions we can have a high degree of certainty about,"
It's a moronic position when you consider that the same basic fact that no theory is complete applies to all theories, including theories like Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics, both of which despite obvious missing pieces and flaws are among the most successful theories ever developed.
A theory does not need to be complete to have explanatory power. Maybe you should stop trying to defend oil company shills and inventing bullshit claims about how science works, and, you know, actually learn how science fucking works.
For scientists, you are probably right -- theories only need to be empirically adequate. If the observations don't contradict the model, the model is fine. But that is not adequate for the rest of the population. Especially not stock brokers and politicians. Those are the people whose opinion counts when discussing the error bars on climate model data. You can be as rational as you want about the data and way the model works, but if it doesn't convince a fund manager who is trying to hedge his $8B investment fund, or a politician who is trying to figure out who to get in bed with so he can get re-elected, it. doesn't. mean. shit. Politicians and brokers use a different calculus and a different model for looking at the world than scientists use. Their models determine the direction of human endeavor on this planet, not scientific models. It's been that way since humans developed government and currency, btw -- good luck trying to change it.
I thought Apple prided itself on making better products, but by bringing these cases before a judge they admit they are not competing on quality anymore.
Why do you feel that using the courts to stifle a competitor is incompatible with making a quality product? It seems to me if you want to optimize your profit, you do both.
So one can block the sale of a device on a whole continent because it possibly infringes on a functionality that represents 1/10000 of the default functionality of the phone. My phone can call, video call, chat, do my email, take and edit videos, upload pictures to the net, scan bar codes for maintaining list of books and dvds, do anything a browser can do, play games like a console, be my alarm clock, and I can't buy it because of the way it reacts if I scroll half way my pictures in the photo editor ?
This is just wrong.
No, it's fucking A right. Using existing law to reduce competition is morally, ethically, and economically sound. If you disagree with the existing law, get it changed.
Seeing a problem and warning other just helps keep the consumer aware of the limitation of the device they are purchasing.
" If yes, STFU, you KNEW what you were getting into when you laid down the plastic at the Apple Store or Amazon."
Since apple doesn't go out of there way to tell people of their limitations, how do you know he was fully informed?
Limitation? It's a fucking appliance, dude -- you don't buy a dishwasher if you want to do something besides wash dishes, do you? Apple devices are aimed at people that want the functionality, and have zero interest or desire in the mechanism that delivers the functionality. I'm a sysadmin, not a motorcycle geek -- I buy a motorcycle not because it is the most fuel efficient one, or the most mechanically reliable one. I bought a Ducati 1098 because it does what I fucking want it to do -- go insanely fast and look really good in my parking slot at work. I admin linux/windows/solaris/HPUX boxen, but I use an iPhone and an iPad because they do what I want them to do without having to RTFM. Just like my Ducati and my dishwasher.
Starcraft and other video games will not be sports until the bookies in Vegas allow it, and they won't. You can't place bets on pro wrestling matches, and you will never be able to place a bet on a video game for the same reason.
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible are rational and well informed? Lets say you have a thousand year old book on sailing that says the earth is flat and that you will fall off the edge if you travel too far from land. Do you throw out the rational lessons on navigating using the sun and stars just because the flat earth thing appears in the same book?
Also you confuse a lunatic fringe with religious people in general with respect to modern medicine. Inoculations may have begun as a religious rite in India. Catholic and protestant hospitals offer vaccinations every day.
Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth.:-)
Why would you keep the flat earth reference if you know it to be false? Changing the word of god is heresy, though -- if you were to try to remove the parts about the flat earth in a religious text, your lunatic fringe would likely burn you at the stake. Get this through your head: Rational people aren't concerned about what religions get right -- it is the brain-dead, institutionalized ignorance and irrationality that is the danger to us. IMHO, there is no fringe lunacy in religion -- it is lunacy to the core, with fringe sanity.
Translation: Religion is born from FEAR and IGNORANCE.
Actually the opposite can sometimes be true. Religion can also be a practical survival manual based upon observations. For example I believe if one adheres to the old testament prohibitions against eating certain types of seafood then one will avoid most of the unsafe species in that part of the world. We say don't do something because the surgeon general says so, thousands of years ago they said don't do something because God said so. Maybe its the telephone game: "great healer says" becomes "great shaman says" becomes "God says", all based on a scientific sort of process - at least the observation part, can't say if they also did the experimentation part.
Are you sure you are not operating on fear of a particular 3 or 4 thousand year old book and rejecting everything in it in an irrational and ignorant way? If we were talking about Hawaiian kapu and its instructions on fishing and such would you be more open minded?
The scenario you concocted leads equally to the situation where religious belief endangers people. Until you can provide some evidence that your beneficial scenario actually occurred in the real world, and that it is more likely to occur than a dangerous one, you are not being rational, you are being religious. Believing that something is true does not make it true. Here's an example of the dangerous kind of scenario, where fear and ignorance made a bad situation worse. When the black death was rampaging through Europe, people looked for a scapegoat, and the Church gave them witches. The people persecuted witches, along with anything else that they associated with witches, like their pet cats. With the decline in the cat population, rats multiplied, so there were more rats available to transport the real vector of the plague bacillus: tiny fleas that lived in the rats' fur.
The way some talk you'd think most of the country believes in the literal interpretation of the creation story. If that were the case why haven't I met anyone who believes that by now? Most of the people I know are closer to being agnostic than anything else, like myself, but I know a few people who are very religious and they completely embrace science. For them there's no question that evolution is real and that the world is billions of years old.
I'd be curious to know how that poll was conducted, how far they probed. Did they what aspect of the Adam and Eve story people believe? Literal or figurative. The number of people who believe might be high, I would expect that the people who believe it literally is a lot lower. Or maybe people have somehow mashed together ideas so that humans evolved from apes into Adam and Even and then went on from there? Who knows? But the picture certainly isn't clear.
The funny thing is that you have people on one side of the fence who want to demonstrate that people are still religious, and on the other you've got those who want to show how stupid people can be. So it's possible loaded questions will get asked that lead, interestingly enough, to the same results.
Polling methodologies are not this issue, here. Polling organizations are fully prepared to support their methodologies, especially this one. And according to this poll a stunning 53% of the US population "believe that God created man exactly how the Bible describes it." The same poll also revealed that a staggering two-thirds of the US population thinks that creationism is definitely true or probably true. (39% and 27%, respectively.) Institutionalized idiocy via religious indoctrination is the political reality in the US at this time; instead of waffling about polling methodologies, I suggest you take a stand for rationality and against religion, or stfu and stay on the sidelines in this debate.
Making a rational decision about what one believes based on evidence is not why the religious right in the US is a dominant political force. This will have little effect on the Christian fundamentalists in the US. Richard Dawkins rightly calls Christian fundamentalists in the US the "American Taliban" in The God Delusion; he is far more eloquent than I on just why rational arguments don't work with religious fundamentalists. And it will have zero effect on two of the three leading GOP presidential hopefuls (Bachmann and Perry) who are both fundamentalists and dominionists.
He got in trouble for insisting that the Copernican Model was true. He was asked to back away from his absolutist language on the motions of the planets, and when he didn't his troubles began. The Church at the time had no problem with Galileo publishing his theory, but they had a serious problem with him insisting that he had overturned the Ptolemaic Model.
Indeed. Copernicus was allowed to publish De revolutionibus orbium coelestium because he explicitly emphasized that his model was only a model to make certain calculations simpler.
It depends. If robots take up some of the menial labor, humans are afforded more time to work on other problems. The calculator might have replaced pure number crunchers, but that doesn't mean people don't practice math anymore. There are still physicist, mathematicians, and engineers. Odds are, if I robot assistant is developed, we'll have robot repair shops, programming centers, and robot insurance; while having fewer fruit pickers and maids. Humans will probably be replaced for certain tasks, but since we define society as a group of humans, we will probably never be rid of one another.
I tend to agree with you about who will be displaced first, but I don't think we have to anticipate more widespread adoption of robots for a long, long time. We will probably have to cross the uncanny valley in one quantum leap before society in general will accept robots in the roles of humans. As you suggest, roles that keep robots out of sight/out of mind will be about the only places robots can be effectively deployed until they are indistinguishable from us. Labor intensive tasks like agriculture and domestic maintenance, which you mentioned, would be where I would target my robotic R&D dollars right now. Human-level replacement prostheses are truly nice, but my personal uncanny valley is pretty steep, and pretty wide. I wouldn't want to shake hands with a prosthesis, if I knew before hand (not trying to be punny) it was artificial.
Hugo Award does not imply sci fi anymore...
on
The 2011 Hugo Awards
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· Score: 2, Informative
The problem with using the Hugo awards to find good sci fi is that the Hugos stopped being a good place to do that when the fantasy fanbois took over the world cons. The thing about the Hugo Awards is that *anybody* who joins a world con can vote for the Hugos; there was always a fringe fantasy element at the cons, but it stopped being fringe all of a sudden. You can pinpoint the year it started, too -- 2001, when a fucking Harry Potter fantasy got Best Novel. Up to 2001, not a single work of fantasy recieved Best Novel. Of the twelve best novel award winners since 2001, seven are works of fantasy. As other people have suggested, look at the nominees and not just the award winners. A quick google will help you weed out the fantasy crap.
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Why aren't they using airships/blimps? Better payload, which allows larger batteries = longer runtime, larger range and larger amount of drugs so more destinations per trip, less expensive than quadcopters, won't "fall out of the sky" like quadcopters, rain will not hurt a blimp as much as it would quadcopter. Blimps do get blown around a bit but I'm sure these hand-held quadcopters don't do well in heavy wind either, and a blimp is far less likely to crash than a quadcopter. Blimp would be larger but it doesn't sound like size is a huge concern, this isn't a spy drone to see enemy positions, it's a efficient delivery system. Quadcopter would be nice for a once-in-awhile delivery or when seconds count making speed is crucial, but a blimp would be better for daily use or when you can wait a few minutes for the drugs to arrive.
I think there is a basic flaw in the idea of a large, undefended, slow moving target carrying medical supplies. I mean, I'm no African warlord, but I would see this as a really good idea, if I were...
Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
Really? Why don't you try using your imagination, instead of echoing tired-ass, discredited memes? Oh wait, you are an AC. The day/night argument against solar power goes away when you put the collector in orbit and use microwaves to transfer the energy. The day/night argument is fucking stupid and has been for about half a century, now.
Putting a solar collection/conversion facility in a Lissajous near the L2 Lagrangian and beaming the energy to where you need it on the surface of the Moon/Mars solves all the problems you associate with solar power, elegantly and simply. Bonus points for assembling the power station in situ at the L2. Imagination is a really cool thing, you know -- more important than knowledge, according to a certain egghead...
If you are curious about the mathematical tools necessary to deploy GR effectively, The Road to Reality is your book. It was written by Roger Penrose, one of the foremost mathematicians of our time.
But it has neither the software support nor the peripherals to be a computer, rather than just another media player.
What? Did you really just assert that the raspberry pi is not a computer because it doesn't have software support or peripherals? Did you even look at the video? I saw a keyboard, mouse and monitor plugged into it, and some of my favorite software *ever* running on it at triple digit framerates. I know some people don't read the actual articles here, but seriously, dude -- at least most people here know what a computer is.
HOPS ftw!
I'll trust Starfleet medical on this one.
What does he have on his laptop that's so gd important that he has to go through this much hassle to secure it....kiddie porn?
Security does not imply criminality. Go fuck up some other thread, you asswipe troll.
seizing anything that is suspected of being used for criminal activity has been perfectly legal for hundreds of years. and there is no excuse that you were running some service or other and didn't know what other people were doing. if the cops get a hunch they will seize your stuff to look for evidence and impound it if there is evidence of a crime
No, no, and no. Your notions about search and seizure don't work the way you think they do on the net, as I'm sure other people will point out to you in excruciating detail. I'll just stick to your obvious ignorance about anonymizers in general, and TOR in particular. Do you really understand what a TOR route is, and the function of entry and exit nodes? It's like a blind drop, to borrow a phrase from espionage. The traffic that exits TOR back onto the internet can't be associated reliably with the address that it entered TOR from. Law enforcement agencies like ICE understand this -- they know that evidence that leads them to TOR is a dead end. What is interesting here is that ICE decided to intimidate the TOR operator by seizing his equipment anyway, warning him explicitly when they gave him back his gear that they might take it away again. Fwiw, I think the TOR operator has a case that his fourth amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search and seizure were violated, and that ICE actually communicated a threat to him. I hope like hell EFF encourages him to pursue it.
How about agreeing to take a sealed parcel for a stranger with you while you travel the world, and delivering it to another stranger...
How many people would say yes to that?
Well, in 2003, for example, Fed Ex said yes about 3,167,000 times per day; UPS, about 13,638,000 times per day. Your point, if you have one?
...stillsuits really should be open hardware.
...and science doesn't get to help. In fact, I would submit that it really doesn't matter whether AGW is confirmed or not in step two. When it comes to making policy in step three, financially vested interests will determine what is best for their profits, and will instruct policy makers in government on what course to set. Would that it were otherwise, but science can't compete with the corporate bottom line.
This is nothing more than a clever restatement of epistemological nihilism. Basically restated it says, "Because we cannot produce a perfect theory, we can have no theory whose predictions we can have a high degree of certainty about,"
It's a moronic position when you consider that the same basic fact that no theory is complete applies to all theories, including theories like Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics, both of which despite obvious missing pieces and flaws are among the most successful theories ever developed.
A theory does not need to be complete to have explanatory power. Maybe you should stop trying to defend oil company shills and inventing bullshit claims about how science works, and, you know, actually learn how science fucking works.
For scientists, you are probably right -- theories only need to be empirically adequate. If the observations don't contradict the model, the model is fine. But that is not adequate for the rest of the population. Especially not stock brokers and politicians. Those are the people whose opinion counts when discussing the error bars on climate model data. You can be as rational as you want about the data and way the model works, but if it doesn't convince a fund manager who is trying to hedge his $8B investment fund, or a politician who is trying to figure out who to get in bed with so he can get re-elected, it. doesn't. mean. shit. Politicians and brokers use a different calculus and a different model for looking at the world than scientists use. Their models determine the direction of human endeavor on this planet, not scientific models. It's been that way since humans developed government and currency, btw -- good luck trying to change it.
Yeah, especially 5.
Using the courts to stifle a competitor is cheap.
I thought Apple prided itself on making better products, but by bringing these cases before a judge they admit they are not competing on quality anymore.
Why do you feel that using the courts to stifle a competitor is incompatible with making a quality product? It seems to me if you want to optimize your profit, you do both.
So one can block the sale of a device on a whole continent because it possibly infringes on a functionality that represents 1/10000 of the default functionality of the phone. My phone can call, video call, chat, do my email, take and edit videos, upload pictures to the net, scan bar codes for maintaining list of books and dvds, do anything a browser can do, play games like a console, be my alarm clock, and I can't buy it because of the way it reacts if I scroll half way my pictures in the photo editor ? This is just wrong.
No, it's fucking A right. Using existing law to reduce competition is morally, ethically, and economically sound. If you disagree with the existing law, get it changed.
Seeing a problem and warning other just helps keep the consumer aware of the limitation of the device they are purchasing.
" If yes, STFU, you KNEW what you were getting into when you laid down the plastic at the Apple Store or Amazon." Since apple doesn't go out of there way to tell people of their limitations, how do you know he was fully informed?
Limitation? It's a fucking appliance, dude -- you don't buy a dishwasher if you want to do something besides wash dishes, do you? Apple devices are aimed at people that want the functionality, and have zero interest or desire in the mechanism that delivers the functionality. I'm a sysadmin, not a motorcycle geek -- I buy a motorcycle not because it is the most fuel efficient one, or the most mechanically reliable one. I bought a Ducati 1098 because it does what I fucking want it to do -- go insanely fast and look really good in my parking slot at work. I admin linux/windows/solaris/HPUX boxen, but I use an iPhone and an iPad because they do what I want them to do without having to RTFM. Just like my Ducati and my dishwasher.
Apple itself announced that Jobs has been elected chairman of the board.
Starcraft and other video games will not be sports until the bookies in Vegas allow it, and they won't. You can't place bets on pro wrestling matches, and you will never be able to place a bet on a video game for the same reason.
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible are rational and well informed? Lets say you have a thousand year old book on sailing that says the earth is flat and that you will fall off the edge if you travel too far from land. Do you throw out the rational lessons on navigating using the sun and stars just because the flat earth thing appears in the same book? Also you confuse a lunatic fringe with religious people in general with respect to modern medicine. Inoculations may have begun as a religious rite in India. Catholic and protestant hospitals offer vaccinations every day. Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth. :-)
Why would you keep the flat earth reference if you know it to be false? Changing the word of god is heresy, though -- if you were to try to remove the parts about the flat earth in a religious text, your lunatic fringe would likely burn you at the stake. Get this through your head: Rational people aren't concerned about what religions get right -- it is the brain-dead, institutionalized ignorance and irrationality that is the danger to us. IMHO, there is no fringe lunacy in religion -- it is lunacy to the core, with fringe sanity.
Translation: Religion is born from FEAR and IGNORANCE.
Actually the opposite can sometimes be true. Religion can also be a practical survival manual based upon observations. For example I believe if one adheres to the old testament prohibitions against eating certain types of seafood then one will avoid most of the unsafe species in that part of the world. We say don't do something because the surgeon general says so, thousands of years ago they said don't do something because God said so. Maybe its the telephone game: "great healer says" becomes "great shaman says" becomes "God says", all based on a scientific sort of process - at least the observation part, can't say if they also did the experimentation part. Are you sure you are not operating on fear of a particular 3 or 4 thousand year old book and rejecting everything in it in an irrational and ignorant way? If we were talking about Hawaiian kapu and its instructions on fishing and such would you be more open minded?
The scenario you concocted leads equally to the situation where religious belief endangers people. Until you can provide some evidence that your beneficial scenario actually occurred in the real world, and that it is more likely to occur than a dangerous one, you are not being rational, you are being religious. Believing that something is true does not make it true. Here's an example of the dangerous kind of scenario, where fear and ignorance made a bad situation worse. When the black death was rampaging through Europe, people looked for a scapegoat, and the Church gave them witches. The people persecuted witches, along with anything else that they associated with witches, like their pet cats. With the decline in the cat population, rats multiplied, so there were more rats available to transport the real vector of the plague bacillus: tiny fleas that lived in the rats' fur.
The way some talk you'd think most of the country believes in the literal interpretation of the creation story. If that were the case why haven't I met anyone who believes that by now? Most of the people I know are closer to being agnostic than anything else, like myself, but I know a few people who are very religious and they completely embrace science. For them there's no question that evolution is real and that the world is billions of years old.
I'd be curious to know how that poll was conducted, how far they probed. Did they what aspect of the Adam and Eve story people believe? Literal or figurative. The number of people who believe might be high, I would expect that the people who believe it literally is a lot lower. Or maybe people have somehow mashed together ideas so that humans evolved from apes into Adam and Even and then went on from there? Who knows? But the picture certainly isn't clear.
The funny thing is that you have people on one side of the fence who want to demonstrate that people are still religious, and on the other you've got those who want to show how stupid people can be. So it's possible loaded questions will get asked that lead, interestingly enough, to the same results.
Polling methodologies are not this issue, here. Polling organizations are fully prepared to support their methodologies, especially this one. And according to this poll a stunning 53% of the US population "believe that God created man exactly how the Bible describes it." The same poll also revealed that a staggering two-thirds of the US population thinks that creationism is definitely true or probably true. (39% and 27%, respectively.) Institutionalized idiocy via religious indoctrination is the political reality in the US at this time; instead of waffling about polling methodologies, I suggest you take a stand for rationality and against religion, or stfu and stay on the sidelines in this debate.
Making a rational decision about what one believes based on evidence is not why the religious right in the US is a dominant political force. This will have little effect on the Christian fundamentalists in the US. Richard Dawkins rightly calls Christian fundamentalists in the US the "American Taliban" in The God Delusion; he is far more eloquent than I on just why rational arguments don't work with religious fundamentalists. And it will have zero effect on two of the three leading GOP presidential hopefuls (Bachmann and Perry) who are both fundamentalists and dominionists.
He got in trouble for insisting that the Copernican Model was true. He was asked to back away from his absolutist language on the motions of the planets, and when he didn't his troubles began. The Church at the time had no problem with Galileo publishing his theory, but they had a serious problem with him insisting that he had overturned the Ptolemaic Model.
Indeed. Copernicus was allowed to publish De revolutionibus orbium coelestium because he explicitly emphasized that his model was only a model to make certain calculations simpler.
Interesting, we're in the same field of study. How did you solve the problem of pancake tectonics in the event of a sudden movement of the plate?
The dampening effect from the in-situ super-saturated sucrose solution almost always associated with mature pancake formation.
It depends. If robots take up some of the menial labor, humans are afforded more time to work on other problems. The calculator might have replaced pure number crunchers, but that doesn't mean people don't practice math anymore. There are still physicist, mathematicians, and engineers. Odds are, if I robot assistant is developed, we'll have robot repair shops, programming centers, and robot insurance; while having fewer fruit pickers and maids. Humans will probably be replaced for certain tasks, but since we define society as a group of humans, we will probably never be rid of one another.
I tend to agree with you about who will be displaced first, but I don't think we have to anticipate more widespread adoption of robots for a long, long time. We will probably have to cross the uncanny valley in one quantum leap before society in general will accept robots in the roles of humans. As you suggest, roles that keep robots out of sight/out of mind will be about the only places robots can be effectively deployed until they are indistinguishable from us. Labor intensive tasks like agriculture and domestic maintenance, which you mentioned, would be where I would target my robotic R&D dollars right now. Human-level replacement prostheses are truly nice, but my personal uncanny valley is pretty steep, and pretty wide. I wouldn't want to shake hands with a prosthesis, if I knew before hand (not trying to be punny) it was artificial.
The problem with using the Hugo awards to find good sci fi is that the Hugos stopped being a good place to do that when the fantasy fanbois took over the world cons. The thing about the Hugo Awards is that *anybody* who joins a world con can vote for the Hugos; there was always a fringe fantasy element at the cons, but it stopped being fringe all of a sudden. You can pinpoint the year it started, too -- 2001, when a fucking Harry Potter fantasy got Best Novel. Up to 2001, not a single work of fantasy recieved Best Novel. Of the twelve best novel award winners since 2001, seven are works of fantasy. As other people have suggested, look at the nominees and not just the award winners. A quick google will help you weed out the fantasy crap.