Oh yeah I had things like that, little metal cars which changed color when I dropped them in hot water, can I get that on my mac? My friends will be sooo amazed when i'll drop my brand new macbook a tub full of hot water and they see it change color.
I've got a better one: drop your friend's MacBook in a tub of hot water and watch him change color!
I strongly disagree. The current patent system, while it really sucks and has certainly generated its share of absolute tripe, is certainly better than the alternative of no patent system at all.
At least now, a company has the option of whether to trade 20 years of protection, followed by a free-for-all, versus keeping the invention a trade secret and maybe being able to make money off of it for longer, but maybe having it reverse-engineered.
Most of them seem to choose the former (patents), and despite the shitty abuses of the system, almost everyone benefits from the body of knowledge that is accumulated in the public domain as a result of expired patents. Generic drugs, for instance, are one of the most immediate results. The companies who make generic pharmaceuticals couldn't afford to do the R&D necessary to either develop the drugs from scratch, or to reverse-engineer them and then push the reverse-engineered drug through the approvals process. (Or if they did either one, then they wouldn't be very cheap, which is the benefit to you and me.) If Pfizer decided to just sit on its formulae: slapping an NDA on every person who might possibly work with the drug, maybe doping the actual production pills with trace amounts of harmless substances to confuse reverse-engineers, we'd all be a lot worse off.
There are lots of other similar industries that instead of having competition, would basically become monopolies driven by the companies who had the tightest security and most robust anti-reverse-engineering capabilities in their products, and not the most innovative. And of course, it's you and me -- the consumer -- who are going to pay for all these anti-tampering technologies. You can bet that if that new Blu-Ray player wasn't covered by patents, that instead the whole thing would be filled full of lead-doped epoxy (so you can't X-ray or MRI it), probably with tons of extra chips and do-nothing components soldered to the boards, just for fun. I don't really want to pay for that.
Also, I think it's worth putting the patent system into perspective. The Patent Office issues probably hundreds of patents a week, and it's a very small number of those that are really egregiously bad. It's the filing and approval process that needs to be completely overhauled, with better peer review. (My feeling is that there ought to be a period of time, say 30 days, when proposed patents have to be posted somewhere and the public has a chance to come forward with prior art; also, patent examiners need to not have their pay or promotions in any way linked to the number of patents processed per week.) To say that the entire patent system is broken is to forget the many un-troublesome ones that just don't make the news, like the RIM/NTP and Amazon One-Click ones do.
I think it's also open to debate whether the 20-year term of most patents has become obsolete (can you say 'yes, definitely'?). If 20 years was the proper term of a patent in a time when a letter took a week to send from one coast to the other, then certainly 3-5 years would be the correct "inflation adjusted" value today. Also, we need to fix the loopholes that some companies exploit in order to unfairly extend patents beyond the maximum.
Overall, I cringe when I hear any of these comments suggesting that we just eliminate the entire patent system. Honestly, it's not that bad, and the alternative would be worse; it really would be a world run by the mega-corporations, whichever were the most ruthless about obtaining intelligence on their competitors and jealously guarding their own trove of secrets. The general public would probably lose any idea of how things actually work, and the startup cost of a new company in any technology or idea-driven sector would be enormous to the point of impracticality. Overall, it's not a world I'd much like to live in, even compared to our own right now.
Yeah, because naturally the government will act in the best interest of all concerned, and not in the best interest of whoever's donated the most money to the largest number of Senators and Congressmen that year. If Monsanto wanted to hurt ADM, they'd just have to convince enough politicos that one of ADM's patents would be "better off" in the public domain, and *poof* -- there goes ADM's IP, and stock price, and eventually their profitability. Which would mean that they'd never be able to fight back (not enough money), and Monsanto would be able to continue to poach their patents through this brilliant system you've proposed.
Basically, you might as well pick the biggest player in each industry: telecommunications, software, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc., let them retain their patents, and liquidate all the other companies that could possibly compete with them.
To work, your proposal would have to first require hauling everyone in our Government out into the street and shooting them, and then replacing them with people who weren't corruptable.
At this point, any solution or system that assumes a government that acts in the best interest of its citizens, and not for the direct personal gain of the representatives themselves, is flawed.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I sure hope they're paying their "black hats" more than the market value of an undisclosed, 0-day Windows exploit, because that's basically the alternative mode of disclosure, should one of those guys really notice something.
Or do they really think that their "black hats" will abide by their NDA's when they're talking to some Russian guy in an IRC channel somewhere?
I don't see why fixing our ability to get along with others is necessary in order to go to another planet, or for any other reason. Frankly, I think it's impossible. I think a certain level of paranoia and hostility towards outsiders is endemic to any organized, highly structured, social/behavioral network of individuals. As long as you have individual semi-autonomous, thinking beings, each with different and usually conflicting agendas, you're going to run into problems. Eventually, it's going to boil down to a problem of unlimited wants and limited resources -- whether you're on the Earth, on the Moon, or anywhere else. You can't "cure" that, and I don't think we'd want to: if war and conflict are the price we pay for our imagination and intelligence (which are what give us those 'unlimited wants' that are so troublesome), then they're a fair price to pay. Without imagination and intelligence, we'd just be another color of monkey, somewhere in the Equatorial jungle of Earth, having never evolved into anything particularly unique.
That's not to say that we shouldn't try to prevent wars from happening through negotiation and conflict abatement, but when you're talking about the very, very long term, you have to just understand that violence and war are going to happen. Any particular conflict, viewed in hindsight, seems preventable; but all conflicts, all the time, cannot be prevented.
Space travel isn't going to eliminate conflict, because nothing ever will. So with that said, there's no reason to delay going to the stars because we're still not playing nice. Wait for everyone to learn to get along, and you'll be the last one here when the Sun goes out.
I was never defending such behaviors; obviously there are things we do, as a species, which on the whole we probably shouldn't be proud of. However, on the net, I think we have more good characteristics than bad, and that the fact that we've produced a civilization wherein most people aren't constantly trying to kill each other is proof of this.
Our behaviors are, at the end of the day, a delicate balance between cooperation and competition. I frankly find it amazing, every time I fly over a city, that so many individuals can be crammed together in such a small space without the whole thing immediately deteriorating into a bloodbath. That alone suggests to me that "the better angels of our nature" win out more often than you're giving credit for.
I'm not a big fan of humanity because of our baser tendencies, I'm a fan of humanity despite them.
No, that's not accurate at all. Treaties entered into by the United States Congress on behalf of the United States have the full force of law behind them. In fact at various points in our history there has been contention as to whether they are above or below the Constitution in terms of weight (personally I find the assertion that any treaty can possibly come before the Constitution to be a both ridiculous and dangerous).
Here's the short, short version. The Constitution discusses treaties in its "supremacy clause,"
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
Now, this seems pretty clear to me that the order of precedence is Constitution->Laws->Treaties, but for some reason, others have disagreed.
The problems all got started in 1918 with Missouri v. Holland, where the Congress, seeking to regulate bird hunting (which it doesn't have a clear way in the Constitution to do -- this was before the courts expanded Interstate Commerce to include everything you could possibly imagine), entered into a treaty with the U.K. to regulate bird hunting. Basically, this eventually went up to the USSC, which declared that treaties entered into by the USA overpower States' rights under the 10th Amendment.
This, in time, started to make people rather nervous, since it meant that the executive and legislative branches of government could basically do anything they wanted, if they could enter into a treaty that required it. There were some unsuccessful attempts at revising the Constitution to prevent this, and make it clear that treaties weren't the supreme law of the land, but were rather limited by the Constitution itself: this was the failed Bricker Amendment. I happen to think this would have been a very good idea, and it's a shame it didn't go through.
The establishment of the current situation came with Reid v. Covert, where the USSC overturned the conviction of a civilian military dependent by a court martial, saying that a treaty doesn't overpower the Constitution in capital cases. (Why they limited it to capital cases, I have no idea, and one of the justices basically asks this in the opinion.) But basically it was seen as a clarification that you can't have treaties that blatantly violate the Constitution. (It also has interesting bearing on the current situation vis a vis Gitmo detainees and the WoT, but that's another story.)
There may have been more cases since then, but that's as far as I've read them. Basically, treaties right now have some effect which is greater than conventional Federal laws (or at least not bound by the traditional powers of Congress, apparently), but less than the Constitution. So it would still be possible, were the Court so inclined, for them to strike down a very bad WIPO treaty on Constitutional grounds. Whether you think the USSC would actually do that, in its current state and incarnation...well, I'll leave that for another comment.
The most interesting part about the history of U.S. treaty law happened in the 1950s, and was called the Bricker Amendment. Before you go click on that link, let me give you the bad news first: it didn't pass. It came rather close, but it didn't make 2/3rds majority. If it had, we wouldn't be having this discussion now, because Bricker would have limited treaty powers in such a way that they couldn't be used to override established Constitutional rights, including ones held by the States under the 10th Amendment.
In retrospect, the Old Right bloc may have gotten a few things right after all; unfortunately not quite enough people saw it that way at the time.
On one hand, we'd have to figure out how to cheaply boost objects and people into orbit, and then let them live comfortably in a completely closed system while travelling to the new world, at which point they'd have to be able to live there while slowly terraforming it into someplace habitable. It would probably involve creating entirely new fields of science, inventing new sources of energy and storage, and perhaps even genetically engineering ourselves to withstand the trip.
Alternately, we'd have to figure out how to stop people from trying to kill each other.
I pick spaceships. The other one is clearly impossible.
Actually might not be as bizarre as you think. If a large asteroid split up into several smaller lumps, the lumps would orbit around the center of gravity/mass of the original rock, and thus would seem like a flock of smaller asteroids, all following each other. Eventually they'd probably be drawn off in different directions by the influences of other bodies, but if one split up on its way into the solar system, it might still be a big ball of fragments by the time it passed by Earth.
It's certainly not totally implausible.
Also, I suppose a really big asteroid might have enough of a gravitational field to attract other objects, or maybe you could even have some semi-stable situation where two asteroids of relatively equal mass orbited around each other, and then their center of mass collectively orbited the Sun (like a binary star system). Again I don't think it would be stable for very long because of all the interfering forces, but it could probably exist for a short while.
Going off on a tangent here for a second: I think the odds of us recognizing the thing that's going to kill us all before it happens is pretty slim. It's not exactly a short list: anything from climate change to asteroids to a virus to some sort of germline genetic engineering gone awry could wipe us out -- and that's only the things we know about or have the capacity to conceive of. There are probably lots of threats out there that we're as ill-equipped to think about as the dinosaurs were of wondering about an asteroid from space. Even if you could put up some type of asteroid shield and control climate change and elimiate industrial pollution and reduce the risk of genetic manipulation, that doesn't mean that we're not living, as a species, in an incredibly precarious situation, all packed together on one planet.
So regardless of what you do to "improve" things here on Earth, Hawking's (and many other people's) point still stands: spreading us out some is an inherent Good Thing from a long-term survival perspective.
Which is a good argument for why, if you were going to start a colony someplace, and you believed that it had sufficent resources to eventually become completely self-sufficent, you might do well to not leave them with any memory of Earth, or at least of its precise location. It wouldn't be that hard to do; raise the first generation of colonists using androids or people who've been conditioned not to mention (because they're members of a particular religious cult, for example) their original origin. Eventually they might figure it out, but with a properly concocted creation myth, you could probably ensure it would take a few thousand years.
The best way to prevent such a situation though would be to find ways in which Earth and the colonies could co-operate; something that's produced on each which is necessary to the other, so that they become trading partners. If you can't socially engineer peace, you can always try economics.
If that's what you believe, I hope you'll do you part first and ensure you don't procreate.
Me personally, I'm a big fan of humanity. I don't quite get the whole nihilistic "humanity sucks, boo hoo hoo" thing. If that's what you really believe, that we're all so terrible, go eat a gun -- you won't be much missed. I don't think I'm alone here when I say I really like what we've gotten going over the past few trillion years, and I'd like to see it continue for another trillion or so, the rest of the universe be damned.
In addition, there are a bunch of other species of non-human animals that I'd like to see get taken along for the ride off this rock before the sun burns out. (Mosquitos, however, are a no-go.)
Why not go into space for some positive reason? like to learn or solve a problem like over population...
Personally, solving the problem of not dying out as a species seems like a perfectly valid reason to go into space. Likewise, solving overpopulation so that we don't die as a species is also a valid motivation.
We're never going to do anything of that massive a scale without some really good motivating factors, and curiosity or solving a non-pressing problem (i.e. anything that's not going to potentially wipe us out) aren't going to do it.
The possibility of becoming extinct is the ultimate motivator, and thus there are some projects which will never be done for any other reason.
This has been discussed over and over. Using fingerprints for access may well be an absolutely horrible idea. All somebody has to do is get your fingerprint, and you're hosed. It's all the worst parts of passwords, combined with a biometric that you can't change.
If you only ever use *your* password scanner, and you know that the thumbprint never goes further than your computer (actually, an intelligent device would hash the thumbprint in hardware before transmitting it over the USB bus), then you might be a little better off, but it's still a huge risk. You only have ten fingerprints: if those were to get compromised, you're SOL.
That's why I never want to see them in public places like ATMs and whatnot. It would be too easy for an attacker to just put down their own thumbprint scanner next to it, or tap into the data line between the scanner and the machine's CPU and grab everyone's prints. Identity theft made easy.
This is a fairly good idea -- assuming you use a good password for the GPG encryption. Because unlike system-access passwords where (assuming it's intelligently built) the attacker would be locked out after a few bad attempts, if they get your encrypted file, they can hammer away at it until the end of time in order to get at what's inside. So that password has to be much more secure than anything inside it.
Also, if you're going to go the stored-and-encrypted route, there are a number of small shareware type products that do the same thing but store them in a database so they're easier to search through once you accrue a large number of them. Whether or not you'd want to trust a product like that if it wasn't open source is a good question, though. Maybe there is an open-source password database around somewhere.
I know people who do something similar to this, by typing geometric patterns on the keyboard. (They weren't using it actually to control access to anything, just as passwords to test accounts and the like.)
You start off with "1qaz2wsx3edc" and then when it expires, you change it to "qaz2wsx3edc4", etc. Depending on how intelligent the password system is -- in this particular case, not very -- you could get away with it. I think more secure systems probably pick up on the lack of difference between the two and would prohibit it.
It's easy to create very complex, seemingly-random passwords that include numerics and punctuation this way, but it's very prone to shoulder-surfing. If anyone sees you enter it even once, they'll know what you're doing.
I'd think that computer people could understand the difference. The 'South' in 'South America' is part of the string, it's not a prepended descriptive modifier.
"South America" is not a region of a larger area known as "America." "South America" is the name of a particular region (actually, an entire continent), period. (In the same way that "South Dakota" is the name of a place, and not just a southern region of some place called "Dakota.") Occasionally we confuse the issue by calling North America, Central America and South America collectively "The Americas", but there you have to be aware of the plural 's'. "The Americas" means 'multiple Americas.' If the area being dicussed was actually 'America,' then there'd be no need for the plural.
So to sum up: "North America" is a continent, and includes the regions claimed by the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico. "South America" is a different continent entirely, "Central America" is a distinct geographic region between North America and South America, although it's considered to be part of the continent of North America. "The Americas" is a term used to refer to North America, Central America, and South America collectively, "America" is a shortened or common term for 'The United States of America,' a country located in North America.
The common uses of the words really have no conflict; it's all pretty clear to me.
None, that I know of. Unless you count a recovery CD as an operating system.
That's why I'd like to see such a Linux branch. It would be an operating system as operating systems ought to be, without the artificial limitations imposed on them by politics and law. We've gotten so used to the status quo that a lot of people assume that the way things are (install your OS, then load it up with codecs, Java, drivers, etc. to make it functional) is how computers must necessarily be. It would be nice to show the artificial restrictions for what they really are.
To beat the tired old horse of an automotive analogy, it would be the ThrustSSC of distros. Not very practical and certainly not for everyday use, but built for the sole purpose of seeing how something would work in the absence of practical limits. Okay, maybe that's not such a good analogy, but you get my point.
Bingo. This was my (admittedly, very roundabout) point in my post a few up in this discussion, regarding coffee.
Coffee isn't even close to a "perfect drug," it has well-established side effects, yet many people believe that it makes them either feel better or be more productive. Overall, we seem to have decided as a civilization (at least in the West) that its good effects outweigh the bad. Evem if each person who drinks coffee gets only a few minutes of extra work done every day as a result of their caffeine consumption, the total gains in productivity for us as a species are staggering.
So if everyone started using some theoretical wonderdrug, the competitive advantage between persons would quickly disappear: you wouldn't be able to use it to get a leg up on others, because we'd all be on it. But the net gain in absolute productivity would remain, versus what would have been accomplished in the same timeframe without the benefit of the drug.
The question then becomes, in the absence of any "perfect drugs," what are the benefits and what are the possible hazards? If other drugs besides caffeine (and nicotine) were to become widely available and unrestricted for 'recreational' use, would the balance sheet be positive or negative at the end of the day? Would the increased hours of work done be enough to offset the number of people who would die of early heart failure or other side-effects? Would it offset the "labor overhead" required to produce the drug in large quantities?
My question is will you really flatten out at the same level?
I use coffee as an example. I actually tried this once for a time. It's a totally subjective experiment, and its results will differ for everyone, but I encourage other people in stable jobs to give it a shot. Give up drinking coffee and other caffinated products. Just go cold turkey: you'll feel like shit, and your productivity will go in the toilet. I actually had people asking me if I was sick for several days.
Then wait: after a while, your productivity will even back out again. Try to get some sort of appreciation for how much work you are actually doing. Not necessarily a concrete metric (although that helps), but something that actually is a gauge of your output generated per effort expended.
Now start drinking coffee again. Just go for it, all at once. You'll be jittery, twitchy...generally you'll look like a crackhead. Or at least I did. Some tasks I got much, much better at (reading big specification documents, scanning emails, uncorrected typing speed, etc.), other stuff I got worse at (things requiring fine motor control), but in general, my productivity went way up.
Now just keep drinking coffee until the initial effect wears off. This is the admittedly hard-to-prove and controversial part. Wait until you stabilize out to what you feel is an infinitely-sustainable level. My absolutely certain feeling after going off and coming back onto caffeine, was that my sustainable level of effort while on coffee -- after the initial "cracked out" period had abated -- was higher than not on coffee. Probably not by too much, definitely not by more than 10% or so, but it was a noticeable effect.
Maybe there's some way you could do a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of this using decaf versus regular coffee for two offices doing similar work or something. (Try to squeeze that one past the ethics boards.)
At any rate, to me it's an open question as to what the long-term productivity effects of other drugs might be. I'm not going to run out and try any others, but I wonder if some other drugs might be similar to what I found with coffee: they produce a short-lived and very large benefit, but also produce a not insubstantial, sustainable benefit to productivity, when used in moderation over time. Or at least if used according to a strict regimen, could be moderated to produce a sustainable benefit. Keeping the cost/benefit ratio in the black with a more-addictive and more dependency-inducing chemical (like amphetamines or cocaine) might be much tougher than with caffeine, but I think it might be possible if we really needed/wanted to.
On the large scale, I've always wondered how many extra man-years of work we get done in the United States as a result of caffeine consumption each year. In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, once you've exhausted the productivity gains due to technological advancement (or are at least on par with your competitors), I wonder if a country will consider legitimizing certain forms of stronger drugs, in order to further boost worker output.
In fact, maybe the increased prescriptions of Adderall is that happening right now.
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I strongly disagree. The current patent system, while it really sucks and has certainly generated its share of absolute tripe, is certainly better than the alternative of no patent system at all.
At least now, a company has the option of whether to trade 20 years of protection, followed by a free-for-all, versus keeping the invention a trade secret and maybe being able to make money off of it for longer, but maybe having it reverse-engineered.
Most of them seem to choose the former (patents), and despite the shitty abuses of the system, almost everyone benefits from the body of knowledge that is accumulated in the public domain as a result of expired patents. Generic drugs, for instance, are one of the most immediate results. The companies who make generic pharmaceuticals couldn't afford to do the R&D necessary to either develop the drugs from scratch, or to reverse-engineer them and then push the reverse-engineered drug through the approvals process. (Or if they did either one, then they wouldn't be very cheap, which is the benefit to you and me.) If Pfizer decided to just sit on its formulae: slapping an NDA on every person who might possibly work with the drug, maybe doping the actual production pills with trace amounts of harmless substances to confuse reverse-engineers, we'd all be a lot worse off.
There are lots of other similar industries that instead of having competition, would basically become monopolies driven by the companies who had the tightest security and most robust anti-reverse-engineering capabilities in their products, and not the most innovative. And of course, it's you and me -- the consumer -- who are going to pay for all these anti-tampering technologies. You can bet that if that new Blu-Ray player wasn't covered by patents, that instead the whole thing would be filled full of lead-doped epoxy (so you can't X-ray or MRI it), probably with tons of extra chips and do-nothing components soldered to the boards, just for fun. I don't really want to pay for that.
Also, I think it's worth putting the patent system into perspective. The Patent Office issues probably hundreds of patents a week, and it's a very small number of those that are really egregiously bad. It's the filing and approval process that needs to be completely overhauled, with better peer review. (My feeling is that there ought to be a period of time, say 30 days, when proposed patents have to be posted somewhere and the public has a chance to come forward with prior art; also, patent examiners need to not have their pay or promotions in any way linked to the number of patents processed per week.) To say that the entire patent system is broken is to forget the many un-troublesome ones that just don't make the news, like the RIM/NTP and Amazon One-Click ones do.
I think it's also open to debate whether the 20-year term of most patents has become obsolete (can you say 'yes, definitely'?). If 20 years was the proper term of a patent in a time when a letter took a week to send from one coast to the other, then certainly 3-5 years would be the correct "inflation adjusted" value today. Also, we need to fix the loopholes that some companies exploit in order to unfairly extend patents beyond the maximum.
Overall, I cringe when I hear any of these comments suggesting that we just eliminate the entire patent system. Honestly, it's not that bad, and the alternative would be worse; it really would be a world run by the mega-corporations, whichever were the most ruthless about obtaining intelligence on their competitors and jealously guarding their own trove of secrets. The general public would probably lose any idea of how things actually work, and the startup cost of a new company in any technology or idea-driven sector would be enormous to the point of impracticality. Overall, it's not a world I'd much like to live in, even compared to our own right now.
Yeah, because naturally the government will act in the best interest of all concerned, and not in the best interest of whoever's donated the most money to the largest number of Senators and Congressmen that year. If Monsanto wanted to hurt ADM, they'd just have to convince enough politicos that one of ADM's patents would be "better off" in the public domain, and *poof* -- there goes ADM's IP, and stock price, and eventually their profitability. Which would mean that they'd never be able to fight back (not enough money), and Monsanto would be able to continue to poach their patents through this brilliant system you've proposed.
Basically, you might as well pick the biggest player in each industry: telecommunications, software, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc., let them retain their patents, and liquidate all the other companies that could possibly compete with them.
To work, your proposal would have to first require hauling everyone in our Government out into the street and shooting them, and then replacing them with people who weren't corruptable.
At this point, any solution or system that assumes a government that acts in the best interest of its citizens, and not for the direct personal gain of the representatives themselves, is flawed.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I sure hope they're paying their "black hats" more than the market value of an undisclosed, 0-day Windows exploit, because that's basically the alternative mode of disclosure, should one of those guys really notice something.
Or do they really think that their "black hats" will abide by their NDA's when they're talking to some Russian guy in an IRC channel somewhere?
I don't see why fixing our ability to get along with others is necessary in order to go to another planet, or for any other reason. Frankly, I think it's impossible. I think a certain level of paranoia and hostility towards outsiders is endemic to any organized, highly structured, social/behavioral network of individuals. As long as you have individual semi-autonomous, thinking beings, each with different and usually conflicting agendas, you're going to run into problems. Eventually, it's going to boil down to a problem of unlimited wants and limited resources -- whether you're on the Earth, on the Moon, or anywhere else. You can't "cure" that, and I don't think we'd want to: if war and conflict are the price we pay for our imagination and intelligence (which are what give us those 'unlimited wants' that are so troublesome), then they're a fair price to pay. Without imagination and intelligence, we'd just be another color of monkey, somewhere in the Equatorial jungle of Earth, having never evolved into anything particularly unique.
That's not to say that we shouldn't try to prevent wars from happening through negotiation and conflict abatement, but when you're talking about the very, very long term, you have to just understand that violence and war are going to happen. Any particular conflict, viewed in hindsight, seems preventable; but all conflicts, all the time, cannot be prevented.
Space travel isn't going to eliminate conflict, because nothing ever will. So with that said, there's no reason to delay going to the stars because we're still not playing nice. Wait for everyone to learn to get along, and you'll be the last one here when the Sun goes out.
I was never defending such behaviors; obviously there are things we do, as a species, which on the whole we probably shouldn't be proud of. However, on the net, I think we have more good characteristics than bad, and that the fact that we've produced a civilization wherein most people aren't constantly trying to kill each other is proof of this.
Our behaviors are, at the end of the day, a delicate balance between cooperation and competition. I frankly find it amazing, every time I fly over a city, that so many individuals can be crammed together in such a small space without the whole thing immediately deteriorating into a bloodbath. That alone suggests to me that "the better angels of our nature" win out more often than you're giving credit for.
I'm not a big fan of humanity because of our baser tendencies, I'm a fan of humanity despite them.
Here's the short, short version. The Constitution discusses treaties in its "supremacy clause,"Now, this seems pretty clear to me that the order of precedence is Constitution->Laws->Treaties, but for some reason, others have disagreed.
The problems all got started in 1918 with Missouri v. Holland, where the Congress, seeking to regulate bird hunting (which it doesn't have a clear way in the Constitution to do -- this was before the courts expanded Interstate Commerce to include everything you could possibly imagine), entered into a treaty with the U.K. to regulate bird hunting. Basically, this eventually went up to the USSC, which declared that treaties entered into by the USA overpower States' rights under the 10th Amendment.
This, in time, started to make people rather nervous, since it meant that the executive and legislative branches of government could basically do anything they wanted, if they could enter into a treaty that required it. There were some unsuccessful attempts at revising the Constitution to prevent this, and make it clear that treaties weren't the supreme law of the land, but were rather limited by the Constitution itself: this was the failed Bricker Amendment. I happen to think this would have been a very good idea, and it's a shame it didn't go through.
The establishment of the current situation came with Reid v. Covert, where the USSC overturned the conviction of a civilian military dependent by a court martial, saying that a treaty doesn't overpower the Constitution in capital cases. (Why they limited it to capital cases, I have no idea, and one of the justices basically asks this in the opinion.) But basically it was seen as a clarification that you can't have treaties that blatantly violate the Constitution. (It also has interesting bearing on the current situation vis a vis Gitmo detainees and the WoT, but that's another story.)
There may have been more cases since then, but that's as far as I've read them. Basically, treaties right now have some effect which is greater than conventional Federal laws (or at least not bound by the traditional powers of Congress, apparently), but less than the Constitution. So it would still be possible, were the Court so inclined, for them to strike down a very bad WIPO treaty on Constitutional grounds. Whether you think the USSC would actually do that, in its current state and incarnation...well, I'll leave that for another comment.
The most interesting part about the history of U.S. treaty law happened in the 1950s, and was called the Bricker Amendment. Before you go click on that link, let me give you the bad news first: it didn't pass. It came rather close, but it didn't make 2/3rds majority. If it had, we wouldn't be having this discussion now, because Bricker would have limited treaty powers in such a way that they couldn't be used to override established Constitutional rights, including ones held by the States under the 10th Amendment.
In retrospect, the Old Right bloc may have gotten a few things right after all; unfortunately not quite enough people saw it that way at the time.
Whoever buys the most members of Congress in order to have himself legislated the broadcaster, duh.
I'll give you a hint: it won't be the guy with the server farm.
On one hand, we'd have to figure out how to cheaply boost objects and people into orbit, and then let them live comfortably in a completely closed system while travelling to the new world, at which point they'd have to be able to live there while slowly terraforming it into someplace habitable. It would probably involve creating entirely new fields of science, inventing new sources of energy and storage, and perhaps even genetically engineering ourselves to withstand the trip.
Alternately, we'd have to figure out how to stop people from trying to kill each other.
I pick spaceships. The other one is clearly impossible.
Actually might not be as bizarre as you think. If a large asteroid split up into several smaller lumps, the lumps would orbit around the center of gravity/mass of the original rock, and thus would seem like a flock of smaller asteroids, all following each other. Eventually they'd probably be drawn off in different directions by the influences of other bodies, but if one split up on its way into the solar system, it might still be a big ball of fragments by the time it passed by Earth.
It's certainly not totally implausible.
Also, I suppose a really big asteroid might have enough of a gravitational field to attract other objects, or maybe you could even have some semi-stable situation where two asteroids of relatively equal mass orbited around each other, and then their center of mass collectively orbited the Sun (like a binary star system). Again I don't think it would be stable for very long because of all the interfering forces, but it could probably exist for a short while.
Going off on a tangent here for a second: I think the odds of us recognizing the thing that's going to kill us all before it happens is pretty slim. It's not exactly a short list: anything from climate change to asteroids to a virus to some sort of germline genetic engineering gone awry could wipe us out -- and that's only the things we know about or have the capacity to conceive of. There are probably lots of threats out there that we're as ill-equipped to think about as the dinosaurs were of wondering about an asteroid from space. Even if you could put up some type of asteroid shield and control climate change and elimiate industrial pollution and reduce the risk of genetic manipulation, that doesn't mean that we're not living, as a species, in an incredibly precarious situation, all packed together on one planet.
So regardless of what you do to "improve" things here on Earth, Hawking's (and many other people's) point still stands: spreading us out some is an inherent Good Thing from a long-term survival perspective.
Which is a good argument for why, if you were going to start a colony someplace, and you believed that it had sufficent resources to eventually become completely self-sufficent, you might do well to not leave them with any memory of Earth, or at least of its precise location. It wouldn't be that hard to do; raise the first generation of colonists using androids or people who've been conditioned not to mention (because they're members of a particular religious cult, for example) their original origin. Eventually they might figure it out, but with a properly concocted creation myth, you could probably ensure it would take a few thousand years.
The best way to prevent such a situation though would be to find ways in which Earth and the colonies could co-operate; something that's produced on each which is necessary to the other, so that they become trading partners. If you can't socially engineer peace, you can always try economics.
If that's what you believe, I hope you'll do you part first and ensure you don't procreate.
Me personally, I'm a big fan of humanity. I don't quite get the whole nihilistic "humanity sucks, boo hoo hoo" thing. If that's what you really believe, that we're all so terrible, go eat a gun -- you won't be much missed. I don't think I'm alone here when I say I really like what we've gotten going over the past few trillion years, and I'd like to see it continue for another trillion or so, the rest of the universe be damned.
In addition, there are a bunch of other species of non-human animals that I'd like to see get taken along for the ride off this rock before the sun burns out. (Mosquitos, however, are a no-go.)
We're never going to do anything of that massive a scale without some really good motivating factors, and curiosity or solving a non-pressing problem (i.e. anything that's not going to potentially wipe us out) aren't going to do it.
The possibility of becoming extinct is the ultimate motivator, and thus there are some projects which will never be done for any other reason.
Yes.
This has been discussed over and over. Using fingerprints for access may well be an absolutely horrible idea. All somebody has to do is get your fingerprint, and you're hosed. It's all the worst parts of passwords, combined with a biometric that you can't change.
If you only ever use *your* password scanner, and you know that the thumbprint never goes further than your computer (actually, an intelligent device would hash the thumbprint in hardware before transmitting it over the USB bus), then you might be a little better off, but it's still a huge risk. You only have ten fingerprints: if those were to get compromised, you're SOL.
That's why I never want to see them in public places like ATMs and whatnot. It would be too easy for an attacker to just put down their own thumbprint scanner next to it, or tap into the data line between the scanner and the machine's CPU and grab everyone's prints. Identity theft made easy.
This is a fairly good idea -- assuming you use a good password for the GPG encryption. Because unlike system-access passwords where (assuming it's intelligently built) the attacker would be locked out after a few bad attempts, if they get your encrypted file, they can hammer away at it until the end of time in order to get at what's inside. So that password has to be much more secure than anything inside it.
Also, if you're going to go the stored-and-encrypted route, there are a number of small shareware type products that do the same thing but store them in a database so they're easier to search through once you accrue a large number of them. Whether or not you'd want to trust a product like that if it wasn't open source is a good question, though. Maybe there is an open-source password database around somewhere.
I know people who do something similar to this, by typing geometric patterns on the keyboard. (They weren't using it actually to control access to anything, just as passwords to test accounts and the like.)
You start off with "1qaz2wsx3edc" and then when it expires, you change it to "qaz2wsx3edc4", etc. Depending on how intelligent the password system is -- in this particular case, not very -- you could get away with it. I think more secure systems probably pick up on the lack of difference between the two and would prohibit it.
It's easy to create very complex, seemingly-random passwords that include numerics and punctuation this way, but it's very prone to shoulder-surfing. If anyone sees you enter it even once, they'll know what you're doing.
Except that "South America" != "America".
I'd think that computer people could understand the difference. The 'South' in 'South America' is part of the string, it's not a prepended descriptive modifier.
"South America" is not a region of a larger area known as "America." "South America" is the name of a particular region (actually, an entire continent), period. (In the same way that "South Dakota" is the name of a place, and not just a southern region of some place called "Dakota.") Occasionally we confuse the issue by calling North America, Central America and South America collectively "The Americas", but there you have to be aware of the plural 's'. "The Americas" means 'multiple Americas.' If the area being dicussed was actually 'America,' then there'd be no need for the plural.
So to sum up:
"North America" is a continent, and includes the regions claimed by the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico.
"South America" is a different continent entirely,
"Central America" is a distinct geographic region between North America and South America, although it's considered to be part of the continent of North America.
"The Americas" is a term used to refer to North America, Central America, and South America collectively,
"America" is a shortened or common term for 'The United States of America,' a country located in North America.
The common uses of the words really have no conflict; it's all pretty clear to me.
None, that I know of. Unless you count a recovery CD as an operating system.
That's why I'd like to see such a Linux branch. It would be an operating system as operating systems ought to be, without the artificial limitations imposed on them by politics and law. We've gotten so used to the status quo that a lot of people assume that the way things are (install your OS, then load it up with codecs, Java, drivers, etc. to make it functional) is how computers must necessarily be. It would be nice to show the artificial restrictions for what they really are.
To beat the tired old horse of an automotive analogy, it would be the ThrustSSC of distros. Not very practical and certainly not for everyday use, but built for the sole purpose of seeing how something would work in the absence of practical limits. Okay, maybe that's not such a good analogy, but you get my point.
Bingo. This was my (admittedly, very roundabout) point in my post a few up in this discussion, regarding coffee.
Coffee isn't even close to a "perfect drug," it has well-established side effects, yet many people believe that it makes them either feel better or be more productive. Overall, we seem to have decided as a civilization (at least in the West) that its good effects outweigh the bad. Evem if each person who drinks coffee gets only a few minutes of extra work done every day as a result of their caffeine consumption, the total gains in productivity for us as a species are staggering.
So if everyone started using some theoretical wonderdrug, the competitive advantage between persons would quickly disappear: you wouldn't be able to use it to get a leg up on others, because we'd all be on it. But the net gain in absolute productivity would remain, versus what would have been accomplished in the same timeframe without the benefit of the drug.
The question then becomes, in the absence of any "perfect drugs," what are the benefits and what are the possible hazards? If other drugs besides caffeine (and nicotine) were to become widely available and unrestricted for 'recreational' use, would the balance sheet be positive or negative at the end of the day? Would the increased hours of work done be enough to offset the number of people who would die of early heart failure or other side-effects? Would it offset the "labor overhead" required to produce the drug in large quantities?
I think it's a question worth asking.
My question is will you really flatten out at the same level?
I use coffee as an example. I actually tried this once for a time. It's a totally subjective experiment, and its results will differ for everyone, but I encourage other people in stable jobs to give it a shot. Give up drinking coffee and other caffinated products. Just go cold turkey: you'll feel like shit, and your productivity will go in the toilet. I actually had people asking me if I was sick for several days.
Then wait: after a while, your productivity will even back out again. Try to get some sort of appreciation for how much work you are actually doing. Not necessarily a concrete metric (although that helps), but something that actually is a gauge of your output generated per effort expended.
Now start drinking coffee again. Just go for it, all at once. You'll be jittery, twitchy...generally you'll look like a crackhead. Or at least I did. Some tasks I got much, much better at (reading big specification documents, scanning emails, uncorrected typing speed, etc.), other stuff I got worse at (things requiring fine motor control), but in general, my productivity went way up.
Now just keep drinking coffee until the initial effect wears off. This is the admittedly hard-to-prove and controversial part. Wait until you stabilize out to what you feel is an infinitely-sustainable level. My absolutely certain feeling after going off and coming back onto caffeine, was that my sustainable level of effort while on coffee -- after the initial "cracked out" period had abated -- was higher than not on coffee. Probably not by too much, definitely not by more than 10% or so, but it was a noticeable effect.
Maybe there's some way you could do a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of this using decaf versus regular coffee for two offices doing similar work or something. (Try to squeeze that one past the ethics boards.)
At any rate, to me it's an open question as to what the long-term productivity effects of other drugs might be. I'm not going to run out and try any others, but I wonder if some other drugs might be similar to what I found with coffee: they produce a short-lived and very large benefit, but also produce a not insubstantial, sustainable benefit to productivity, when used in moderation over time. Or at least if used according to a strict regimen, could be moderated to produce a sustainable benefit. Keeping the cost/benefit ratio in the black with a more-addictive and more dependency-inducing chemical (like amphetamines or cocaine) might be much tougher than with caffeine, but I think it might be possible if we really needed/wanted to.
On the large scale, I've always wondered how many extra man-years of work we get done in the United States as a result of caffeine consumption each year. In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, once you've exhausted the productivity gains due to technological advancement (or are at least on par with your competitors), I wonder if a country will consider legitimizing certain forms of stronger drugs, in order to further boost worker output.
In fact, maybe the increased prescriptions of Adderall is that happening right now.