Funny -- he's [Al Gore] the one that failed out of two college programs and one was divinity school (how do you fail "Jesus loves me this I know"?).... If you knock Bush's grades (which weren't stellar), you can't praise Gore's (which were Fs).
Perhaps I was just brainwashed by the common media impression and the fact he tries to pursue hard topics. His selection as VP and relative mastery of English when debating Bush do add a suggestion of intelligence.
However, your facts to do appear to be correct as confirmed by this Washington Times Article (reprinted).
Of course, grades aren't everything as Bush will attest.
I know very little about Bobby Fischer so I'm speaking in general, not about him in particular.
Intellect can do a lot, but there are other skills that one needs to be successful, especially in the public eye. These are things like stage presence, speaking ability, charisma, style, bearing and common sense, which are only tangentially connected to intelligence. A smart person might be able to develop them faster than your average Joe. On the other hand intelligence might hinder their development, especially if that person is arrogant because of their intelligence.
To take a high profile example, by all accounts Al Gore is a pretty learned guy, but he still hasn't figured out what he wants his appearance to be, and the last election suggests that he has had only mediocre success connecting with the public. The stereotypical closed-in scientist (and I've known a few) can be far worse.
Bobby Fischer is, at least to my limited knowledge, something of a one trick wonder. He is exceptionally good at chess, but clearly doesn't want to be a public figure, and perhaps he wouldn't be very good at it?
The thing I wonder most about is what kind of a life is he living now? Chess isn't easy to make a profession of and it must be nearly impossible if you don't want people to know who you are. So does he program computers by day and trounce chess masters at night, or what?
My name is also Bobby and I'm pleased to hear that Mr. Fischer might be having some fun. For my part I've grown to realize the value of that other skill set, and I'm ever so slowly trying to cultivate it.
Aside from the obvious issue with the name, it could very well depend on what patents they've been issued. For instance if they have a patent on "user programmable systems for manipulating interlocking toy blocks" then no one else can do this without permission of Lego even if they design their system without any knowledge of the software Lego is using.
DMCA aside, historically it's legal to reverse engineer things you buy, but you can't use that knowledge to create things that would violate patents unless you get permission from the patent holder.
Lego certainly holds patents on the hardware, but it's entirely possible that they have some that cover part or all of the software as well. After all it's not really a computer in the sense we typically expect and the patent office people may have decided it's sufficiently different to have different rules. I remember a while ago the patent expired on the RSA cryptosystem and that was just an algorithm.
First off, who says the amount of people will always increase? Many industrialized nations have seen great dorps in population growth. Some places have even fallen so far that the birth rate doesn't match the death rate and thus they are actually shrinking. (IIRC, Italy was the leading example of this) All environments produce limits on what a sustainable population size is. It just happens that humans are capable of occupying an incredibly large environment.
Secondly, our most important resource is energy. Fossil fuels, wind, hydro-electric and solar power all ultimately derive their energy content from that big ball of fire in the sky. The sun will be with us for a real long time and technology has been moving it to be cheaper not more expensive to harness the energy as it comes out. Fusion (if it ever works) may provide virtually limitless energy supplies as well.
This is a general trend, the amount of resources available doesn't change much over time, but the cost to use them goes down because technology improves. Perhaps someday we will resort to mining landfills for raw materials but right now we are no where close to being critically short on most resources. For many raw materials the amount harvested from the environment still exceeds the amount consumed and discarded each year. Often we find alternatives to anything that is suddenly in short supply.
Coexisting peacefully with our environment is a good thing and we have been slowly moving in that direction. Don't think however that resource limits are going to cramp our lifestyles anytime soon.
Pollution is waste. Waste is inefficency. Inefficency is lost profit. Ergo, it is cheaper to be cleaner.
Sometimes waste is just waste.
For instance mining, I want the silver and it might turn out to be cheaper to scoop out the ore, remove the silver and dump the rest of the dirt back in the ground.
Or how about processed corn? I buy lots of corn on the cob, do my thing, and end up with bags of corn and lots of cob. What do I do with the cobs? Perhaps they make a good fuel, or can be ground up for animal feed, or maybe I can press them together to make building material. Who knows? But whatever I want to do with them, the public has to be willing to pay me more than the cost to process them - the cost of throwing the away. If I would take a lesser hit by throwing away the cobs then that's what makes good economic sense for me.
Looking at nature, there are lots of niche markets. Plants can store chemical energy efficiently so long as they don't expend too much energy in daily life. Animals by contrast show that for a highly mobile lifestyle it's more efficent to discard lots of waste that is too energy costly to reprocess compared with the abundance of food their mobility gives them access to. By contrast algae, fungus, etc breakdown that waste because they aren't mobile enough to find better resaources for them. Of course some organisms do things the way they do because they've never evolved a better method, but natural selection suggests that their place in nature will be close to the most efficient they can be with what they've got.
Technology makes new uses for things and makes reclaiming raw materials more cost effective, but it doesn't make sense for the producer until it is cost effective. If we don't like pollution then one solution is to charge the polluters for dumping stuff into the environment, because then their costs for disposal may exceed the costs of reclaimation or alternative use. Or we might subsidize other solutions so they become less costly than dumping.
Efficiency can be equivalent to cost effective, but it doesn't have to be in all processes and markets.
Well I certainly didn't come up with 5 minutes a person looking to the industrialized world. Most people in the US use far more than that. For instance my teenage sister probably spends 2 hours a day talking to her best friend. That way she has covered her alotment and 23 other people without phones.
Seriously, if only 20% of the world has regular phone service (and I'd guess it's a least a little higher than that), then they only have to average 25 minutes a day amongst themselves to still result in 5 minutes a day average worldwide.
It's meant as an average. I never thought to claim that everyone talks for 5 minutes a day.
Bullshit warning: I'm about to pull a lot of numbers out my ass. I hope to be semi-reasonable and conservative, but it's guesswork nonetheless.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument the NSA can in fact intercept any transmission and beyond that can convert any spoken words in any language to flawless text.
5 minutes of phone time per person per day worldwide
6 billion people
at least 1 word every 3 seconds
2 people in the typical conversation
8 character average word length (w/ space)
= 2.4 Terabytes per day
200 important daily newspapers
50,000 words per issue
= 80 Mbytes per day
5,000 magazines / periodicals
median time of 2 weeks
100 pages on average
average 400 words per page
= 114 Mbytes per day
15,000 worldwide radio stations
35% of time is spoken
1 word every 2 seconds in spoken segments
= 1.8 Gigabytes
7 million new webpages a day (source)
10k average size
= 70 Gigabytes per day
500 million email users
average 0.5 email sent per user per day
18k average email size (source)
= 4.5 Terabytes per day
Total = 7 Terabytes per day
If the NSA really were out to track everything, suffice it to say, it's one monster of a computer engineering problem. We are generating more information than ever and don't have the same kinds of well defined enemies. And how many actual analysts are required to make any sense of all that? Is it any wonder they might be falling behind?
Of course I'm sure there are lots of sources of information, such as TV, that I haven't even covered.
Probably wouldn't destroy the Earth (though perhaps no one would be left around to care.)
If the moon were summarily dropped on the Earth from it's current distance it would release 4.5e30 J of energy. It's commonly believed that the moon was created by a massive collision with a perhaps Mars sized body early in the solar system's existence. This would require even more energy than what would be released by bringing down the moon. Thus the Earth, as a huge chunk of rock orbiting the sun, would survive.
Whether people, or any life, survive all depends on how it is released. For instance the energy processed by a hurricane can be in the 10s of exajoules per day. The Krakatowa volcano explosion registered about 0.2 exajoules in a matter of moments, and had a major impact on that part of the world back in the 19th century.
Okay the summarized text is a little more than 1 page to reflect a bill that is quoted as being 19 pages long in the draft copy. By comparision DMCA was 94 pages, and attempted to account for the few legitimate concerns that were raised at the time. What degree of success it actually had in that respect is a matter of judgement.
The essential idea I'm getting from this is that this congressman wants to make it very difficult to do certain things with computers and other electronic devices in order to ensure that copyrights are protected. Somehow I don't think this one will quietly get through congress, and all things considered I bet the final draft at least attempts to address many concerns that clearly haven't been. Were it to pass today, the excessive brevity might well be its undoing. Wide sweeping impostions on individual rights without clear justification have never faired very well before the Supreme Court.
As an interesting side note, it occurs to me that this neatly sidesteps one of the issues of DMCA. If all computer equipment are required to implement standard protections then one can no longer argue that having protections present limits a technology to a particular platform. I doubt however that this is the point that Disney is so gung ho in support of.
Rather than get upset with the summary of the draft copy, I'm going to way to a real bill is submitted for consideration. Once it is available to read both by us and other Congressmen, then we can figure out what's wrong with it and how to salvage it to address legitimate copyright holder concerns, if any. After all how much do you think your representatives are going to listen to people ranting about a bil that doesn't yet exist, or blatantly against the copyright protections they obviously favor.
It's good to be aware and want to act, but wait till you know a little more about your enemy before you rush into battle.
Is anyone else struck by the similarity in argumentation for creating DMCA and that for limiting face recognition?
Parts of DMCA were written because those with the power to do so believed people couldn't be trusted with technology. In that case the technology to break copyrights and hence illegally spread copyrighted material.
Now we are sitting back and use the same arguments ourselves that we can't trust the people in charge to make reasonable use of facial recognition technology, or to limit the system in response to privacy and rights concerns.
Obviously both scenarios bring up rights issues which differ significantly, but the arguments for DMCA and against facial recognition rarely focus on these. As you might notice 5 of Arge's 7 main points against facial recognition rest on the potential for abuse or considerable privacy invasion (linking such systems to information about average people).
Perhaps this is the nature of society and we really can't trust enough people to be responsible when it comes to the oppurtunities new technology gives us. Frankly though if that's true, it says something sad about the state of the world we've made for ourselves.
Personally I feel that both DMCA and facial recognition software benefit legitimate concerns and can serve a useful purpose. If properly legislated in an enforcable way then it should be possible to strike a balance between the varying concerns. That's not to say that DMCA as currently constructed couldn't use revision or that facial recognition should grow unchecked.
Ultimately, if we are going to make arguments, then we need to be consistent. Either we accept or reject the argument that people will abuse new technologies on a wide scale. From there we decide how the issue plays out with respect to human rights concerns. Beware of people that will dismiss your concerns in one setting and then champion them in another setting. (For the record I don't know if Ager does this since I can't recall hearing arguments from him about DMCA, but I know some organizations certainly have put forth contradictory arguments when it serves their purpose.)
While, everyone has already pointed out that the scale doesn't work that way, I want to add something. Would you really want to use this as a weapon (even if you could)? After all the jumpers and their country would be right at the epicenter of the thing.
Okay everyone, let's destroy our homeland in order to break some windows belonging to those no good foreign devils.
I'd like to think you're joking, but since I'm not sure I'm going to reply anyway.
They were expecting the jumping to be equivalent to about a magnitude 3 earthquake on the Richter scale which is a common seismic event that shows up on seismographs but which people can't even detect. A significant quake will be more like a 5 or higher on the Richter scale. This scale is logarithmic so a 4 is actually 10 times more powerful than a 3, and a 5 is 10 times a 4.
Thus the scientists would have to have been mistaken about the impact of all that jumping by a factor of 100 to actually rattle people. Any scientist worth his salt ought to be able to estimate the effect of what he's doing more precisely than 2 orders of magnitude, especially if it might be dangerous for him to be wrong.
Note: The 10 times factor applies to wave amplitude, energy content scales by about 10*Sqrt(10) or 31 times from one level to the next.
Re:This might mean something...
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eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe it's just your wording here, but if this is the case, I'd be very scared... you shouldn't have to prove that you're "not guilty", they should have to prove that you ARE guilty.
Perhaps it is sloppy wording on my part. The most relevant section (512(f)) makes no reference to burden of proof, so I would assume that standard principles still apply. Again IANAL, but it would seem to me that if you contest their claim of infringement then the burden lies with the accuser. However to recieve full punitive damages (above and beyond monetary losses and court costs), requires the accuser "knowingly materially misrepresents", which might require you to prove something about the accuser. I'm not sure.
In any case I am pretty sure that typical rules regarding court evidence and proof still apply. Sorry for any confusion.
Re:This might mean something...
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eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 2
... DMCA seems to openly take advantage of that fact to try to scare people who might want to violate copyrights: "We need proof to send you to jail, but we don't need any to cut your internet access..."
If the law were clarified or changed so that ISPs and network providers would only act if you were actively sharing or hosting infringing materials at the time someone complained, would you be satisfied?
Personally, I would be okay with it if service only got terminated when there was something physical and immediate to point to. Like I said, it seems in parts that this is what the DMCA's authors intended, but other parts don't adequately support it.
Re:This might mean something...
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eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 5, Informative
I do remember that story and since then I've done a little foot work to see what the deal is.
Looking to the DMCA itself, what happens when infringement is suspected? Well copyright holders (or more typically their lawyers), can send a letter to your ISP (or other network provider) and they then cut off your service or risk being sued. Actually if you look at the wording in the DMCA, it appears that the intent was that action be taken only if you are actively infringing on copyrights, such as hosting files on a website, at the time of the receipt of the copyright holder's letter (amended section 512 of the Copyright Act). One problem is that the limitations on damages appear to allow an ISP to cut off all service whenever a notice is received without any repercussions and regardless of any actual infringement (Section 512(g)(1)). A second problem is that even if you aren't infringing at the moment, the fact that someone said you were might be enough to negate the ISP's protection should you infringe in the future (see Section 512(c)).
The DMCA does explicitly allow you recourse however. Pursuant to Section 512(g)(3) you can file a counter notice with the ISP and they have to restore your access within 14 days unless the copyright holder files for a court order against you. I don't know how this will intersect with the notion of arbitrary service termination in many license agreements, however. Furthermore, if you prove in court that you did not commit the act of which you are accused then the accuser may be subject to paying monetary losses, punitive damages and legal costs.
IANAL, but I am a concerned citizen (IAACC, anyone?)
I've never personally encountered this result and don't know for sure how it is derived, but I think I can take a stab at it classically. I'm not doing GR and won't get the same equations but the behavior is the same so this is probably along the right line to consider.
Escape velocity is dictated by having enough kinetic energy to "escape" the gravitational potential well. This comes to v = Sqrt(2*G*M/R) in the classical regime. Surface gravity on the other hand goes as g=G*M/R^2. This means that you could have an escape velocity v = the speed of light, c, so long as M/R = (c^2)/(2*G). This is the black hole conditon that not even light is moving fast enoguh to get out. By making M really large and proportionally R also really large you can end up with g small because g depends on 1/R^2 instead of 1/R.
As I said this is a crude hack but it does suggest why this might be true without delving into GR.
DMCA Section 512(d) explicitly exempts "information location tools", such as search engines, from liability for linking, indexing, referencing, etc., copyrighted material. Furthermore Section 512(b) exempts most forms of temporary caching (though not if you modify the material which might be important here).
If you wondered why DMCA wasn't mentioned explicitly in the article, this is probably why. DMCA is relatively nice to search engines, but the issues here go beyond that. We are concerned with whether images are different from text and what is a fair use. The article does a good job of outlining the issues.
For more on DMCA you might try this summary.
And for the really adventurous there is always the full text. Note: Both links are PDF files.
Hawking didn't hypothesize the virtual particles, they are a neccesary feature in some aspects of quatum mechanics, especially QED (quantum electrodynamics), whose predictive validity has been established with incredible accuracy.
Hawking's contribution was thinking about how they might interact with black holes. Interestingly his theory was incomplete in that it rested on a major assumption that was not proved (it's math so "proved" is the right word) until quite recently. To be honest though we won't be certain about Hawking radiation till we have a good understanding of quantum gravity. Until then it's just a good hack trying to apply both quantum mechanics and general relativity to a problem, despite the fact that they are inherently incompatible theories.
As far as compressing things down, many physicists believe a black hole can't swallow anything whose de Broglie wavelength is greater than the diameter of the event horizion. De Broglie wavelength is a quantum mechanical property that in this context can roughly be thought of as a measure of something's intrinsic size. Once something gets pulled in, it would get compressed far smaller, but the black hole has to be able to catch it first. Electrons have a wavelength on the order of 10^-10 m, where as nuclear particles are about 10^-15 m. Schwarzschild radius is given by 2*G*M/c^2, which implies that a hole of 10^-15 m has about 6.7e11 kg of matter in it.
Thus you can't make a black hole out of a cat because a cat doesn't have enough mass to generate an event horizon that would encompass it's atoms. Besides we already wondering whether the cat is dead or alive, why subject him to anything else.
One final note, some of the plans for quantum gravity would replace the singularity with a highly compact structure of miniscule but non-zero volume. IIRC something with radius on the order of 10^-30 to 10^-34 m.
In this report on Yahoo there is additional description of the experiment.
They did in fact compare the effects of a caffiene pill to a placebo in a double blind test.
Still no reference to a published journal article, but this does give more credence to the work and this journalist seems to appreciate that it's not just coffee that has caffiene.
Personally, I'm casting my vote for sloppy reporting.
I used to be really big on drinking caffeine, a good deal from soda but some other stuff as well.
It got to the point where withdrawl headaches and weakness would kick in if I hadn't had any for only 6-8 hours. At about this point I decided it was nuts and started cutting the stuff out. After a several weeks with no caffiene I realize that I could no longer tolerate the stuff. I don't know if it's a allergy or what, but now having a single Coke is enough to give me a headache.
When your body starts getting ill every time you have caffiene (and I don't mean withdrawl, I mean shortly after consumption), that's a pretty good incentive to stop using it. After several years it doesn't seem like much of a loss.
Of course HDTV typically has a digital signal (some countries actually have tried analog high-def signals), but digital television just means using a digital signal instead of analog and that can include the contemporary TV format.
Afterall digital cable companies and satelite providers already commonly transmit digital signals of contemporary sized and formatted television programs.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
Of course the companies would like to get everyone behind the higher res, wider, bandwidth hungry HDTV format and spew that all over the air waves as well or exclusively, but personally that seems more like a marketing gimmick than an especially useful technology. Even if digital broadcasting takes off, don't expect all the shows on the air to be HDTV formatted, at least not any time soon.
I don't have a lot of experience with wireless communications. Thus far all I've used is radio, a wireless phone handset, and an emergency cell phone. In my daily life then interference has never caused any critical problems. Sure there is the occasional static on radio or what not, but the signal to noise ratio is generally quite good and a little corruption isn't that bad.
My question to you then is how bad is interference now and has it been getting worse? When you are running wireless networks and systems where single bit errors can be serious, how well do the failsafes work? Can you give examples where interference was/is a persistent serious problem?
Obviously if we keep expanding the spectrum and pumping more things into the air, there will be more interference. So right now are we doing pretty good that we can tolerate more interference, or are in the position of making a real problem much worse?
PS While I respect radio astronomers, your problems are not typical. We may simply have to accept that what's useful to us is harmful to you and the overall utility might trump some methods of research.
"Don't forget to increase our budget allocation, since our new environmentally friendly weapons will cost several times the value of our current stockpile. Just remember it's for the environment and the children."
I tried submitting information on just this issue several hours ago and it got rejected. Anyway here's the scoop I had.
MirCorp, despite the ditching of their namesake, is still in the business of space tourism. They have proposed a new space station dubbed "Mini Station 1", which would house 3 space tourists for upto 20 days at a time. They hope to make a commercial venture of it through corporate endorsements and giving clients with ultra deep pockets an out of this world vacation. This news story gives additional response from the Russian Space Agency and the spacecraft builder Energia.
It's a trade off. Judges were given long-term / permanent appointments exactly because we wanted them to be free of the restraints of having to run for re-election and fight public opinion. If they have to pander to public opinion then they might not do what they believe to be morally and ethically right when it conflicts with what a majority of the people want. It would a bad thing for the guardians of the rule of law to be compromising their ethics to ensure re-election.
Furthermore judges can only interpret the law. While this can have large implications, it's not the same as if they can decree martial law is in effect or pass taxes to raise money for themselves. The founders of our democracy decided that benevolent dictators with limited power were good for the republic.
The important thing is to make sure that only good honest people get to be judges in the first place. As an additional safe guard, the heirarchy of the judicial system ensures that only judges who consistently make intelligent reasonable rulings will advance in stature.
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Funny -- he's [Al Gore] the one that failed out of two college programs and one was divinity school (how do you fail "Jesus loves me this I know"?). ... If you knock Bush's grades (which weren't stellar), you can't praise Gore's (which were Fs).
Perhaps I was just brainwashed by the common media impression and the fact he tries to pursue hard topics. His selection as VP and relative mastery of English when debating Bush do add a suggestion of intelligence.
However, your facts to do appear to be correct as confirmed by this Washington Times Article (reprinted).
Of course, grades aren't everything as Bush will attest.
Intellect isn't everything.
I know very little about Bobby Fischer so I'm speaking in general, not about him in particular.
Intellect can do a lot, but there are other skills that one needs to be successful, especially in the public eye. These are things like stage presence, speaking ability, charisma, style, bearing and common sense, which are only tangentially connected to intelligence. A smart person might be able to develop them faster than your average Joe. On the other hand intelligence might hinder their development, especially if that person is arrogant because of their intelligence.
To take a high profile example, by all accounts Al Gore is a pretty learned guy, but he still hasn't figured out what he wants his appearance to be, and the last election suggests that he has had only mediocre success connecting with the public. The stereotypical closed-in scientist (and I've known a few) can be far worse.
Bobby Fischer is, at least to my limited knowledge, something of a one trick wonder. He is exceptionally good at chess, but clearly doesn't want to be a public figure, and perhaps he wouldn't be very good at it?
The thing I wonder most about is what kind of a life is he living now? Chess isn't easy to make a profession of and it must be nearly impossible if you don't want people to know who you are. So does he program computers by day and trounce chess masters at night, or what?
My name is also Bobby and I'm pleased to hear that Mr. Fischer might be having some fun. For my part I've grown to realize the value of that other skill set, and I'm ever so slowly trying to cultivate it.
IANAL.
Aside from the obvious issue with the name, it could very well depend on what patents they've been issued. For instance if they have a patent on "user programmable systems for manipulating interlocking toy blocks" then no one else can do this without permission of Lego even if they design their system without any knowledge of the software Lego is using.
DMCA aside, historically it's legal to reverse engineer things you buy, but you can't use that knowledge to create things that would violate patents unless you get permission from the patent holder.
Lego certainly holds patents on the hardware, but it's entirely possible that they have some that cover part or all of the software as well. After all it's not really a computer in the sense we typically expect and the patent office people may have decided it's sufficiently different to have different rules. I remember a while ago the patent expired on the RSA cryptosystem and that was just an algorithm.
I disagree.
First off, who says the amount of people will always increase? Many industrialized nations have seen great dorps in population growth. Some places have even fallen so far that the birth rate doesn't match the death rate and thus they are actually shrinking. (IIRC, Italy was the leading example of this) All environments produce limits on what a sustainable population size is. It just happens that humans are capable of occupying an incredibly large environment.
Secondly, our most important resource is energy. Fossil fuels, wind, hydro-electric and solar power all ultimately derive their energy content from that big ball of fire in the sky. The sun will be with us for a real long time and technology has been moving it to be cheaper not more expensive to harness the energy as it comes out. Fusion (if it ever works) may provide virtually limitless energy supplies as well.
This is a general trend, the amount of resources available doesn't change much over time, but the cost to use them goes down because technology improves. Perhaps someday we will resort to mining landfills for raw materials but right now we are no where close to being critically short on most resources. For many raw materials the amount harvested from the environment still exceeds the amount consumed and discarded each year. Often we find alternatives to anything that is suddenly in short supply.
Coexisting peacefully with our environment is a good thing and we have been slowly moving in that direction. Don't think however that resource limits are going to cramp our lifestyles anytime soon.
Pollution is waste. Waste is inefficency. Inefficency is lost profit. Ergo, it is cheaper to be cleaner.
Sometimes waste is just waste.
For instance mining, I want the silver and it might turn out to be cheaper to scoop out the ore, remove the silver and dump the rest of the dirt back in the ground.
Or how about processed corn? I buy lots of corn on the cob, do my thing, and end up with bags of corn and lots of cob. What do I do with the cobs? Perhaps they make a good fuel, or can be ground up for animal feed, or maybe I can press them together to make building material. Who knows? But whatever I want to do with them, the public has to be willing to pay me more than the cost to process them - the cost of throwing the away. If I would take a lesser hit by throwing away the cobs then that's what makes good economic sense for me.
Looking at nature, there are lots of niche markets. Plants can store chemical energy efficiently so long as they don't expend too much energy in daily life. Animals by contrast show that for a highly mobile lifestyle it's more efficent to discard lots of waste that is too energy costly to reprocess compared with the abundance of food their mobility gives them access to. By contrast algae, fungus, etc breakdown that waste because they aren't mobile enough to find better resaources for them. Of course some organisms do things the way they do because they've never evolved a better method, but natural selection suggests that their place in nature will be close to the most efficient they can be with what they've got.
Technology makes new uses for things and makes reclaiming raw materials more cost effective, but it doesn't make sense for the producer until it is cost effective. If we don't like pollution then one solution is to charge the polluters for dumping stuff into the environment, because then their costs for disposal may exceed the costs of reclaimation or alternative use. Or we might subsidize other solutions so they become less costly than dumping.
Efficiency can be equivalent to cost effective, but it doesn't have to be in all processes and markets.
Well I certainly didn't come up with 5 minutes a person looking to the industrialized world. Most people in the US use far more than that. For instance my teenage sister probably spends 2 hours a day talking to her best friend. That way she has covered her alotment and 23 other people without phones.
Seriously, if only 20% of the world has regular phone service (and I'd guess it's a least a little higher than that), then they only have to average 25 minutes a day amongst themselves to still result in 5 minutes a day average worldwide.
It's meant as an average. I never thought to claim that everyone talks for 5 minutes a day.
Bullshit warning: I'm about to pull a lot of numbers out my ass. I hope to be semi-reasonable and conservative, but it's guesswork nonetheless.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument the NSA can in fact intercept any transmission and beyond that can convert any spoken words in any language to flawless text.
5 minutes of phone time per person per day worldwide
6 billion people
at least 1 word every 3 seconds
2 people in the typical conversation
8 character average word length (w/ space)
= 2.4 Terabytes per day
200 important daily newspapers
50,000 words per issue
= 80 Mbytes per day
5,000 magazines / periodicals
median time of 2 weeks
100 pages on average
average 400 words per page
= 114 Mbytes per day
15,000 worldwide radio stations
35% of time is spoken
1 word every 2 seconds in spoken segments
= 1.8 Gigabytes
7 million new webpages a day (source)
10k average size
= 70 Gigabytes per day
500 million email users
average 0.5 email sent per user per day
18k average email size (source)
= 4.5 Terabytes per day
Total = 7 Terabytes per day
If the NSA really were out to track everything, suffice it to say, it's one monster of a computer engineering problem. We are generating more information than ever and don't have the same kinds of well defined enemies. And how many actual analysts are required to make any sense of all that? Is it any wonder they might be falling behind?
Of course I'm sure there are lots of sources of information, such as TV, that I haven't even covered.
Probably wouldn't destroy the Earth (though perhaps no one would be left around to care.)
If the moon were summarily dropped on the Earth from it's current distance it would release 4.5e30 J of energy. It's commonly believed that the moon was created by a massive collision with a perhaps Mars sized body early in the solar system's existence. This would require even more energy than what would be released by bringing down the moon. Thus the Earth, as a huge chunk of rock orbiting the sun, would survive.
Whether people, or any life, survive all depends on how it is released. For instance the energy processed by a hurricane can be in the 10s of exajoules per day. The Krakatowa volcano explosion registered about 0.2 exajoules in a matter of moments, and had a major impact on that part of the world back in the 19th century.
Okay the summarized text is a little more than 1 page to reflect a bill that is quoted as being 19 pages long in the draft copy. By comparision DMCA was 94 pages, and attempted to account for the few legitimate concerns that were raised at the time. What degree of success it actually had in that respect is a matter of judgement.
The essential idea I'm getting from this is that this congressman wants to make it very difficult to do certain things with computers and other electronic devices in order to ensure that copyrights are protected. Somehow I don't think this one will quietly get through congress, and all things considered I bet the final draft at least attempts to address many concerns that clearly haven't been. Were it to pass today, the excessive brevity might well be its undoing. Wide sweeping impostions on individual rights without clear justification have never faired very well before the Supreme Court.
As an interesting side note, it occurs to me that this neatly sidesteps one of the issues of DMCA. If all computer equipment are required to implement standard protections then one can no longer argue that having protections present limits a technology to a particular platform. I doubt however that this is the point that Disney is so gung ho in support of.
Rather than get upset with the summary of the draft copy, I'm going to way to a real bill is submitted for consideration. Once it is available to read both by us and other Congressmen, then we can figure out what's wrong with it and how to salvage it to address legitimate copyright holder concerns, if any. After all how much do you think your representatives are going to listen to people ranting about a bil that doesn't yet exist, or blatantly against the copyright protections they obviously favor.
It's good to be aware and want to act, but wait till you know a little more about your enemy before you rush into battle.
Is anyone else struck by the similarity in argumentation for creating DMCA and that for limiting face recognition?
Parts of DMCA were written because those with the power to do so believed people couldn't be trusted with technology. In that case the technology to break copyrights and hence illegally spread copyrighted material.
Now we are sitting back and use the same arguments ourselves that we can't trust the people in charge to make reasonable use of facial recognition technology, or to limit the system in response to privacy and rights concerns.
Obviously both scenarios bring up rights issues which differ significantly, but the arguments for DMCA and against facial recognition rarely focus on these. As you might notice 5 of Arge's 7 main points against facial recognition rest on the potential for abuse or considerable privacy invasion (linking such systems to information about average people).
Perhaps this is the nature of society and we really can't trust enough people to be responsible when it comes to the oppurtunities new technology gives us. Frankly though if that's true, it says something sad about the state of the world we've made for ourselves.
Personally I feel that both DMCA and facial recognition software benefit legitimate concerns and can serve a useful purpose. If properly legislated in an enforcable way then it should be possible to strike a balance between the varying concerns. That's not to say that DMCA as currently constructed couldn't use revision or that facial recognition should grow unchecked.
Ultimately, if we are going to make arguments, then we need to be consistent. Either we accept or reject the argument that people will abuse new technologies on a wide scale. From there we decide how the issue plays out with respect to human rights concerns. Beware of people that will dismiss your concerns in one setting and then champion them in another setting. (For the record I don't know if Ager does this since I can't recall hearing arguments from him about DMCA, but I know some organizations certainly have put forth contradictory arguments when it serves their purpose.)
While, everyone has already pointed out that the scale doesn't work that way, I want to add something. Would you really want to use this as a weapon (even if you could)? After all the jumpers and their country would be right at the epicenter of the thing.
Okay everyone, let's destroy our homeland in order to break some windows belonging to those no good foreign devils.
I'd like to think you're joking, but since I'm not sure I'm going to reply anyway.
They were expecting the jumping to be equivalent to about a magnitude 3 earthquake on the Richter scale which is a common seismic event that shows up on seismographs but which people can't even detect. A significant quake will be more like a 5 or higher on the Richter scale. This scale is logarithmic so a 4 is actually 10 times more powerful than a 3, and a 5 is 10 times a 4.
Thus the scientists would have to have been mistaken about the impact of all that jumping by a factor of 100 to actually rattle people. Any scientist worth his salt ought to be able to estimate the effect of what he's doing more precisely than 2 orders of magnitude, especially if it might be dangerous for him to be wrong.
Note: The 10 times factor applies to wave amplitude, energy content scales by about 10*Sqrt(10) or 31 times from one level to the next.
Maybe it's just your wording here, but if this is the case, I'd be very scared... you shouldn't have to prove that you're "not guilty", they should have to prove that you ARE guilty.
Perhaps it is sloppy wording on my part. The most relevant section (512(f)) makes no reference to burden of proof, so I would assume that standard principles still apply. Again IANAL, but it would seem to me that if you contest their claim of infringement then the burden lies with the accuser. However to recieve full punitive damages (above and beyond monetary losses and court costs), requires the accuser "knowingly materially misrepresents", which might require you to prove something about the accuser. I'm not sure.
In any case I am pretty sure that typical rules regarding court evidence and proof still apply. Sorry for any confusion.
... DMCA seems to openly take advantage of that fact to try to scare people who might want to violate copyrights: "We need proof to send you to jail, but we don't need any to cut your internet access..."
If the law were clarified or changed so that ISPs and network providers would only act if you were actively sharing or hosting infringing materials at the time someone complained, would you be satisfied?
Personally, I would be okay with it if service only got terminated when there was something physical and immediate to point to. Like I said, it seems in parts that this is what the DMCA's authors intended, but other parts don't adequately support it.
I do remember that story and since then I've done a little foot work to see what the deal is.
Looking to the DMCA itself, what happens when infringement is suspected? Well copyright holders (or more typically their lawyers), can send a letter to your ISP (or other network provider) and they then cut off your service or risk being sued. Actually if you look at the wording in the DMCA, it appears that the intent was that action be taken only if you are actively infringing on copyrights, such as hosting files on a website, at the time of the receipt of the copyright holder's letter (amended section 512 of the Copyright Act). One problem is that the limitations on damages appear to allow an ISP to cut off all service whenever a notice is received without any repercussions and regardless of any actual infringement (Section 512(g)(1)). A second problem is that even if you aren't infringing at the moment, the fact that someone said you were might be enough to negate the ISP's protection should you infringe in the future (see Section 512(c)).
The DMCA does explicitly allow you recourse however. Pursuant to Section 512(g)(3) you can file a counter notice with the ISP and they have to restore your access within 14 days unless the copyright holder files for a court order against you. I don't know how this will intersect with the notion of arbitrary service termination in many license agreements, however. Furthermore, if you prove in court that you did not commit the act of which you are accused then the accuser may be subject to paying monetary losses, punitive damages and legal costs.
IANAL, but I am a concerned citizen (IAACC, anyone?)
I've never personally encountered this result and don't know for sure how it is derived, but I think I can take a stab at it classically. I'm not doing GR and won't get the same equations but the behavior is the same so this is probably along the right line to consider.
Escape velocity is dictated by having enough kinetic energy to "escape" the gravitational potential well. This comes to v = Sqrt(2*G*M/R) in the classical regime. Surface gravity on the other hand goes as g=G*M/R^2. This means that you could have an escape velocity v = the speed of light, c, so long as M/R = (c^2)/(2*G). This is the black hole conditon that not even light is moving fast enoguh to get out. By making M really large and proportionally R also really large you can end up with g small because g depends on 1/R^2 instead of 1/R.
As I said this is a crude hack but it does suggest why this might be true without delving into GR.
DMCA Section 512(d) explicitly exempts "information location tools", such as search engines, from liability for linking, indexing, referencing, etc., copyrighted material. Furthermore Section 512(b) exempts most forms of temporary caching (though not if you modify the material which might be important here).
If you wondered why DMCA wasn't mentioned explicitly in the article, this is probably why. DMCA is relatively nice to search engines, but the issues here go beyond that. We are concerned with whether images are different from text and what is a fair use. The article does a good job of outlining the issues.
For more on DMCA you might try this summary.
And for the really adventurous there is always the full text.
Note: Both links are PDF files.
Hawking didn't hypothesize the virtual particles, they are a neccesary feature in some aspects of quatum mechanics, especially QED (quantum electrodynamics), whose predictive validity has been established with incredible accuracy.
Hawking's contribution was thinking about how they might interact with black holes. Interestingly his theory was incomplete in that it rested on a major assumption that was not proved (it's math so "proved" is the right word) until quite recently. To be honest though we won't be certain about Hawking radiation till we have a good understanding of quantum gravity. Until then it's just a good hack trying to apply both quantum mechanics and general relativity to a problem, despite the fact that they are inherently incompatible theories.
As far as compressing things down, many physicists believe a black hole can't swallow anything whose de Broglie wavelength is greater than the diameter of the event horizion. De Broglie wavelength is a quantum mechanical property that in this context can roughly be thought of as a measure of something's intrinsic size. Once something gets pulled in, it would get compressed far smaller, but the black hole has to be able to catch it first. Electrons have a wavelength on the order of 10^-10 m, where as nuclear particles are about 10^-15 m. Schwarzschild radius is given by 2*G*M/c^2, which implies that a hole of 10^-15 m has about 6.7e11 kg of matter in it.
Thus you can't make a black hole out of a cat because a cat doesn't have enough mass to generate an event horizon that would encompass it's atoms. Besides we already wondering whether the cat is dead or alive, why subject him to anything else.
One final note, some of the plans for quantum gravity would replace the singularity with a highly compact structure of miniscule but non-zero volume. IIRC something with radius on the order of 10^-30 to 10^-34 m.
In this report on Yahoo there is additional description of the experiment.
They did in fact compare the effects of a caffiene pill to a placebo in a double blind test.
Still no reference to a published journal article, but this does give more credence to the work and this journalist seems to appreciate that it's not just coffee that has caffiene.
Personally, I'm casting my vote for sloppy reporting.
I used to be really big on drinking caffeine, a good deal from soda but some other stuff as well.
It got to the point where withdrawl headaches and weakness would kick in if I hadn't had any for only 6-8 hours. At about this point I decided it was nuts and started cutting the stuff out. After a several weeks with no caffiene I realize that I could no longer tolerate the stuff. I don't know if it's a allergy or what, but now having a single Coke is enough to give me a headache.
When your body starts getting ill every time you have caffiene (and I don't mean withdrawl, I mean shortly after consumption), that's a pretty good incentive to stop using it. After several years it doesn't seem like much of a loss.
Digital Television != High Definition Television.
Of course HDTV typically has a digital signal (some countries actually have tried analog high-def signals), but digital television just means using a digital signal instead of analog and that can include the contemporary TV format.
Afterall digital cable companies and satelite providers already commonly transmit digital signals of contemporary sized and formatted television programs.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
Of course the companies would like to get everyone behind the higher res, wider, bandwidth hungry HDTV format and spew that all over the air waves as well or exclusively, but personally that seems more like a marketing gimmick than an especially useful technology. Even if digital broadcasting takes off, don't expect all the shows on the air to be HDTV formatted, at least not any time soon.
I don't have a lot of experience with wireless communications. Thus far all I've used is radio, a wireless phone handset, and an emergency cell phone. In my daily life then interference has never caused any critical problems. Sure there is the occasional static on radio or what not, but the signal to noise ratio is generally quite good and a little corruption isn't that bad.
My question to you then is how bad is interference now and has it been getting worse? When you are running wireless networks and systems where single bit errors can be serious, how well do the failsafes work? Can you give examples where interference was/is a persistent serious problem?
Obviously if we keep expanding the spectrum and pumping more things into the air, there will be more interference. So right now are we doing pretty good that we can tolerate more interference, or are in the position of making a real problem much worse?
PS While I respect radio astronomers, your problems are not typical. We may simply have to accept that what's useful to us is harmful to you and the overall utility might trump some methods of research.
You forgot to mention:
"Don't forget to increase our budget allocation, since our new environmentally friendly weapons will cost several times the value of our current stockpile. Just remember it's for the environment and the children."
I tried submitting information on just this issue several hours ago and it got rejected. Anyway here's the scoop I had.
MirCorp, despite the ditching of their namesake, is still in the business of space tourism. They have proposed a new space station dubbed "Mini Station 1", which would house 3 space tourists for upto 20 days at a time. They hope to make a commercial venture of it through corporate endorsements and giving clients with ultra deep pockets an out of this world vacation. This news story gives additional response from the Russian Space Agency and the spacecraft builder Energia.
It's a trade off. Judges were given long-term / permanent appointments exactly because we wanted them to be free of the restraints of having to run for re-election and fight public opinion. If they have to pander to public opinion then they might not do what they believe to be morally and ethically right when it conflicts with what a majority of the people want. It would a bad thing for the guardians of the rule of law to be compromising their ethics to ensure re-election.
Furthermore judges can only interpret the law. While this can have large implications, it's not the same as if they can decree martial law is in effect or pass taxes to raise money for themselves. The founders of our democracy decided that benevolent dictators with limited power were good for the republic.
The important thing is to make sure that only good honest people get to be judges in the first place. As an additional safe guard, the heirarchy of the judicial system ensures that only judges who consistently make intelligent reasonable rulings will advance in stature.