To give you some idea of how far we are from this. If you could afford the fuel to do 0.5 G to half way and then flip to slow down, the whole trip takes only 2.4 days at Martian closest approach. Ramp it up to 1 G and you get things down to 1.7 days.
Simulated gravity could be made this way but no engine design has fuel sufficiently light to make this even remotely possible with current technology.
As far as spinning. Acceleration = Radius * (angular frequency)^2. To get a good one G in a ship with a 5 meter radius, you'd have to spin it at 1.4 revolutions per second. Okay so make the ship bigger and aim for less gravity? 20 meters for 0.5 G still carries a rate of 0.49 rev. per sec. Spinning isn't generally a simple answer unless you are planning something that is monumentally huge. A station 2 km across can get to 0.5 G with one revolution about every 14 seconds. (If you feel like making the stretch to call that simple.)
Someone might point out that without air resistance or other interactions, getting and keeping a spin isn't the problem it would normally be. This is true, but if the object is small you get all kinds of wierd effects caused by the gradients in force. For instance a 1m tall person standing in that 5 m ship at 1G would have only 80% of the gravity at his feet acting on his head.
I will concede that getting such a ship spinning takes not unreasonable amounts of energy (considerably less than would presumably be spent getting it to Mars at a reasonable speed, and not a problem if you start the spin while in Earth orbit and fuel is plentiful), but then you pretty much have to go in a straight line along the axis, because you've just made the largest gyroscope man's ever seen, and turning the thing would be a bitch.
Some of the other problems would include getting in and out of such a ship (think floating through a hatch on the axis and then somehow matching rotation). Also anything on the outer wall would want horribly much to fly off. Large stresses would be involved in getting it spinning and holding it there. And last but not least on my short list, is that any propulsion system would carry both mass and angular momentum away from the ship affecting the rate of rotation.
Okay, so I've sat down and done the calculations. Sustained acceleration isn't likely to work any time soon. Rotation is technically possible, but certainly not easy given the kind of speed needed and presents serious technical issues to deal with the stresses, manuevering, getting in and out of the ship, etc.
Good luck NASA, I hope you figure something out in my lifetime.
Here is the Mars Fact Sheet from NASA. The surface gravity on Mars is 0.377 times that of Earth, which I would expect to cause at least some bone loss, but of course IANAD.
Incidently the year in space, 6 months each way, seems somewhat short to me. I thought they generally planned for closer to a 9 month journey when sending things over there. Of course the really important point is whether we can make more fuel once we get there. Carrying all the fuel for a return trip with you would make for a lot heavier and slower trip.
In any case men won't be going there soon. We haven't even been to the moon in ages, and we might as well test whatever technology we plan on using on some long duration lunar missions.
Why do large companies like Borders announce implementations of things like this, suspend them upon complaints and then review things like customer's rights to privacy? Are these only an issue when people complain?
Why not? It makes good business sense. Lots of places have security cameras, no one really would have cared if that's all they wanted. I have no idea how much they lose to shoplifting but it might be enough to financially justify installing such a system. From their point of view they are just protecting their possessions from theft.
Clearly someone knew that people might be upset by this, otherwise there is no point in announcing it, you just start doing it. Instead they sat down, told people what they wanted to do and waited to see the reaction. Now they've realized that it isn't a reasonable thing to do unless they can seriously reassure the people of their privacy.
I bet we still see systems like this appear, but it isn't a place like Border's that will likely stand up and take the intial flak. Perhaps casinos, banks, or some other place where security truly matters will be the first.
As classically understood, molecules are fundamental chemical units composed of atoms in precise amounts, types and arrangements. Molecules can't be subdivided without changing their chemical properties.
Crystals are not molecules because their constituents need not appear in precise proportions (a water molecule on the other hand is ALWAYS 2 hydrogen and one water), and because you can break them into chuncks that have identical intensive chemical properties. Crystals have basic units which are molecules or single atoms and combine to form the crystal lattice (often with trace impurties which are important). Crystals are chemcially bonded together, as are many things, but this does not make them molecules (according to the classical definition).
Things like diamond, polymers, DNA, and nanotubes have come to challenge the bounds of what people label as molecules. Many people, news media, and some scientists have come to accept a broader conception of molecules as being any stable, complete (as in not attached to something), and strongly bonded (doesn't usually spontaneously disassociate) compound. Myself and others I know tend to consider this looser definition to be a foolish disregard for the important aspects of the previous definition.
Knowing that what you are studying is the smallest unit with the properties you are interested in is a powerful piece of information. Similarly knowing that this basic unit requires a particular arrangement of certain atomic types grants you the keys to understanding it.
As far as I'm concerned crystals are chemical compounds or chemical aggregates but not molecules. Same for polymers (unless the context makes it important to distinguish 40-unit from 41-unit and every other length of polymer, etc.). DNA is a molecule because every single arrangement is important to how it functions and no piece has the full chemical functionality of the whole. Nanotubes, on the face of it, seem to be polymers and thus not molecules (though I don't have enough depth in the matter to say for sure.)
So we have the first logic process made out of a polymer, but it's not a specific molecule that does the job. I'm glad chemical bonds hold their tubes together and I'm glad they make our standard transistors possible, but chemical bonding != molecule.
Neurons get to make their own decision on how to grow, taking into account factors such as present of growth inducing hormones, and how much a connection a neuron makes is used. But still, to a great extant, neurons get to make their own decisions about how much and in what direction they get to grow.
It's not that simple. Basic nueroscience (of the poke and see what happens variety) recognizes that the brain is composed of many massively interconnected functional groups. In everyone the centers for speech, math, motor skills, etc. are roughly located in the same places. (Yes nature can compensate for damage in some cases, but retraining parts to do other work is slower and often less effective than the original)
People and animals are genetically coded to design brains in certain ways. Merely having lots of nuerons doesn't guarantee intelligence or functionality. A lot of it has to do with where inputs come in and where the outputs go out and how the groups are connected along the way. Also there are different types of nuerons with different nuerotransmitters and degrees of interconnectedness.
That said, yes the nuerons to some degree govern themselves. An architechture is built up and then nuerons respond in complicated and individual ways to some, as yet poorly understood, system for learning and development. If the brain really is all there is to intelligence than memory and learning have to be a product of something the nuerons are doing. Unless there is some uber mechanism directing all the nuerons, then learning has to be a natural result of what nuerons. Crudely put this might be divided into two categories (as we understand it today):
Nuerons like to fire in the same patterns they've seen before.
Nuerons like to make new connections.
Thoughts, especially memories, aren't random, they are similar to thoughts that have occured before. Roughly speaking it appears that the brain likes doing things it has done before, and thus learning. One way this is accomplished is by strengthening connections between nerves that have fired together in the past and weakening ones that don't often fire together.
The second thing is that nerves do like to grow. Not so much that it makes the brain random or chaotic, but enough to allow new patterns to be formed and improve on existing ones (for instance shortening the number of nuerons a common path goes through).
No one really understands how it all interacts, or how the features of nuerons relate to our preferences for certain outcomes over others (e.g. what in the brains causes pleasures to be reinforced and painful experiences to be avoided). This is however a good first step at being able to study nueronal circuitry in a highly controlled way.
Besides if you really expect functional "squishy" computers than something has to provide the initial framework that genetics and evolution has arranged in the animal kingdom. Build some nueron groups in meaningful ways, provide some mechanism for learning in an input/output environment (perhaps similar to how people try to train nueral computer networks), and then remove the restrictions on growth and connectedness and let the structures optimize and develop themselves.
Personally I agree for the most part with your rules of thumb. I am at best an amatuer astronomer, but I do have some friends in academia who do this stuff professionally.
It seems that it might be worth also considering how a given object was formed. For instance I expect my planets to form in orbits around the sun. If they formed as someone else's moon or even remains from some other solar system, I'm not sure I'd think of that object the same way. (Some people think Pluto may have once been a moon of Neptune.)
Mass is also an important characteristic, but mass is dubiously hard to measure unless something can be observed orbitting the object in question. This is a large part of the reason people spend more time worrying about size.
Ultimately we need classification that means something, be it mass, roundness, whether the gravitational collapse released enough heat to start a liquid core, or whatever is useful. Until we have a larger sample of planets (afterall there are only 9 we can examine with any detail), I don't think we'll be able to say what the important characteristics are.
To my mind the debate about Pluto boils down to whether we think it's a rarity. If there are in fact lots of similarly sized asteroids or whatever hiding out there beyond and around Pluto, then Pluto probably isn't all that significant in understanding our solar system.
This article on Space.com has considerably more detail about the asteroid and the techniques used for its discovery and measurement.
Included in their discussion is a debate about whether it really is the largest asteroid. The measurement of its radius relies on a reasonable, but not well established, guess for the objects reflectivity of sun light. Also some people claim that since objects at that distance are largely ice, that it may not qualify as a true asteroid (i.e. made of rock).
Astronomers have such HUGE amounts of data collected I'm glad to see that automated techniques are aiding in discovering new objects.
Things don't have to be born classified, per se. What it really takes is a guy in a government office deciding that it ought to be classified and the understanding that the info has never been made publicly available.
With science and technology projects in government most things start out with the ubiquitious "Protect as Restricted Data" designation, which means it's not important enough to guard or lock up but don't go talking about it or publishing to the public. Later on someone comes along and decides that the project or whatever has becomes more important (i.e. it actally works and is useful), and then bumps the security classification up.
The trick here is that almost nothing starts out truly unclassified unless intentionally designated so (for example some pure research efforts).
Sooner or later they have to show someone the specs, if not this judge then a higher judiciary, and there are judges with exceptional clearance (such as those that approve NSA snooping). I think the bigger concern is whether he has the technical savvy to interpret the information he is given accurately.
Having recently gone through the experience of applying to grad school in physics. I can tell you that it's not uncommon for big name universities to offer around 50% or more of their physics graduate student positions to foriegn students.
We really have reached a point where foriegn students are often more qualified for positions in American graduate schools than the American students we are suppossed to be preparing for those oppurtunities.
We are a rich nation and can afford to import scientific talent, but do we really want to be dependant on that? There has been talk about how scientific geniuses can succeed in any environment, but many researches aren't geniuses. People that come to the study of science in HS or college are behind and waste considerable effort catching up with their international counterparts when competing on a world stage.
It amazes me that we can raise a population that makes use of so much technology which is utterly mysterious to them.
I actually got to tour the main NSA facility devoted to quantum computing research as a potential employee. (If they have more than one major lab working on this, no one told us).
They actually don't have anything working right now, beyond what many public labs have. What they do have however is an essentially inexhaustible supply of money being thrown at this. They can hire the best talent and get any equipment they want.
The NSA isn't there yet, but they sure do want to be first.
Ideas are unique in that I may freely share my ideas with you without diminishing my own knowledge. The digital age has made it so that many other media are also reproducible at neglible cost to the individual.
By constrast, Intellectual Property Law serves the legitimate purpose of attempting to guarantee that the originator of an idea or creative work can earn income based on his creation without competing with others who grasp what it is he has done. Unfortunately quite often digital technology circumvents this process my allowing people free access to music, art, books, software, etc. without ever compensating the inventor.
Ultimately fair use comes from the principal that people should be able to use portions of a work when doing so is not for financial gain and to do so does not cause a lost of income to the property rights holder. As long as people percieve that they are losing money, they are not going to be happy about technologies that allow for copying and sharing.
This is something that the world will have to confront. I don't think the answer is to shut down the development and use of technology. Clearly when people are using technologies for illegal financial advantages, they can be targetted with existing law. The question is what to do with all the small time players who only "steal" a few MP3s or a little software?
What I would like to see is a paradigm shift in how we think about digital information and creative works. A world where music, movies, software, etc. are entirely free and subsidized by the government could be a wonderful place to live. Of course with fewer or no economic incentives the produce these works, one might lose quality people who value the huge profits of today. Trnasitioning to such a world would be a hard sell and lengthy process. Perhaps if subscription services become the norm then we can progress until everyone pays a flat tax for "entertainment & software services".
One might stop to notice the date of November 22, 1996 on this article.
Don't you love cutting edge Slashdot.
Does sound like a somewhat useful step in submersible development, though of course it would have to surface sooner or late to refresh it's supply of fuel and vent spent fuel byproducts. Conservation of energy and all that.
"Sex" and "Gender" are distinct semi-technical concepts in psychology.
Sex refers to whether an individual is male or female as defined by genetics and primary sexual characteristics (genitalia, basically).
Gender is defined as the set of cultural and psychological characteristics typical for a member of a certain sex in a certain environment.
Naturally most people of male sex also have male gender (same for female sex/gender), but then these distinctions arose because psychologists enjoy studying people who defy the norms.
If the goal of the internet is free exchange of information, then the real challenge is making the whole thing really free.
Ideas are special because, in most cases, it costs you nothing to share your thoughts with me. The internet however has inherent costs from electricity, infrastructure and support. It costs little in effort or energy for me to make copies of files on my computer, but once you start making a few million copies, those costs will add up.
More important at this moment in time, however is the issue of intellectual property. Back in Jefferson's day, the US notion of intellectual property was born because of the belief that if your original idea can make you money then, you ought to get the first shot at that wealth. Similarly with art and music, people want to be paid for original creations made with their talents and skills. The whole purpose was to spur on creativity and invention by giving a limited monopoly to the inventor.
Ultimately many people will fight tooth and nail to try and control the internet as long as they think that the way people are using it is costing them money!
I feel certain the number of regulations will increase. Perhaps it will only be a patchwork of different national government rules, but this will still stunt the growth and diversity of the net and certainly impact users in the countries where laws get passed. If our goal as a community is the free exchange of information and digital data then several things are going to need to happen.
We need durable, low cost, low maintainence infrastructure to power the network.
We need dirt cheap energy, in large amounts, to keep the whole thing running and power all our nifty toys.
We need a paradigm shift in how we think about and compensate intellectual property. Art, music, and software which are freely reproducible may have to be subsidized on a governmental level to ensure its continued existence.
Personally I fear that it will turn out to be easier to dramatically (though probably not totally) clamp down on the exchange of information than to create a world where the value of a thing is measured more by it's mere existence than the number of copies that have been made.
Simply put, the ISPs, Music Industry and Software companies exist because ultimately they expect to make money. As long as money is important in this world, anything which is free will fail without other means of support and anyone who can sell it will wish it wasn't free.
Slashdot Mirror
Lost track of the units, it's radians per second in the rotation numbers, not revolutions. That means the correct values are:
0.22 rev per sec at 5m, 1G
0.078 rev per sec at 20m, 0.5G
One rotation every 85 seconds at 2 km, 0.5G
Makes the thing look even better than I thought but still not slow.
To give you some idea of how far we are from this. If you could afford the fuel to do 0.5 G to half way and then flip to slow down, the whole trip takes only 2.4 days at Martian closest approach. Ramp it up to 1 G and you get things down to 1.7 days.
Simulated gravity could be made this way but no engine design has fuel sufficiently light to make this even remotely possible with current technology.
As far as spinning. Acceleration = Radius * (angular frequency)^2. To get a good one G in a ship with a 5 meter radius, you'd have to spin it at 1.4 revolutions per second. Okay so make the ship bigger and aim for less gravity? 20 meters for 0.5 G still carries a rate of 0.49 rev. per sec. Spinning isn't generally a simple answer unless you are planning something that is monumentally huge. A station 2 km across can get to 0.5 G with one revolution about every 14 seconds. (If you feel like making the stretch to call that simple.)
Someone might point out that without air resistance or other interactions, getting and keeping a spin isn't the problem it would normally be. This is true, but if the object is small you get all kinds of wierd effects caused by the gradients in force. For instance a 1m tall person standing in that 5 m ship at 1G would have only 80% of the gravity at his feet acting on his head.
I will concede that getting such a ship spinning takes not unreasonable amounts of energy (considerably less than would presumably be spent getting it to Mars at a reasonable speed, and not a problem if you start the spin while in Earth orbit and fuel is plentiful), but then you pretty much have to go in a straight line along the axis, because you've just made the largest gyroscope man's ever seen, and turning the thing would be a bitch.
Some of the other problems would include getting in and out of such a ship (think floating through a hatch on the axis and then somehow matching rotation). Also anything on the outer wall would want horribly much to fly off. Large stresses would be involved in getting it spinning and holding it there. And last but not least on my short list, is that any propulsion system would carry both mass and angular momentum away from the ship affecting the rate of rotation.
Okay, so I've sat down and done the calculations. Sustained acceleration isn't likely to work any time soon. Rotation is technically possible, but certainly not easy given the kind of speed needed and presents serious technical issues to deal with the stresses, manuevering, getting in and out of the ship, etc.
Good luck NASA, I hope you figure something out in my lifetime.
Here is the Mars Fact Sheet from NASA. The surface gravity on Mars is 0.377 times that of Earth, which I would expect to cause at least some bone loss, but of course IANAD.
Incidently the year in space, 6 months each way, seems somewhat short to me. I thought they generally planned for closer to a 9 month journey when sending things over there. Of course the really important point is whether we can make more fuel once we get there. Carrying all the fuel for a return trip with you would make for a lot heavier and slower trip.
In any case men won't be going there soon. We haven't even been to the moon in ages, and we might as well test whatever technology we plan on using on some long duration lunar missions.
Why do large companies like Borders announce implementations of things like this, suspend them upon complaints and then review things like customer's rights to privacy? Are these only an issue when people complain?
Why not? It makes good business sense. Lots of places have security cameras, no one really would have cared if that's all they wanted. I have no idea how much they lose to shoplifting but it might be enough to financially justify installing such a system. From their point of view they are just protecting their possessions from theft.
Clearly someone knew that people might be upset by this, otherwise there is no point in announcing it, you just start doing it. Instead they sat down, told people what they wanted to do and waited to see the reaction. Now they've realized that it isn't a reasonable thing to do unless they can seriously reassure the people of their privacy.
I bet we still see systems like this appear, but it isn't a place like Border's that will likely stand up and take the intial flak. Perhaps casinos, banks, or some other place where security truly matters will be the first.
"a water molecule on the other hand is ALWAYS 2 hydrogen and one water"
You mean Oxygen (h2o).
Yes, I do. Sorry about that, I need to sleep more.
As classically understood, molecules are fundamental chemical units composed of atoms in precise amounts, types and arrangements. Molecules can't be subdivided without changing their chemical properties.
Crystals are not molecules because their constituents need not appear in precise proportions (a water molecule on the other hand is ALWAYS 2 hydrogen and one water), and because you can break them into chuncks that have identical intensive chemical properties. Crystals have basic units which are molecules or single atoms and combine to form the crystal lattice (often with trace impurties which are important). Crystals are chemcially bonded together, as are many things, but this does not make them molecules (according to the classical definition).
Things like diamond, polymers, DNA, and nanotubes have come to challenge the bounds of what people label as molecules. Many people, news media, and some scientists have come to accept a broader conception of molecules as being any stable, complete (as in not attached to something), and strongly bonded (doesn't usually spontaneously disassociate) compound. Myself and others I know tend to consider this looser definition to be a foolish disregard for the important aspects of the previous definition.
Knowing that what you are studying is the smallest unit with the properties you are interested in is a powerful piece of information. Similarly knowing that this basic unit requires a particular arrangement of certain atomic types grants you the keys to understanding it.
As far as I'm concerned crystals are chemical compounds or chemical aggregates but not molecules. Same for polymers (unless the context makes it important to distinguish 40-unit from 41-unit and every other length of polymer, etc.). DNA is a molecule because every single arrangement is important to how it functions and no piece has the full chemical functionality of the whole. Nanotubes, on the face of it, seem to be polymers and thus not molecules (though I don't have enough depth in the matter to say for sure.)
So we have the first logic process made out of a polymer, but it's not a specific molecule that does the job. I'm glad chemical bonds hold their tubes together and I'm glad they make our standard transistors possible, but chemical bonding != molecule.
It's not that simple. Basic nueroscience (of the poke and see what happens variety) recognizes that the brain is composed of many massively interconnected functional groups. In everyone the centers for speech, math, motor skills, etc. are roughly located in the same places. (Yes nature can compensate for damage in some cases, but retraining parts to do other work is slower and often less effective than the original)
People and animals are genetically coded to design brains in certain ways. Merely having lots of nuerons doesn't guarantee intelligence or functionality. A lot of it has to do with where inputs come in and where the outputs go out and how the groups are connected along the way. Also there are different types of nuerons with different nuerotransmitters and degrees of interconnectedness.
That said, yes the nuerons to some degree govern themselves. An architechture is built up and then nuerons respond in complicated and individual ways to some, as yet poorly understood, system for learning and development. If the brain really is all there is to intelligence than memory and learning have to be a product of something the nuerons are doing. Unless there is some uber mechanism directing all the nuerons, then learning has to be a natural result of what nuerons. Crudely put this might be divided into two categories (as we understand it today):
- Nuerons like to fire in the same patterns they've seen before.
- Nuerons like to make new connections.
Thoughts, especially memories, aren't random, they are similar to thoughts that have occured before. Roughly speaking it appears that the brain likes doing things it has done before, and thus learning. One way this is accomplished is by strengthening connections between nerves that have fired together in the past and weakening ones that don't often fire together.The second thing is that nerves do like to grow. Not so much that it makes the brain random or chaotic, but enough to allow new patterns to be formed and improve on existing ones (for instance shortening the number of nuerons a common path goes through).
No one really understands how it all interacts, or how the features of nuerons relate to our preferences for certain outcomes over others (e.g. what in the brains causes pleasures to be reinforced and painful experiences to be avoided). This is however a good first step at being able to study nueronal circuitry in a highly controlled way.
Besides if you really expect functional "squishy" computers than something has to provide the initial framework that genetics and evolution has arranged in the animal kingdom. Build some nueron groups in meaningful ways, provide some mechanism for learning in an input/output environment (perhaps similar to how people try to train nueral computer networks), and then remove the restrictions on growth and connectedness and let the structures optimize and develop themselves.
Personally I agree for the most part with your rules of thumb. I am at best an amatuer astronomer, but I do have some friends in academia who do this stuff professionally.
It seems that it might be worth also considering how a given object was formed. For instance I expect my planets to form in orbits around the sun. If they formed as someone else's moon or even remains from some other solar system, I'm not sure I'd think of that object the same way. (Some people think Pluto may have once been a moon of Neptune.)
Mass is also an important characteristic, but mass is dubiously hard to measure unless something can be observed orbitting the object in question. This is a large part of the reason people spend more time worrying about size.
Ultimately we need classification that means something, be it mass, roundness, whether the gravitational collapse released enough heat to start a liquid core, or whatever is useful. Until we have a larger sample of planets (afterall there are only 9 we can examine with any detail), I don't think we'll be able to say what the important characteristics are.
To my mind the debate about Pluto boils down to whether we think it's a rarity. If there are in fact lots of similarly sized asteroids or whatever hiding out there beyond and around Pluto, then Pluto probably isn't all that significant in understanding our solar system.
This article on Space.com has considerably more detail about the asteroid and the techniques used for its discovery and measurement.
Included in their discussion is a debate about whether it really is the largest asteroid. The measurement of its radius relies on a reasonable, but not well established, guess for the objects reflectivity of sun light. Also some people claim that since objects at that distance are largely ice, that it may not qualify as a true asteroid (i.e. made of rock).
Astronomers have such HUGE amounts of data collected I'm glad to see that automated techniques are aiding in discovering new objects.
Things don't have to be born classified, per se. What it really takes is a guy in a government office deciding that it ought to be classified and the understanding that the info has never been made publicly available.
With science and technology projects in government most things start out with the ubiquitious "Protect as Restricted Data" designation, which means it's not important enough to guard or lock up but don't go talking about it or publishing to the public. Later on someone comes along and decides that the project or whatever has becomes more important (i.e. it actally works and is useful), and then bumps the security classification up.
The trick here is that almost nothing starts out truly unclassified unless intentionally designated so (for example some pure research efforts).
Sooner or later they have to show someone the specs, if not this judge then a higher judiciary, and there are judges with exceptional clearance (such as those that approve NSA snooping). I think the bigger concern is whether he has the technical savvy to interpret the information he is given accurately.
Having recently gone through the experience of applying to grad school in physics. I can tell you that it's not uncommon for big name universities to offer around 50% or more of their physics graduate student positions to foriegn students.
We really have reached a point where foriegn students are often more qualified for positions in American graduate schools than the American students we are suppossed to be preparing for those oppurtunities.
We are a rich nation and can afford to import scientific talent, but do we really want to be dependant on that? There has been talk about how scientific geniuses can succeed in any environment, but many researches aren't geniuses. People that come to the study of science in HS or college are behind and waste considerable effort catching up with their international counterparts when competing on a world stage.
It amazes me that we can raise a population that makes use of so much technology which is utterly mysterious to them.
I actually got to tour the main NSA facility devoted to quantum computing research as a potential employee. (If they have more than one major lab working on this, no one told us).
They actually don't have anything working right now, beyond what many public labs have. What they do have however is an essentially inexhaustible supply of money being thrown at this. They can hire the best talent and get any equipment they want.
The NSA isn't there yet, but they sure do want to be first.
Ideas are unique in that I may freely share my ideas with you without diminishing my own knowledge. The digital age has made it so that many other media are also reproducible at neglible cost to the individual.
By constrast, Intellectual Property Law serves the legitimate purpose of attempting to guarantee that the originator of an idea or creative work can earn income based on his creation without competing with others who grasp what it is he has done. Unfortunately quite often digital technology circumvents this process my allowing people free access to music, art, books, software, etc. without ever compensating the inventor.
Ultimately fair use comes from the principal that people should be able to use portions of a work when doing so is not for financial gain and to do so does not cause a lost of income to the property rights holder. As long as people percieve that they are losing money, they are not going to be happy about technologies that allow for copying and sharing.
This is something that the world will have to confront. I don't think the answer is to shut down the development and use of technology. Clearly when people are using technologies for illegal financial advantages, they can be targetted with existing law. The question is what to do with all the small time players who only "steal" a few MP3s or a little software?
What I would like to see is a paradigm shift in how we think about digital information and creative works. A world where music, movies, software, etc. are entirely free and subsidized by the government could be a wonderful place to live. Of course with fewer or no economic incentives the produce these works, one might lose quality people who value the huge profits of today. Trnasitioning to such a world would be a hard sell and lengthy process. Perhaps if subscription services become the norm then we can progress until everyone pays a flat tax for "entertainment & software services".
It could happen...
One might stop to notice the date of November 22, 1996 on this article.
Don't you love cutting edge Slashdot.
Does sound like a somewhat useful step in submersible development, though of course it would have to surface sooner or late to refresh it's supply of fuel and vent spent fuel byproducts. Conservation of energy and all that.
"Sex" and "Gender" are distinct semi-technical concepts in psychology.
Sex refers to whether an individual is male or female as defined by genetics and primary sexual characteristics (genitalia, basically).
Gender is defined as the set of cultural and psychological characteristics typical for a member of a certain sex in a certain environment.
Naturally most people of male sex also have male gender (same for female sex/gender), but then these distinctions arose because psychologists enjoy studying people who defy the norms.
Ideas are special because, in most cases, it costs you nothing to share your thoughts with me. The internet however has inherent costs from electricity, infrastructure and support. It costs little in effort or energy for me to make copies of files on my computer, but once you start making a few million copies, those costs will add up.
More important at this moment in time, however is the issue of intellectual property. Back in Jefferson's day, the US notion of intellectual property was born because of the belief that if your original idea can make you money then, you ought to get the first shot at that wealth. Similarly with art and music, people want to be paid for original creations made with their talents and skills. The whole purpose was to spur on creativity and invention by giving a limited monopoly to the inventor.
Ultimately many people will fight tooth and nail to try and control the internet as long as they think that the way people are using it is costing them money!
I feel certain the number of regulations will increase. Perhaps it will only be a patchwork of different national government rules, but this will still stunt the growth and diversity of the net and certainly impact users in the countries where laws get passed. If our goal as a community is the free exchange of information and digital data then several things are going to need to happen.
- We need durable, low cost, low maintainence infrastructure to power the network.
- We need dirt cheap energy, in large amounts, to keep the whole thing running and power all our nifty toys.
- We need a paradigm shift in how we think about and compensate intellectual property. Art, music, and software which are freely reproducible may have to be subsidized on a governmental level to ensure its continued existence.
Personally I fear that it will turn out to be easier to dramatically (though probably not totally) clamp down on the exchange of information than to create a world where the value of a thing is measured more by it's mere existence than the number of copies that have been made.Simply put, the ISPs, Music Industry and Software companies exist because ultimately they expect to make money. As long as money is important in this world, anything which is free will fail without other means of support and anyone who can sell it will wish it wasn't free.