What would be the travel times (in Earth's reference frame) of both the 1g human trip and the 12g robotic trip?
Well the robot saves around 4 months of acceleration at each end for a total of 8 months at higher speed. I'd guess that you'd save something like 3-5 months of travel time to Alpha Centauri A. It does make for an interesting calculus problem though. Saving a few months out of a 4-5 year trip doesn't seem all that significant to me and Alpha Centauri is the best case scenario for showing benefit of higher accelerations. Think of a trip to Gliese 581 20.3 light years away. Shortening a 25 year trip by a a few months is even less important. Or consider the closest known pulsar, PSR J0108-1431, around 424 light years away. I don't think future interstellar space travelers will bother with accelerations higher than 1 G. It may not even be worth doing with robots since it creates a lot more stress on the ship requiring a more massive, stronger structure. In practice, with ideal energy sources at least, less than 1 G accelerations would probably be preferred by the crew. Less time at zero G. With current technology there is one huge advantage to the higher accelerations possible with unmanned craft. Nuclear pulse propulsion is more practical that way. It's easier and less expensive to build a short shock absorber than a long one.
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I would be doing it for the sheer adventure of it. I'd rather live a short exciting life than a long boring one. And as far as wanting others to do it, it would be to experience the excitement vicariously through the astronaut videos.
if you are looking for more living room or better living conditions, start on earth and "terraform" the deserts and the arctic.
An excellent argument against the "we need more room" argument for space exploration. I always thought that was a silly argument. Congratulations in utterly destroying that strawman. I think we should have a manned base on Mars because it is cool and, short of self-replicating robots, perhaps the only way to thoroughly explore the planet given current technology. You don't do exploration out of necessity. You do it because of what you might find that you had not anticipated.
I admit that there is no immediate, practical reason to ever leave the earth's atmosphere other than to launch communication satellites and/or telescopes of various sorts. Actually, by the same logic, telescopes and really all of astronomy and astrophysics are also pointless. So I guess the most practical thing to do is to close down NASA and take away all government funding for Astronomy. So then only communication satellites I guess.
In terms of practicality, a lunar base would allow construction of immense kilometer scale optical and radio telescopes without the interference of the atmosphere or a large gravitational field, but since astronomy doesn't give any immediate practical benefits I guess that is also a waste.
Presumably those silly, impractical Chinese will be doing most of the space exploration from now on. Hopefully they will share with us any discoveries they make. I do think that space exploration is only for advanced societies. Primitive, brutish ones like ours should probably stay away from it and focus on more practical things like more efficient ways to thresh grain.
You do realize that it only takes a year of constant acceleration at a puny 1 G acceleration to reach the speed of light, right? Constant acceleration is an unlikely scenario for this reason. With an ideal energy source a manned trip to Alpha Centauri A would probably consist of about 10 months of 1 G acceleration to start approaching the point where the energy requirements for further acceleration toward c become too great due to the ship's increasing relativistic mass. A few years of gliding. And then another 10 months of deceleration. Obviously 2G accelerations would result in less than 6 months each of acceleration and deceleration for around a year of engine use and 4 years of gliding, but the humans onboard would be awfully uncomfortable trying to live at 2 G for 6 months at a time. Robotic missions could probably just accelerate at around 12 G for a month in each direction and glide the rest of the way.
If we ever have technology capable of destroying the earth we will probably also have the technology to travel to the stars at speeds of at least.25c, allowing interstellar journeys within a human lifetime. Of course if we destroy the planet as soon as we discover this incredible new energy source we won't have the chance. Unless we had already hedged our bets by putting viable breeding populations off world.
Communication delays are far from the largest obstacle. You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
Communication delays in robotic systems are completely different. If it takes you 5 years before telling a robot to avoid falling into that hole 10 feet away that's a very different sort of problem. One that you haven't addressed with your sailing ship analogy.
More to the point is that people aren't as willing to take 5 year voyages that are likely to be one way. Any place Beagle could land other than the antarctic was as likely to be habitable, with eventual visitors. Not so while heading to Alpha Centauri. Even a one way trip to Mars is an unreasonable undertaking (although not without many who claim they are willing to do so).
Unreasonable to you maybe. Not all human beings are cowards. Many long distant ship voyages and pretty much any trip to Antarctica in the early 20th century may as well have been one way. Ditto for quite a few high altitude mountain ascents. The kind of adventurers and explorers who are willing to make such trips are not afraid of risk.
FWIW, I would be willing to go on a one way Mars mission. Even one without any resupply missions where my death was certain in a matter of months or a year or two. To get to actually walk on a new planet is more of a motivation than you seem to realize. Hell, there are probably quite a few people who would be willing to make a one way trip even to the moon. The one way trip thing is a red herring anyway. Just build the equivalent of a spaceship on the ground with a closed life support system and resupply every year or two with robotic craft.
We need vastly bigger ships and better engines, large enough to produce enough of its own food for 20 or 30 years.
We do need giant ships for interstellar missions, one of the great difficulties in that undertaking. Ship size is not an insurmountable obstacle. A giant ships can be assembled at a Lagrange point station so that it doesn't have to escape the earth's or even the moon's gravity well. It does have to escape the sun's powerful grip however, which will require a huge amount of energy. For interplanetary missions with travel times of under a decade we can just resupply the bases at regular intervals with unmanned supply ships, interplanetary ferries based at Earth-Moon Lagrange points and resupplied either from a lunar base or from traditional rockets or perhaps some kind of rail gun technology. No breakthroughs in technology are needed.
1. We aren't adapted to cold weather. Naked humans will quickly die in any climate more than around 25-30 degrees north or south of the equator. Science fiction has speculated that someday we will find a way, perhaps with genetic engineering, to live in these cold climates. Pipe dreams. It will never happen. Instead we will send robots with cameras to live in these places for us.
2. Human beings are land animals. We have lungs, not gills and no flippers to allow us to move efficiently. We will never be able to explore or spend any significant amount of time underwater. Nor will we ever be able to cross oceans are any large bodies of water. Unless we can genetically engineer humans with gills and flippers or just send robots.
3. Human beings are slow. We will never be able to travel great distances because of this. Human beings are too slow to outrun most animals. Surely we are doomed to extinction since we have no way to escape from the certain death of any predator's jaws.
4. Human beings are weak. We will never survive as a species because we cannot defend ourselves with our pathetic fists and feet and a mouth not adapted for defense.
5. Human flight is perhaps the most absurd pipe dream of them all. Totally ridiculous. If we were intended to fly we would have wings and feathers like birds and a much lighter body. This will only ever happen in science fiction. Instead we will design and build robotic birds with video cameras.
The real reason human beings haven't already established permanent bases on many of the Jovian moons is that we as a species just haven't cared enough to do so. We could have had missions to those places in the 1970s. We could have had bases on Titan. Cassini-Huygens took only 7 years to get there. It's really not that far even with current technology. Since it isn't a technology issue, humans could have made it to Titan in the 70s. Certainly by 1980. We probably could have had a permanent base restocked by resupply ships every 5 years by 1990. The fact that we could have had a permanent lunar base since the 70s should make it obvious that the lack of human presence in space is an issue of will (money) and not technological impossibility.
Not only could humans have been walking around on Titan right now sending videos of that dark, smoggy world back to us, but we could have Humans almost halfway to Alpha Centauri by now as well. We discovered a means to do this in the 1960s with the Orion project. Admittedly the method is untested with full scale prototypes, but no one has shown why it cannot work. If the project had continued we could probably have built an interstellar capable craft by the late 80s after having launched many interplanetary craft.
If you assume an interstellar Orion launched from the earth or from an Earth-Moon Lagrange point by, say, 1987 then it would already have been traveling for a quarter century by now. About 28% of the 88 year journey at 0.05c. At the very least we could have been working on a giant city-sized Orion with parts constructed on the moon and ferried to the nearby Earth-Moon L1 or L2 Lagrange point for final assembly and have partially completed the giant craft by now. But, for better or worse, our species has chosen not to engage in such grand projects. That's fine, but don't ever forget that it was a matter of choice. We have simply chosen not to spend the money or the time on such grand schemes. An alien species, noting how far our space travel abilities exceeded our actual accomplishments, might wonder how such a lazy species could have survived for so long. We tend to flatter ourselves by thinking that we are a curious species motivated by the possibility and awe and wonder of new discoveries, but really we are not.
I was expecting some kind of chemistry argument about how oxygen is impossible to recycle or generate and CO2 is impossible to scrub, but he never made one. Robots have the advantage that they are cheaper and that they don't require oxygen or even a pressurized, temperature controlled, radiat
Huh? What about Windows 2000? I don't understand why some people leave that out. It's not like people ignored it because it wasn't officially a "consumer" OS. Everyone I knew ran it until XP was released. I mean why would anyone want to deal with Windows 98's frequent crashing when they can use the first reliable OS Microsoft ever made? Okay. Some people had apps that only ran in 98. I still have some. But that's no reason to ignore Windows 2000. You just dual boot. Just like I would do with XP and Windows 7 if I had some reason to actually run Windows 7. Windows 2000 seems to share something in common with Windows 7. Both were major changes at least in terms of compatibility and both were pretty reliable even before SP1.
You do realize that there are developers without CF, right? I was born ugly. I've sometimes tried to justify it and the unhappiness it has caused me in my life by thinking like that. "If I had been born good-looking I would be shallow and spend all my time at parties and having sex with hot girls instead of studying and pursuing challenging intellectual goals." But that isn't necessarily true. If my parents had been able to stop me from being born with an ugly face and body I would have been much happier. I don't think it would necessarily have made me lose my intellectual interests. In fact they could have selected for an IQ higher than a pathetic 137 while they were messing with my genetic code, which would have helped me achieve those goals that appeal to me so much. The whole point of genetic manipulation is to avoid such compromises. I'd rather have made the choice to spend my time banging hot chicks than to have some choice forced on me due to an undesirable genetic code. I've met people who were both good looking and intelligent. Were they happy? Hell, yes. Would I want to trade lives with them? Without hesitation. Someone with a genius level IQ, but who is even uglier than I am would give me more hesitation, but I'd still rather have a choice rather than my parents just selfishly ignoring the issue of my future happiness.
If you want to reproduce anywhere in the world you only really need one thing: physical beauty. In poor countries, your income or your family's income can also be important, but in most first world countries it's basically irrelevant if you are not attractive.
The survival of the fittest is still true, but only in the British slang sense of "fit". If you are attractive and you want to have children it's easy enough. If you are ugly? Hah! Good luck with that. It's possible in some cases, but it is very, very difficult. So natural selection is still going on but it's not selecting for intelligence. It's selecting for physical attractiveness.
Whether or not you believe the US has any interest in prosecuting Assange or holding him in Gitmo, Assange clearly does believe it. He is not afraid of the possibility that the new American-bought investigator will decide to charge him with something after all, although the obvious corruption may give him pause. If investigators can be bought then judges could be as well. He is afraid of spending the rest of his life in Gitmo being tortured and humiliated for the amusement of his captors, and I don't blame him.
Now he's totally screwed. The Brits may not break into the embassy, but they certainly will arrest and extradite him as soon as he leaves and he will have to leave eventually. In Sweden it's possible he may have a chance to escape and sneak out of Sweden and get his ass to a country with no extradition treaties with the US, the UK, or Sweden.
Assange's error was in not being sufficiently risk averse. He knew that the US would want his head on a stick. The least precaution he could have taken would have been to flee to a country with no extradition treaty with the US. He took a gamble going for Swedish citizenship and then seeking 'asylum' in the UK.
In one case, the actor posts the information to express to the world the tyranny under which they live to maybe just someday restore some kind of liberty in their lives, at great risk to their own life. In the other case the actor posts the information with the express purpose of shaming and harming the government that authored them.
In what way is motive relevant? And even if it is relevant where is your evidence of Assange's motive? His motive may have been precisely the same as your hypothetical Syrian. The US government absolutely does not care about Assange's motives. They only care that he released classified military documents and would like to make an example of him if at all possible in order to discourage such behavior in future.
In Cuba you'd be immune from extradition and prosecution. Or any other country that does not have an extradition treaty with the US. Also a boat in international waters, most islands in the southern ocean, and Antarctica.
As it stands now, he is facing a serious sex-crimes investigation in Sweden, which he did to himself, by-the-way.
Would that be the investigation that was already conducted in Sweden while he was there? The investigation that was closed due to insufficient evidence or whatever and Assange given formal permission to leave?
Also, how can you be accused of a sex crime that you did to yourself? Is masturbation illegal in Sweden.
It seems pretty clear that the new investigator is receiving large sums of money from the US to keep this going. When it comes to Sweden the CIA are like kids in a candy shop. Every person they see they want to buy. I wonder if the CIA had to pay more than the RIAA/MPAA paid their investigator. Probably.
If Assange returns to Sweden I hope he has enough sense to avoid having sex with any Swedish girls. Instead of snatching him, the US may have plans to frame him again. If not for rape, the real kind this time, for murder or necrophilia/pedophilia. Something utterly humiliating. The US may not want the political fallout from snatching Assange and taking him to Gitmo. Discrediting him some more may be sufficient.
I don't expect them to do all their work for free. Just this work. I would never pay for the bloated piece of shit that microtorrent has become. It should be called MaxiTorrent now. Lots of free replacements that are just as good. If you want to develop a paid software product it's best to focus on types of software that don't have lots of free versions with equivalent or better functionality. How about actually meeting a need in the marketplace that isn't currently being met? Is that really so difficult?
I've bought into the arguments that block lists are ineffective at best and can even be counterproductive due to false positives. Although blocking non-uploading peers through a temporary IP address block can be amusing. I also like that qbittorrent fills in names for magnet links. utorrent 3.0 required me to enter the names manually. What a PITA. I also regard even a very slight false sense of security as a bad thing. I rely on the protection of the herd and not having mainstream tastes. It's always worked for me.
I also think Qbittorrent is a nice utorrent replacement. And it's multiplatform. Particularly important for me as Microsoft migrates to tablet-centric OSes which I will never use more than is absolutely necessary. I also find rTorrent very difficult to install and use
Do all people in the world have to have the same motivation in your world view? Some pirates download stuff because it's free. Some download stuff because it's convenient and would be willing to buy content with an equally convenient system. This is why iTunes and other similar systems are profitable despite the availability of the same content for free elsewhere, often in higher quality forms. The same person can have different motives depending on the content.
I typically buy blurays that I like when they go on sale and cost somewhere in the $10 - $15 range. I only do this however after I have watched the movie and like it enough to watch again. I don't actually own a television or bluray player. So in order to watch my purchased content I have to run AnyDVD HD and rip the disc to an MKV file with the help of Eac3to and other programs. Of course if/when the DRM gets sufficiently good to prevent ripping I will not buy content at all. This is what happened with software a decade ago. If you prevent me from making backup copies you also permanently lose me as a customer. For every movie that I purchase there is always a corresponding download that prompted the purchase. I can't speak for everyone, but if the industry manages to somehow stop all illegal downloads they will lose at least this customer. I don't watch films in the cinema at all anymore because most theatres are using video projectors now anyway. So the quality difference between video and projection is no longer significant and I avoid all the rude people that prompted the killing in Bobcat Goldthwait's excellent God Bless America. I've always wanted to do something like that, but instead I just wait for the bluray torrent releases and stay away from the cinema.
As far as software goes I also use torrents for try-before-you-buy, but I refuse to encourage DRM, especially the insanely intrusive stuff around nowadays with limited installs and internet connection requirements. I refuse to give 1 cent to a publisher that does that. So I almost never buy anymore. My last software purchase was around the turn of the century when most "copy protection" consisted of CD keys or whatever. When the DRM became sufficiently advanced to thwart me in making a backup copy sometime around the new millenium that was the last straw. Now I only buy software if it is 100% DRM free and I like it and can afford it. Which means I almost never buy software anymore. I will nearly always contribute to promising kickstarter/indiegogo software projects however.
As far as music goes, I do tend to buy CDs from artists that I like. The RIAA is even more evil than the MPAA and I don't like to reward the record companies. So I try to buy used whenever possible. My taste in music is sufficiently narrow that this is a rare occurrence.
For books I support my favorite authors by buying the paper version in hardcover as soon as it is released. I don't buy ebooks however. I believe they are overpriced and I won't support price gouging. Although this is also something of a middleman issue. If all of my money or even most of it went directly to the author I might be willing to buy both the paper and electronic version. I'd like to see authors experiment with kickstarter to cut out the fat middleman. Although direct sales through Amazon also seem viable for ebooks.
So there you have it. The actual thought process for one individual pirate. There are no doubt millions of variations.
But is it really mutually exclusive? Assuming you have sufficient funds you can reward the movie industry by buying a bluray that you like and reward the writer of a clever program that you like.
I don't happen to think utorrent is all that special. I just used it out of habit and convenience. I started out using Azureus and still think it is a superior program despite its bloated and slow reliance on Java instead of c.
Of course some will make the argument that if you buy a DVD or Bluray you should buy it used so as not to directly support the evil that is the MPAA buying laws left and right and attempting various assaults on personal liberty in order to accomplish their goal of making as much money as possible in any way possible or world domination or whatever is in their evil brains. I am sympathetic with this argument, but haven't had the greatest luck in buying used media.
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What would be the travel times (in Earth's reference frame) of both the 1g human trip and the 12g robotic trip?
Well the robot saves around 4 months of acceleration at each end for a total of 8 months at higher speed. I'd guess that you'd save something like 3-5 months of travel time to Alpha Centauri A. It does make for an interesting calculus problem though. Saving a few months out of a 4-5 year trip doesn't seem all that significant to me and Alpha Centauri is the best case scenario for showing benefit of higher accelerations. Think of a trip to Gliese 581 20.3 light years away. Shortening a 25 year trip by a a few months is even less important. Or consider the closest known pulsar, PSR J0108-1431, around 424 light years away. I don't think future interstellar space travelers will bother with accelerations higher than 1 G. It may not even be worth doing with robots since it creates a lot more stress on the ship requiring a more massive, stronger structure. In practice, with ideal energy sources at least, less than 1 G accelerations would probably be preferred by the crew. Less time at zero G. With current technology there is one huge advantage to the higher accelerations possible with unmanned craft. Nuclear pulse propulsion is more practical that way. It's easier and less expensive to build a short shock absorber than a long one.
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I would be doing it for the sheer adventure of it. I'd rather live a short exciting life than a long boring one. And as far as wanting others to do it, it would be to experience the excitement vicariously through the astronaut videos.
Well we already have a permanent base on Antarctica. So perhaps we are up for a new challenge.
if you are looking for more living room or better living conditions, start on earth and "terraform" the deserts and the arctic.
An excellent argument against the "we need more room" argument for space exploration. I always thought that was a silly argument. Congratulations in utterly destroying that strawman. I think we should have a manned base on Mars because it is cool and, short of self-replicating robots, perhaps the only way to thoroughly explore the planet given current technology. You don't do exploration out of necessity. You do it because of what you might find that you had not anticipated.
I admit that there is no immediate, practical reason to ever leave the earth's atmosphere other than to launch communication satellites and/or telescopes of various sorts. Actually, by the same logic, telescopes and really all of astronomy and astrophysics are also pointless. So I guess the most practical thing to do is to close down NASA and take away all government funding for Astronomy. So then only communication satellites I guess.
In terms of practicality, a lunar base would allow construction of immense kilometer scale optical and radio telescopes without the interference of the atmosphere or a large gravitational field, but since astronomy doesn't give any immediate practical benefits I guess that is also a waste.
Presumably those silly, impractical Chinese will be doing most of the space exploration from now on. Hopefully they will share with us any discoveries they make. I do think that space exploration is only for advanced societies. Primitive, brutish ones like ours should probably stay away from it and focus on more practical things like more efficient ways to thresh grain.
Just because a very smart individual showed us logic stating that it's impossible does not mean that it truly is impossible.
Huh? What smart individual? What logic? You are not referring to the article I assume where neither intelligence nor logic existed.
You do realize that it only takes a year of constant acceleration at a puny 1 G acceleration to reach the speed of light, right? Constant acceleration is an unlikely scenario for this reason. With an ideal energy source a manned trip to Alpha Centauri A would probably consist of about 10 months of 1 G acceleration to start approaching the point where the energy requirements for further acceleration toward c become too great due to the ship's increasing relativistic mass. A few years of gliding. And then another 10 months of deceleration. Obviously 2G accelerations would result in less than 6 months each of acceleration and deceleration for around a year of engine use and 4 years of gliding, but the humans onboard would be awfully uncomfortable trying to live at 2 G for 6 months at a time. Robotic missions could probably just accelerate at around 12 G for a month in each direction and glide the rest of the way.
If we ever have technology capable of destroying the earth we will probably also have the technology to travel to the stars at speeds of at least .25c, allowing interstellar journeys within a human lifetime. Of course if we destroy the planet as soon as we discover this incredible new energy source we won't have the chance. Unless we had already hedged our bets by putting viable breeding populations off world.
Communication delays are far from the largest obstacle. You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
Communication delays in robotic systems are completely different. If it takes you 5 years before telling a robot to avoid falling into that hole 10 feet away that's a very different sort of problem. One that you haven't addressed with your sailing ship analogy.
More to the point is that people aren't as willing to take 5 year voyages that are likely to be one way. Any place Beagle could land other than the antarctic was as likely to be habitable, with eventual visitors. Not so while heading to Alpha Centauri. Even a one way trip to Mars is an unreasonable undertaking (although not without many who claim they are willing to do so).
Unreasonable to you maybe. Not all human beings are cowards. Many long distant ship voyages and pretty much any trip to Antarctica in the early 20th century may as well have been one way. Ditto for quite a few high altitude mountain ascents. The kind of adventurers and explorers who are willing to make such trips are not afraid of risk.
FWIW, I would be willing to go on a one way Mars mission. Even one without any resupply missions where my death was certain in a matter of months or a year or two. To get to actually walk on a new planet is more of a motivation than you seem to realize. Hell, there are probably quite a few people who would be willing to make a one way trip even to the moon. The one way trip thing is a red herring anyway. Just build the equivalent of a spaceship on the ground with a closed life support system and resupply every year or two with robotic craft.
We need vastly bigger ships and better engines, large enough to produce enough of its own food for 20 or 30 years.
We do need giant ships for interstellar missions, one of the great difficulties in that undertaking. Ship size is not an insurmountable obstacle. A giant ships can be assembled at a Lagrange point station so that it doesn't have to escape the earth's or even the moon's gravity well. It does have to escape the sun's powerful grip however, which will require a huge amount of energy. For interplanetary missions with travel times of under a decade we can just resupply the bases at regular intervals with unmanned supply ships, interplanetary ferries based at Earth-Moon Lagrange points and resupplied either from a lunar base or from traditional rockets or perhaps some kind of rail gun technology. No breakthroughs in technology are needed.
1. We aren't adapted to cold weather. Naked humans will quickly die in any climate more than around 25-30 degrees north or south of the equator. Science fiction has speculated that someday we will find a way, perhaps with genetic engineering, to live in these cold climates. Pipe dreams. It will never happen. Instead we will send robots with cameras to live in these places for us.
2. Human beings are land animals. We have lungs, not gills and no flippers to allow us to move efficiently. We will never be able to explore or spend any significant amount of time underwater. Nor will we ever be able to cross oceans are any large bodies of water. Unless we can genetically engineer humans with gills and flippers or just send robots.
3. Human beings are slow. We will never be able to travel great distances because of this. Human beings are too slow to outrun most animals. Surely we are doomed to extinction since we have no way to escape from the certain death of any predator's jaws.
4. Human beings are weak. We will never survive as a species because we cannot defend ourselves with our pathetic fists and feet and a mouth not adapted for defense.
5. Human flight is perhaps the most absurd pipe dream of them all. Totally ridiculous. If we were intended to fly we would have wings and feathers like birds and a much lighter body. This will only ever happen in science fiction. Instead we will design and build robotic birds with video cameras.
The real reason human beings haven't already established permanent bases on many of the Jovian moons is that we as a species just haven't cared enough to do so. We could have had missions to those places in the 1970s. We could have had bases on Titan. Cassini-Huygens took only 7 years to get there. It's really not that far even with current technology. Since it isn't a technology issue, humans could have made it to Titan in the 70s. Certainly by 1980. We probably could have had a permanent base restocked by resupply ships every 5 years by 1990. The fact that we could have had a permanent lunar base since the 70s should make it obvious that the lack of human presence in space is an issue of will (money) and not technological impossibility.
Not only could humans have been walking around on Titan right now sending videos of that dark, smoggy world back to us, but we could have Humans almost halfway to Alpha Centauri by now as well. We discovered a means to do this in the 1960s with the Orion project. Admittedly the method is untested with full scale prototypes, but no one has shown why it cannot work. If the project had continued we could probably have built an interstellar capable craft by the late 80s after having launched many interplanetary craft.
If you assume an interstellar Orion launched from the earth or from an Earth-Moon Lagrange point by, say, 1987 then it would already have been traveling for a quarter century by now. About 28% of the 88 year journey at 0.05c. At the very least we could have been working on a giant city-sized Orion with parts constructed on the moon and ferried to the nearby Earth-Moon L1 or L2 Lagrange point for final assembly and have partially completed the giant craft by now. But, for better or worse, our species has chosen not to engage in such grand projects. That's fine, but don't ever forget that it was a matter of choice. We have simply chosen not to spend the money or the time on such grand schemes. An alien species, noting how far our space travel abilities exceeded our actual accomplishments, might wonder how such a lazy species could have survived for so long. We tend to flatter ourselves by thinking that we are a curious species motivated by the possibility and awe and wonder of new discoveries, but really we are not.
I was expecting some kind of chemistry argument about how oxygen is impossible to recycle or generate and CO2 is impossible to scrub, but he never made one. Robots have the advantage that they are cheaper and that they don't require oxygen or even a pressurized, temperature controlled, radiat
Huh? What about Windows 2000? I don't understand why some people leave that out. It's not like people ignored it because it wasn't officially a "consumer" OS. Everyone I knew ran it until XP was released. I mean why would anyone want to deal with Windows 98's frequent crashing when they can use the first reliable OS Microsoft ever made? Okay. Some people had apps that only ran in 98. I still have some. But that's no reason to ignore Windows 2000. You just dual boot. Just like I would do with XP and Windows 7 if I had some reason to actually run Windows 7. Windows 2000 seems to share something in common with Windows 7. Both were major changes at least in terms of compatibility and both were pretty reliable even before SP1.
You'd like to complain, but you're afraid microsoft will fire you if you did.
So you believe that stopping piracy is a realistic goal? Seriously?
You do realize that there are developers without CF, right? I was born ugly. I've sometimes tried to justify it and the unhappiness it has caused me in my life by thinking like that. "If I had been born good-looking I would be shallow and spend all my time at parties and having sex with hot girls instead of studying and pursuing challenging intellectual goals." But that isn't necessarily true. If my parents had been able to stop me from being born with an ugly face and body I would have been much happier. I don't think it would necessarily have made me lose my intellectual interests. In fact they could have selected for an IQ higher than a pathetic 137 while they were messing with my genetic code, which would have helped me achieve those goals that appeal to me so much. The whole point of genetic manipulation is to avoid such compromises. I'd rather have made the choice to spend my time banging hot chicks than to have some choice forced on me due to an undesirable genetic code. I've met people who were both good looking and intelligent. Were they happy? Hell, yes. Would I want to trade lives with them? Without hesitation. Someone with a genius level IQ, but who is even uglier than I am would give me more hesitation, but I'd still rather have a choice rather than my parents just selfishly ignoring the issue of my future happiness.
If you want to reproduce anywhere in the world you only really need one thing: physical beauty. In poor countries, your income or your family's income can also be important, but in most first world countries it's basically irrelevant if you are not attractive.
The survival of the fittest is still true, but only in the British slang sense of "fit". If you are attractive and you want to have children it's easy enough. If you are ugly? Hah! Good luck with that. It's possible in some cases, but it is very, very difficult. So natural selection is still going on but it's not selecting for intelligence. It's selecting for physical attractiveness.
You think there's a lesson to be learned from fiction? It's fiction. It doesn't demonstrate anything.
Whether or not you believe the US has any interest in prosecuting Assange or holding him in Gitmo, Assange clearly does believe it. He is not afraid of the possibility that the new American-bought investigator will decide to charge him with something after all, although the obvious corruption may give him pause. If investigators can be bought then judges could be as well. He is afraid of spending the rest of his life in Gitmo being tortured and humiliated for the amusement of his captors, and I don't blame him.
Now he's totally screwed. The Brits may not break into the embassy, but they certainly will arrest and extradite him as soon as he leaves and he will have to leave eventually. In Sweden it's possible he may have a chance to escape and sneak out of Sweden and get his ass to a country with no extradition treaties with the US, the UK, or Sweden.
Assange's error was in not being sufficiently risk averse. He knew that the US would want his head on a stick. The least precaution he could have taken would have been to flee to a country with no extradition treaty with the US. He took a gamble going for Swedish citizenship and then seeking 'asylum' in the UK.
In one case, the actor posts the information to express to the world the tyranny under which they live to maybe just someday restore some kind of liberty in their lives, at great risk to their own life. In the other case the actor posts the information with the express purpose of shaming and harming the government that authored them.
In what way is motive relevant? And even if it is relevant where is your evidence of Assange's motive? His motive may have been precisely the same as your hypothetical Syrian. The US government absolutely does not care about Assange's motives. They only care that he released classified military documents and would like to make an example of him if at all possible in order to discourage such behavior in future.
No. First shoot the police. Then their masters. Without the police their evil bosses have no power.
In Cuba you'd be immune from extradition and prosecution. Or any other country that does not have an extradition treaty with the US. Also a boat in international waters, most islands in the southern ocean, and Antarctica.
As it stands now, he is facing a serious sex-crimes investigation in Sweden, which he did to himself, by-the-way.
Would that be the investigation that was already conducted in Sweden while he was there? The investigation that was closed due to insufficient evidence or whatever and Assange given formal permission to leave?
Also, how can you be accused of a sex crime that you did to yourself? Is masturbation illegal in Sweden.
It seems pretty clear that the new investigator is receiving large sums of money from the US to keep this going. When it comes to Sweden the CIA are like kids in a candy shop. Every person they see they want to buy. I wonder if the CIA had to pay more than the RIAA/MPAA paid their investigator. Probably.
If Assange returns to Sweden I hope he has enough sense to avoid having sex with any Swedish girls. Instead of snatching him, the US may have plans to frame him again. If not for rape, the real kind this time, for murder or necrophilia/pedophilia. Something utterly humiliating. The US may not want the political fallout from snatching Assange and taking him to Gitmo. Discrediting him some more may be sufficient.
I don't expect them to do all their work for free. Just this work. I would never pay for the bloated piece of shit that microtorrent has become. It should be called MaxiTorrent now. Lots of free replacements that are just as good. If you want to develop a paid software product it's best to focus on types of software that don't have lots of free versions with equivalent or better functionality. How about actually meeting a need in the marketplace that isn't currently being met? Is that really so difficult?
I've bought into the arguments that block lists are ineffective at best and can even be counterproductive due to false positives. Although blocking non-uploading peers through a temporary IP address block can be amusing. I also like that qbittorrent fills in names for magnet links. utorrent 3.0 required me to enter the names manually. What a PITA. I also regard even a very slight false sense of security as a bad thing. I rely on the protection of the herd and not having mainstream tastes. It's always worked for me.
I also think Qbittorrent is a nice utorrent replacement. And it's multiplatform. Particularly important for me as Microsoft migrates to tablet-centric OSes which I will never use more than is absolutely necessary. I also find rTorrent very difficult to install and use
Do all people in the world have to have the same motivation in your world view? Some pirates download stuff because it's free. Some download stuff because it's convenient and would be willing to buy content with an equally convenient system. This is why iTunes and other similar systems are profitable despite the availability of the same content for free elsewhere, often in higher quality forms. The same person can have different motives depending on the content.
I typically buy blurays that I like when they go on sale and cost somewhere in the $10 - $15 range. I only do this however after I have watched the movie and like it enough to watch again. I don't actually own a television or bluray player. So in order to watch my purchased content I have to run AnyDVD HD and rip the disc to an MKV file with the help of Eac3to and other programs. Of course if/when the DRM gets sufficiently good to prevent ripping I will not buy content at all. This is what happened with software a decade ago. If you prevent me from making backup copies you also permanently lose me as a customer. For every movie that I purchase there is always a corresponding download that prompted the purchase. I can't speak for everyone, but if the industry manages to somehow stop all illegal downloads they will lose at least this customer. I don't watch films in the cinema at all anymore because most theatres are using video projectors now anyway. So the quality difference between video and projection is no longer significant and I avoid all the rude people that prompted the killing in Bobcat Goldthwait's excellent God Bless America. I've always wanted to do something like that, but instead I just wait for the bluray torrent releases and stay away from the cinema.
As far as software goes I also use torrents for try-before-you-buy, but I refuse to encourage DRM, especially the insanely intrusive stuff around nowadays with limited installs and internet connection requirements. I refuse to give 1 cent to a publisher that does that. So I almost never buy anymore. My last software purchase was around the turn of the century when most "copy protection" consisted of CD keys or whatever. When the DRM became sufficiently advanced to thwart me in making a backup copy sometime around the new millenium that was the last straw. Now I only buy software if it is 100% DRM free and I like it and can afford it. Which means I almost never buy software anymore. I will nearly always contribute to promising kickstarter/indiegogo software projects however.
As far as music goes, I do tend to buy CDs from artists that I like. The RIAA is even more evil than the MPAA and I don't like to reward the record companies. So I try to buy used whenever possible. My taste in music is sufficiently narrow that this is a rare occurrence.
For books I support my favorite authors by buying the paper version in hardcover as soon as it is released. I don't buy ebooks however. I believe they are overpriced and I won't support price gouging. Although this is also something of a middleman issue. If all of my money or even most of it went directly to the author I might be willing to buy both the paper and electronic version. I'd like to see authors experiment with kickstarter to cut out the fat middleman. Although direct sales through Amazon also seem viable for ebooks.
So there you have it. The actual thought process for one individual pirate. There are no doubt millions of variations.
But is it really mutually exclusive? Assuming you have sufficient funds you can reward the movie industry by buying a bluray that you like and reward the writer of a clever program that you like.
I don't happen to think utorrent is all that special. I just used it out of habit and convenience. I started out using Azureus and still think it is a superior program despite its bloated and slow reliance on Java instead of c.
Of course some will make the argument that if you buy a DVD or Bluray you should buy it used so as not to directly support the evil that is the MPAA buying laws left and right and attempting various assaults on personal liberty in order to accomplish their goal of making as much money as possible in any way possible or world domination or whatever is in their evil brains. I am sympathetic with this argument, but haven't had the greatest luck in buying used media.