Don't know about Portugal, but in Sweden, small-scale copyright infringement for personal use is a criminal offense, as well as a civil liability. In fact, it needs to be a criminal offense in order to force the ISPs to reveal the identity behind an IP address.
(Making copies for personal use is only allowed in Sweden if you make them directly off an authorised copy, e.g, a store-bought DVD. If you make copies by downloading off the Internet, private use is not a defence.)
In Swedish law, "personal use" means you can make a few copies for your family and closest friends. More than that, and you infringe copyright. To qualify for "commercial use", you need to actually earn money from it, and it will result in a harsher punishment.
That hardly seems like an exception. The extraditing country agrees not to enforce the death penalty. An exception would be if it was a "we won't*wink wink* execute him" statement.
I'm not sure the CIA will give a shit - they'll come in anyway, kidnap the people, and drop them off at the torture camps.
That's preposterous. That's not at all how it works. The US government will make a diplomatic call to the local government, who will conveniently lose the prisoners or forget what the local law says, and THEN CIA will kidnap them and drop them off at torture camps.
That's exactly what happened to two asylum seekers in Sweden, who were illegally handed over to the CIA by Swedish authorities and fell off the map.
Portuguese citizens need to be reminded that they're still under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and WILL be extradited to the U.S. for breaking any IP laws!
Here in Sweden, it's well-known that the workers' unions support the social democrats, and the employer's union supports the right-wing parties, either directly, or indirectly, through financing ad campaigns.
There're are also many cases where politicians are offered jobs by special interest groups in connection with advancing their agenda. E.g, a politician pushes for a law change a special interest group wants, and after the change goes through, he's offered a job as thanks. By systematically favouring special interest groups, a single member of parliament can lift several salaries at the same time (as chairman, consultant, board member, etc), besides the one he/she gets from the state.
Isn't there likely a point where the loss of piracy may overtake the gain of the extra advertisement.
Probably. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It means the most successful books will sell less, and people will have more money left to buy the lesser known books. At least that's how it works with music piracy - people who pirate music tend to spend their money on other music products instead.
There's no universal "now" in relativity theory. Which events are simultaneous, depends on the observer. Two events can be simultaneous for you, while being years apart for an observer moving close to the speed of light.
So when someone sends a message which arrives instantly in their reference frame, it MUST appear before it was sent in some other reference frame (and after it was sent in yet other reference frames).
The sense of "now" gets skewed at all speeds, but the lightspeed barrier is sufficient to slow down signals so they don't arrive before they were sent in any reference frame.
This is a common misunderstanding. We are able to see further than the hubble sphere because scale is changing in flight.
If I remember correctly speeds of thousands of times the speed of light have been observed as measured by red shift.
Hm... I think those're stars which were within the Hubble sphere when they emmited the light which now reaches us, and that light has been red-shifted by the expansion of space, not by the speed of the stars as such.
Is that what you mean by scale changing in flight?
But I phrased it wrong... I meant that you could send a faster-than-light message to a fast-moving object, who then relays it back to you, and it arrives before you sent it (in your frame of reference).
Oops, sorry. I meant that you could send a faster-than-light signal to an object which travels close to the speed of light, which then relays it back to you, and you get it before you sent it.
This is possible because in the fast-moving object's reference frame, the events of sending and receiving the return message are simultaneous, but in your reference frame, the event of receiving it can take place years before the event where the fast-moving object sends it.
And like I said earlier, every argument of this time I've heard involves instantaneous communication between objects in different inertial frames, meaning FTL works fine as long as as everybody is the same inertial frame.
Ah, but what prevents observers in different frames from relaying the message using ordinary, sub-light-speed transmissions?
Say you send an FTL signal from point A to point B, which are in the same reference frame.
At that moment, a fast-moving space ship (B') passes by B, and B relays the signal to B' using an ordinary, sub-light-speed transmission.
At the same time, another space ship, A', passes by A. A' moves with the same velocity as B', and is in the same reference frame, so it should be possible for B' to send an FTL signal back to A'. Moreover, depending on the velocity of A' and B', the signal can arrive back at A' before A sends it.
A' then relays the signal back to A using an ordinary, sub-light-speed transmission, and it arrives before A sent it.
If I wrote a message at 8pm, Jan 1, 2012 and sent it by warp to a destination 10 light years away and it arrived 1 second later, it would be received at 8:00:01pm, Jan 1, 2012.
Now, if I sent that message at the speed of light, via the electromagnetic spectrum, to a destination 10 light years away then traveled by warp to the destination to arrive 1 second later. I would receive the message from myself 10 years later. I still sent the message before I received it.
Ah, but what if the recipient of the message was moving close to the speed of light? In their reference frame, the event where you leave Earth could be years *after* the event where you arrive at the destination.
Furthermore, if the recipient sent another warp ship back to Earth the moment they saw you arrive, it would take one second to get back to Earth in their reference frame, but in Earth's reference frame, it would arrive years before before you left the planet.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
You need a relay station to make the warning message arrive before it was sent. Ideally, the relay station should move close to the speed of light, in a direction parallell to a line between star system A and star system B.
When the explosion occurs at star system A, you send an FTL message to the relay station R. In A's frame of reference, the message travels faster than light, but still arrives after it was sent. However, if R moves sufficiently close to the speed of light, the message will arrive before it was sent in R's frame of reference.
R then sends out a message to star system B. In R's frame of reference, it sends out a signal that merely travels faster than light, but in A's and B's reference frames, it will arrive before it was sent.
So whether we look at it from R's, or from A's and B's, reference frame, one of the signals will be able to arrive before it is emitted. The closer to the speed of light we let R move, the more skewed its frame of reference will be compared to A's and B's, and the earlier its signal will arrive at B. We can also make the time-consuming portion of the trip arbitrarily short, by letting R pass close to one of the star systems when the message is relayed.
In total, the message will be able to arrive at B before it was sent from A, given sufficiently high speeds of R. And if we can do that, it's trivial to use a second relay station R' to send a message back to A and warn them before the star explodes.
Good point. But each observer has to deduct the time it took for light to reach them, when they observe events. According to an observer on Earth or Vega, the space ship left Vega at T=0, and arrived on Earth at T=5 years, so events happened in the right order for them. To see that events happen out of order, we at least need to consider an observer who is moving fast relative to Earth/Vega.
Different observers (reference frames) have different ideas of what events are simultaneous. For an observer R who moves relative to A and B, the "instant" message may arrive before or after it is sent, depending on which direction R moves in.
To actually send messages back in time, A and B can use R as a relay station. A sends an instant message to R, who then relays it instantly to B. But what is instant delivery in R's message frame, may actually mean the message is delivered before it is sent in A's and B's reference frames.
So what? We observe stars and shit moving hundreds to thousands of times faster than light realitive to ourselves all the time.
Actually, we don't. Only the expansion of the universe causes galaxies to recede from us faster than the speed of light - and they're unobservable for that very reason.
If a spaceship moves at a high speed relative to Earth, events will occur in different orders in the space ship's frame of reference. Specifically, if an event on Earth and an event on the space ship are simultaneous in Earth's frame of reference, in the space ship's frame of reference, the Earth event will happen after the local event. This is after all optical effects are adjusted for.
Now let's assume Earth sends an instant signal to the space ship. "Instant" means the signal is emitted on Earth and received by the spaceship simultaneously, where "simulteaneously" is defined by Earth's frame of reference.
However, in the space ship's frame of reference, the emission of the signal from Earth occurs after it is received by the space ship. If the space ship sends an instant message back, it will be emitted from the space ship and arrive on Earth simultaneously. However, in the space ship's frame of reference, "simultaneously" means *before* the message was emitted from Earth.
You're at Vega, 25 light years away. You send a radio message "I'm coming!" and hop in your warp drive and head to earth at 5x the speed of light. In 5 years I see you arrive at earth. 20 years later the message announcing your departure arrives.
This doesn't violate causality... causality is violated when you (on Earth) send an FTL message to the moving spaceship, and the spaceship uses the same FTL technique to send a message back. In the space ship's frame of reference, the first message is received before it's sent out, so the space ship just needs to send an instant message back to Earth, to make it arrive before the first message was sent.
It doesn't save causality, though. It doesn't matter if the signal travels from point A to point B faster than light, or just magically appears at point B without travelling the distance. In either case, you can set up a messaging system which sends a signal back to point A before the first signal is emitted.
If you have a faster than light travel/signalling then there will be an interial frame of referance in which that travel/signal went back in time.
If by "went back in time", you mean: observed the signal, earlier than the signal would have been observed, if the signal had travelled at the speed of light, then yes.
If by "went back in time", you mean: observed the signal, before the signal would have been emitted, then no.
Not sure if you're just trolling, but: causality would be violated when you sent a signal back to the source of the first signal. If one of the objects were moving faster than light, it could be set up so the response signal arrives before the first signal is sent
Since the first postulate or relativity says that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames that means backwards in time travel/signalling is possible in all inertial frames of reference and we have killed causality.
Laws of physics being the same in all reference frames, does not imply that the observation will be the same in all reference frames.
No, it just implies that causality can be broken in all other reference frames as well, as long as you can send signals to/from an object moving faster than light from the frame.
It is true that faster-than-light travel would mean that we have causal sequences whose order is frame dependent, but would that be a violation of causality?
Yes. You could send a signal to the object travelling faster than light, which could then wait a moment, send it back, and it would arrive earlier than it was sent.
What would happen if a chunk of the planet was temporarily missing and gravity forced the planet to round out--and then the piece comes back? No extra energy would be needed, just the gravitational potential energy stored in the planet.
The chunk would need to be relocated to somewhere where it had the same potential energy (e.g, slightly closer to the sun), or the difference in potential energy would need to be taken from somewhere.
Of course, the same problem would prevent ships from warping out of a solar system without expending huge amounts of energy in a very short time to increase the ship's potential energy. Circumventing this problem without expending the energy, would violate the conservation of energy, and provide a way to produce unlimited energy. Just warp water to the top of a mountain, and let it run down again, driving a turbine, over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
$1.28 billion? No problem, Microsoft can win that back with a patent suit or two !
Don't know about Portugal, but in Sweden, small-scale copyright infringement for personal use is a criminal offense, as well as a civil liability. In fact, it needs to be a criminal offense in order to force the ISPs to reveal the identity behind an IP address.
(Making copies for personal use is only allowed in Sweden if you make them directly off an authorised copy, e.g, a store-bought DVD. If you make copies by downloading off the Internet, private use is not a defence.)
In Swedish law, "personal use" means you can make a few copies for your family and closest friends. More than that, and you infringe copyright. To qualify for "commercial use", you need to actually earn money from it, and it will result in a harsher punishment.
That hardly seems like an exception. The extraditing country agrees not to enforce the death penalty. An exception would be if it was a "we won't*wink wink* execute him" statement.
Yes, and that probably happens too.
I'm not sure the CIA will give a shit - they'll come in anyway, kidnap the people, and drop them off at the torture camps.
That's preposterous. That's not at all how it works. The US government will make a diplomatic call to the local government, who will conveniently lose the prisoners or forget what the local law says, and THEN CIA will kidnap them and drop them off at torture camps.
That's exactly what happened to two asylum seekers in Sweden, who were illegally handed over to the CIA by Swedish authorities and fell off the map.
Portuguese citizens need to be reminded that they're still under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and WILL be extradited to the U.S. for breaking any IP laws!
Trolled much lately?
Here in Sweden, it's well-known that the workers' unions support the social democrats, and the employer's union supports the right-wing parties, either directly, or indirectly, through financing ad campaigns.
There're are also many cases where politicians are offered jobs by special interest groups in connection with advancing their agenda. E.g, a politician pushes for a law change a special interest group wants, and after the change goes through, he's offered a job as thanks. By systematically favouring special interest groups, a single member of parliament can lift several salaries at the same time (as chairman, consultant, board member, etc), besides the one he/she gets from the state.
Isn't there likely a point where the loss of piracy may overtake the gain of the extra advertisement.
Probably. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It means the most successful books will sell less, and people will have more money left to buy the lesser known books. At least that's how it works with music piracy - people who pirate music tend to spend their money on other music products instead.
There's no universal "now" in relativity theory. Which events are simultaneous, depends on the observer. Two events can be simultaneous for you, while being years apart for an observer moving close to the speed of light.
So when someone sends a message which arrives instantly in their reference frame, it MUST appear before it was sent in some other reference frame (and after it was sent in yet other reference frames).
The sense of "now" gets skewed at all speeds, but the lightspeed barrier is sufficient to slow down signals so they don't arrive before they were sent in any reference frame.
This is a common misunderstanding. We are able to see further than the hubble sphere because scale is changing in flight.
If I remember correctly speeds of thousands of times the speed of light have been observed as measured by red shift.
Hm... I think those're stars which were within the Hubble sphere when they emmited the light which now reaches us, and that light has been red-shifted by the expansion of space, not by the speed of the stars as such.
Is that what you mean by scale changing in flight?
With respect to you (the original sender).
But I phrased it wrong... I meant that you could send a faster-than-light message to a fast-moving object, who then relays it back to you, and it arrives before you sent it (in your frame of reference).
Oops, sorry. I meant that you could send a faster-than-light signal to an object which travels close to the speed of light, which then relays it back to you, and you get it before you sent it.
This is possible because in the fast-moving object's reference frame, the events of sending and receiving the return message are simultaneous, but in your reference frame, the event of receiving it can take place years before the event where the fast-moving object sends it.
And like I said earlier, every argument of this time I've heard involves instantaneous communication between objects in different inertial frames, meaning FTL works fine as long as as everybody is the same inertial frame.
Ah, but what prevents observers in different frames from relaying the message using ordinary, sub-light-speed transmissions?
Say you send an FTL signal from point A to point B, which are in the same reference frame.
At that moment, a fast-moving space ship (B') passes by B, and B relays the signal to B' using an ordinary, sub-light-speed transmission.
At the same time, another space ship, A', passes by A. A' moves with the same velocity as B', and is in the same reference frame, so it should be possible for B' to send an FTL signal back to A'. Moreover, depending on the velocity of A' and B', the signal can arrive back at A' before A sends it.
A' then relays the signal back to A using an ordinary, sub-light-speed transmission, and it arrives before A sent it.
If I wrote a message at 8pm, Jan 1, 2012 and sent it by warp to a destination 10 light years away and it arrived 1 second later, it would be received at 8:00:01pm, Jan 1, 2012.
Now, if I sent that message at the speed of light, via the electromagnetic spectrum, to a destination 10 light years away then traveled by warp to the destination to arrive 1 second later. I would receive the message from myself 10 years later. I still sent the message before I received it.
Ah, but what if the recipient of the message was moving close to the speed of light? In their reference frame, the event where you leave Earth could be years *after* the event where you arrive at the destination.
Furthermore, if the recipient sent another warp ship back to Earth the moment they saw you arrive, it would take one second to get back to Earth in their reference frame, but in Earth's reference frame, it would arrive years before before you left the planet.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
You need a relay station to make the warning message arrive before it was sent. Ideally, the relay station should move close to the speed of light, in a direction parallell to a line between star system A and star system B.
When the explosion occurs at star system A, you send an FTL message to the relay station R. In A's frame of reference, the message travels faster than light, but still arrives after it was sent. However, if R moves sufficiently close to the speed of light, the message will arrive before it was sent in R's frame of reference.
R then sends out a message to star system B. In R's frame of reference, it sends out a signal that merely travels faster than light, but in A's and B's reference frames, it will arrive before it was sent.
So whether we look at it from R's, or from A's and B's, reference frame, one of the signals will be able to arrive before it is emitted. The closer to the speed of light we let R move, the more skewed its frame of reference will be compared to A's and B's, and the earlier its signal will arrive at B. We can also make the time-consuming portion of the trip arbitrarily short, by letting R pass close to one of the star systems when the message is relayed.
In total, the message will be able to arrive at B before it was sent from A, given sufficiently high speeds of R. And if we can do that, it's trivial to use a second relay station R' to send a message back to A and warn them before the star explodes.
Good point. But each observer has to deduct the time it took for light to reach them, when they observe events. According to an observer on Earth or Vega, the space ship left Vega at T=0, and arrived on Earth at T=5 years, so events happened in the right order for them. To see that events happen out of order, we at least need to consider an observer who is moving fast relative to Earth/Vega.
Different observers (reference frames) have different ideas of what events are simultaneous. For an observer R who moves relative to A and B, the "instant" message may arrive before or after it is sent, depending on which direction R moves in.
To actually send messages back in time, A and B can use R as a relay station. A sends an instant message to R, who then relays it instantly to B. But what is instant delivery in R's message frame, may actually mean the message is delivered before it is sent in A's and B's reference frames.
So what? We observe stars and shit moving hundreds to thousands of times faster than light realitive to ourselves all the time.
Actually, we don't. Only the expansion of the universe causes galaxies to recede from us faster than the speed of light - and they're unobservable for that very reason.
If a spaceship moves at a high speed relative to Earth, events will occur in different orders in the space ship's frame of reference. Specifically, if an event on Earth and an event on the space ship are simultaneous in Earth's frame of reference, in the space ship's frame of reference, the Earth event will happen after the local event. This is after all optical effects are adjusted for.
Now let's assume Earth sends an instant signal to the space ship. "Instant" means the signal is emitted on Earth and received by the spaceship simultaneously, where "simulteaneously" is defined by Earth's frame of reference.
However, in the space ship's frame of reference, the emission of the signal from Earth occurs after it is received by the space ship. If the space ship sends an instant message back, it will be emitted from the space ship and arrive on Earth simultaneously. However, in the space ship's frame of reference, "simultaneously" means *before* the message was emitted from Earth.
You're at Vega, 25 light years away. You send a radio message "I'm coming!" and hop in your warp drive and head to earth at 5x the speed of light. In 5 years I see you arrive at earth. 20 years later the message announcing your departure arrives.
This doesn't violate causality... causality is violated when you (on Earth) send an FTL message to the moving spaceship, and the spaceship uses the same FTL technique to send a message back. In the space ship's frame of reference, the first message is received before it's sent out, so the space ship just needs to send an instant message back to Earth, to make it arrive before the first message was sent.
It doesn't save causality, though. It doesn't matter if the signal travels from point A to point B faster than light, or just magically appears at point B without travelling the distance. In either case, you can set up a messaging system which sends a signal back to point A before the first signal is emitted.
If you have a faster than light travel/signalling then there will be an interial frame of referance in which that travel/signal went back in time.
If by "went back in time", you mean: observed the signal, earlier than the signal would have been observed, if the signal had travelled at the speed of light, then yes.
If by "went back in time", you mean: observed the signal, before the signal would have been emitted, then no.
Not sure if you're just trolling, but: causality would be violated when you sent a signal back to the source of the first signal. If one of the objects were moving faster than light, it could be set up so the response signal arrives before the first signal is sent
Since the first postulate or relativity says that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames that means backwards in time travel/signalling is possible in all inertial frames of reference and we have killed causality.
Laws of physics being the same in all reference frames, does not imply that the observation will be the same in all reference frames.
No, it just implies that causality can be broken in all other reference frames as well, as long as you can send signals to/from an object moving faster than light from the frame.
It is true that faster-than-light travel would mean that we have causal sequences whose order is frame dependent, but would that be a violation of causality?
Yes. You could send a signal to the object travelling faster than light, which could then wait a moment, send it back, and it would arrive earlier than it was sent.
What would happen if a chunk of the planet was temporarily missing and gravity forced the planet to round out--and then the piece comes back? No extra energy would be needed, just the gravitational potential energy stored in the planet.
The chunk would need to be relocated to somewhere where it had the same potential energy (e.g, slightly closer to the sun), or the difference in potential energy would need to be taken from somewhere.
Of course, the same problem would prevent ships from warping out of a solar system without expending huge amounts of energy in a very short time to increase the ship's potential energy. Circumventing this problem without expending the energy, would violate the conservation of energy, and provide a way to produce unlimited energy. Just warp water to the top of a mountain, and let it run down again, driving a turbine, over and over again.
... what are you waiting for? Build one already!