Squids and octopuses are rather intelligent invertebrates. If they were more social creatures, and perhaps a tad more intelligent, they might have developed a civilization on their own.
Being a vertebrate is only helpful if you need to support your mass against a solid surface like land. What might have happened if a buoyant animal had evolved, one that floated in the air the way sea creatures do in the sea?
(Aside from the comically tragic effect of lightning strikes, of course. But then, it could avoid even that by floating above the level of cumulonimbus clouds.)
It wasn't our body type that won, it was our brain. Otherwise, bonobos would have won out, with their more dextrous appendages. Or perhaps centaurs might have developed. (Take the stability of four legs and couple it with the dexterity of a couple arms and hands.)
I don't know that our particular form of spoken language has a significant benefit.
I wasn't clear enough. In my scenario, only ten weeks had passed (in total) for observation points at planet A and planet B. I leave to conjecture the time passed for our traveler. Time probably wouldn't dilate at the relativistic rates we're used to in such a scenario.
This is "the worst possible scenario" because it can easily be shown (in a mathematically rigorous way) that as expansion occurs, the universe will become isolated islands of matter, which are flying away from each other so fast that they cannot hope to communicate with one another. Here's a mindblower for you...what if that's what a universe is?
Your argument doesn't make sense if time flows uniformly for all stationary frames of reference. (I.e. a universal frame of reference.)
Let's say you have two planets 1 LY apart. An observer travels from planet A to planet B at 10 LY/y, so it takes him (from the perspective of the universe) five weeks to get from A to B.
He looks back at planet A, and can just make out himself on training exercises for the journey he just made, 47 weeks ago. The thing is, the common frame of reference for both planets recognizes that this took place 47 weeks ago. That planet B is seeing this does not mean the events are only just now occurring; The light simply took a full year to reach his new observation point, and he passed it on his way to planet B.
Now he travels at 10 LY/y back to planet A, taking another five weeks. It's now ten weeks since he left, by planet A's account. In 47 weeks, he can watch himself set out from planet B.
I remember ages ago, when I was trying to put together a mass-spring model simulation, I would search for things like "mass-spring", and keep coming up with usenet spam for "Spring Theory".
Christ, stars don't last that long, what chances do you think there are for information we can store? We can barely archive it for 20 years never mind 100 billion. Then there's the issue of finding a way of transmitting it or making it available. But it's insanely simple...Just transmit the entire archive using some encoding using EM radiation. Your "archive" is thus stored in a volume of space as a media stream. As long as it can be intercepted and eventually decoded by whoever "finds it", you're good.
The difficulty lies in transmitting it at a high enough power to still have a workable signal elsewhere in the galaxy. To this end, one could build a Dyson sphere around a sun, then block or transmit the star's light according to your signal.
Yeah, building a Dyson sphere is hard...but it has so many uses.:-)
Basically we have no responsibility to anyone but ourselves. Any species which exist in 100 billion years can go and get stuffed. This sounds like a generalization of Ayn Rand's "You have no responsibility to anyone but yourself" philosophy, and makes me wonder how much of human "civilization" comes from culture, and how much comes from human nature.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with your point of view...
While I have no problem archiving information for future intelligences, I really don't think intelligences 100 billion years from now will have any more difficult a time understanding their universe as we do now. (I am assuming, of course, that those intelligences are of a similar nature intellectually to our own. This may not be the case...)
Look at it this way: What if intelligences similar to ourselves were alive five billion years ago? Would they have any easier or more difficult understanding their universe as we do ours? How do we know that there weren't signals and information sources available then that have petered out today?
What it all boils down to is the sensory nature of the intelligence. Our understanding of the universe is framed in how we understand our environment. Astrophysics is merely an application of our own interpretation of things which we have only limited tools to understand. If we could personally sense neutrinos or gravity waves, for example, wouldn't our understanding of the universe be much different? It's conceivable that, if life existed in a sufficiently early period of the universe, sensory details such as these could be vital for life, while things like visible-spectrum EM pictures would be useless.
Who's to say that, 100 billion years from now, life will exist whose sensory perception takes advantage of physics that we can't? Astrophysics or quantum physics, there are things we don't understand. Perhaps the underlying causes would be more clear to life in 100 billion years than today.
Short Circuit is a homo. This stuff is making me laugh.:-D
Yesterday, I was walking out of a Walgreens, and some guy shouts from a car in the parking lot, "Hey! That guy's a fairy!" (I have long hair...I guess that led to his assumption.)
I snickered loud enough for him to hear, shook my head, got in my car, and left. The guy was an idiot...what else could I do?:-)
Celexa/citalopram? Well, from the Wikipedia page, that's not even in the same class that my meds are in. (I don't take any SSRIs)
However, the lines those drug reps were feeding your doctor are the exact same ones that mine was trying to feed me. I called BS, and won't be going back to that doctor. (Some kinds of doctors want to change things up every time you have an appointment. He's one of them.)
This will give the police $10,000 teeth they did not have before. How does it in any way aid an investigation into, say, fraud? Both state and federal police have access to telco ANI records that show true phone numbers, not just what's on the caller-ID.
Freedom is not free. Sorry, "Freedom" doesn't entail expanding the number of laws on the books.
"Privacy" does not equate to "lying to get people to answer a sales call they would otherwise have exercised their right to ignore". Not everyone who spoofs caller-ID is "lying to get people to answer a sales call that they would otherwise have exercised their right to ignore." Take, for example, any business with a PBX and more internal extensions than incoming phone lines. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Kodak, Xerox, Herman-Miller...the list would exceed Slashdot's max comment size limit.
No, no it really doesn't. Being a deceptive cheat is not "legitimate use" in a civilized society. Again, you're refactoring the argument. Not everyone who uses caller-ID spoofing is a "deceptive cheat." See the above list...
As others mentioned, you can get the *actual* phone numbers from your phone company. Get those, find out the names of the companies calling you, and have a lawyer draft a cease-and-desist. Or, if the cost of the lawyer is too much, write one yourself.
Nope. Once a pseudonym can be associated with you, all records associated with that pseudonym can, as well. The only way a pseudonym can give you privacy is if you use a different one every time.
except that the amount assessed for any continuing violation shall not exceed a total of $1,000,000 for any single act or failure to act. Sounds like a gem in the resume for politicians come election day, and a way for big telemarketing firms to outlive smaller ones. (I wonder who the lobbying groups behind this one were...)
Second, we live in a competitive country and world. That's right. I compete with other consumers for access to medications, driving prices up. Businesses compete with each other to get our business, driving prices down. Supply and demand. Except that we've got a patent and legal system that encourages high medication prices.
My primary medication goes "generic" this summer, which means I should be able to get it for significantly less, right?
Wrong.
It's going "generic" in name, only, but a single company (I don't know who, yet) will be given exclusive rights to manufacture and sell it for six months, before other companies are allowed to join the market. The doctor who related this "good news" to me promptly tried to sell me on the newer, twice-as-potent-so-you-can-take-half-as-much form of the drug, which will be released about the same time as my current medicine goes generic.
My current medicine costs my insurance company $500/mo, and people wonder why Medicare and Medicaid have such an impact on our budget.
"Private" communications like that aren't what I would worry about. Instead, I'd be worried about anything covered under a public (or even members-only) search index.
And which company's processor do you think of as a legitimate "80686"? I seem to recall Intel and AMD stepping away from numbered processors after Intel lost its trademark dispute, with even Cyrix calling their processors things like "5x86" and "6x86".
"686" is more a generation indicator than an actual specification, and different companies (Intel, AMD, Cyrix/VIA) have different feature sets in that generation.
I learned how to ignore bullies back in high school. But that's in meatspace, where everything is ephemeral. In online forums, comments and rumors about me are all but permanent, and available for any potential employer (or private investigator) to see.
I wonder if/when libel laws will be applied to moronic posts made to Myspace, Facebook and the plethora of phpBB boards out there.
very strong magnets placed on hardened satellites would act as beacons for roughly 40% of the space junk. Wouldn't any magnet strong enough to catch a significant amount of junk also slingshot it into eccentric and less-predictable orbits? Not only that, but what wouldn't it decrease the orbital lifetime of other satellites that pass nearby?
Slashdot Mirror
Squids and octopuses are rather intelligent invertebrates. If they were more social creatures, and perhaps a tad more intelligent, they might have developed a civilization on their own.
Being a vertebrate is only helpful if you need to support your mass against a solid surface like land. What might have happened if a buoyant animal had evolved, one that floated in the air the way sea creatures do in the sea?
(Aside from the comically tragic effect of lightning strikes, of course. But then, it could avoid even that by floating above the level of cumulonimbus clouds.)
It wasn't our body type that won, it was our brain. Otherwise, bonobos would have won out, with their more dextrous appendages. Or perhaps centaurs might have developed. (Take the stability of four legs and couple it with the dexterity of a couple arms and hands.)
I don't know that our particular form of spoken language has a significant benefit.
I wasn't clear enough. In my scenario, only ten weeks had passed (in total) for observation points at planet A and planet B. I leave to conjecture the time passed for our traveler. Time probably wouldn't dilate at the relativistic rates we're used to in such a scenario.
Your argument doesn't make sense if time flows uniformly for all stationary frames of reference. (I.e. a universal frame of reference.)
Let's say you have two planets 1 LY apart. An observer travels from planet A to planet B at 10 LY/y, so it takes him (from the perspective of the universe) five weeks to get from A to B.
He looks back at planet A, and can just make out himself on training exercises for the journey he just made, 47 weeks ago. The thing is, the common frame of reference for both planets recognizes that this took place 47 weeks ago. That planet B is seeing this does not mean the events are only just now occurring; The light simply took a full year to reach his new observation point, and he passed it on his way to planet B.
Now he travels at 10 LY/y back to planet A, taking another five weeks. It's now ten weeks since he left, by planet A's account. In 47 weeks, he can watch himself set out from planet B.
What's the problem here?
I remember ages ago, when I was trying to put together a mass-spring model simulation, I would search for things like "mass-spring", and keep coming up with usenet spam for "Spring Theory".
The difficulty lies in transmitting it at a high enough power to still have a workable signal elsewhere in the galaxy. To this end, one could build a Dyson sphere around a sun, then block or transmit the star's light according to your signal.
Yeah, building a Dyson sphere is hard...but it has so many uses.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with your point of view...
While I have no problem archiving information for future intelligences, I really don't think intelligences 100 billion years from now will have any more difficult a time understanding their universe as we do now. (I am assuming, of course, that those intelligences are of a similar nature intellectually to our own. This may not be the case...)
Look at it this way: What if intelligences similar to ourselves were alive five billion years ago? Would they have any easier or more difficult understanding their universe as we do ours? How do we know that there weren't signals and information sources available then that have petered out today?
What it all boils down to is the sensory nature of the intelligence. Our understanding of the universe is framed in how we understand our environment. Astrophysics is merely an application of our own interpretation of things which we have only limited tools to understand. If we could personally sense neutrinos or gravity waves, for example, wouldn't our understanding of the universe be much different? It's conceivable that, if life existed in a sufficiently early period of the universe, sensory details such as these could be vital for life, while things like visible-spectrum EM pictures would be useless.
Who's to say that, 100 billion years from now, life will exist whose sensory perception takes advantage of physics that we can't? Astrophysics or quantum physics, there are things we don't understand. Perhaps the underlying causes would be more clear to life in 100 billion years than today.
(Sorry...been thinking a lot about Dyson spheres and Niven rings lately. Niven misspelled Klemperer Rosette, BTW.)
Yesterday, I was walking out of a Walgreens, and some guy shouts from a car in the parking lot, "Hey! That guy's a fairy!" (I have long hair...I guess that led to his assumption.)
I snickered loud enough for him to hear, shook my head, got in my car, and left. The guy was an idiot...what else could I do?
However, the lines those drug reps were feeding your doctor are the exact same ones that mine was trying to feed me. I called BS, and won't be going back to that doctor. (Some kinds of doctors want to change things up every time you have an appointment. He's one of them.)
I would be willing to pay $50/mo, assuming there's no insurance involved.
People have been arrested for wearing masks outside.
As others mentioned, you can get the *actual* phone numbers from your phone company. Get those, find out the names of the companies calling you, and have a lawyer draft a cease-and-desist. Or, if the cost of the lawyer is too much, write one yourself.
Nope. Once a pseudonym can be associated with you, all records associated with that pseudonym can, as well. The only way a pseudonym can give you privacy is if you use a different one every time.
Want true privacy? Achieve anonymity.
My primary medication goes "generic" this summer, which means I should be able to get it for significantly less, right?
Wrong.
It's going "generic" in name, only, but a single company (I don't know who, yet) will be given exclusive rights to manufacture and sell it for six months, before other companies are allowed to join the market. The doctor who related this "good news" to me promptly tried to sell me on the newer, twice-as-potent-so-you-can-take-half-as-much form of the drug, which will be released about the same time as my current medicine goes generic.
My current medicine costs my insurance company $500/mo, and people wonder why Medicare and Medicaid have such an impact on our budget.
"Private" communications like that aren't what I would worry about. Instead, I'd be worried about anything covered under a public (or even members-only) search index.
No, what this means is no other brand is Intel-compatible. :-)
And which company's processor do you think of as a legitimate "80686"? I seem to recall Intel and AMD stepping away from numbered processors after Intel lost its trademark dispute, with even Cyrix calling their processors things like "5x86" and "6x86".
"686" is more a generation indicator than an actual specification, and different companies (Intel, AMD, Cyrix/VIA) have different feature sets in that generation.
I learned how to ignore bullies back in high school. But that's in meatspace, where everything is ephemeral. In online forums, comments and rumors about me are all but permanent, and available for any potential employer (or private investigator) to see.
I wonder if/when libel laws will be applied to moronic posts made to Myspace, Facebook and the plethora of phpBB boards out there.
You know, I'd love to see you participate in one of my projects. You're obviously interested in giving this sort of conversation thought.