It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive.
I'm not sure I would argue that it will lead to "warp drive" given the major scientific hurdles but I expect it will lead to much, much better rocket technology. Once we have human beings on another planet who are producing an important resource we want here on Earth you have all the makings of interplanetary trade which will provide a fantastic incentive to develop cheaper ways to get there.
Sail was the power used for centuries. Initially boats had to hug coasts and only later did we develop the technology needed to take sails across oceans: developments motivated by wanting faster, better ships for trade. Why not the same with rockets?
Because space is mostly empty, and extremely hostile.
Given the technology available 500+ years ago so was North America: freezing cold winters, strange plants, new diseases etc. Indeed the available technology was barely able to match the challenge and some early colonies failed. However once there, as our knowledge of the new environment and our technology improved it became easy to survive there.
Isn't space exactly the same? Our technology is barely up to the job of keeping us alive on Mars and I expect some of the early colonies will fail. However given time it is likely that survival will become easier and there is a good chance to discover new resources which Earth lacks and which might be very useful in the future e.g. helium-3 on the moon.
Worse, it is not even true. Encryption places nobody above the law all it does do is ensure that you are aware of any legal attempt to access your encrypted data because they will need to get a court order to compel you to disclose the decryption key. Before electronic documents they used to have to do this in more or less the same way (get a search warrant for physical documents) so why can't they manage to do the same now?
I know that over in England the rules are somewhat different, truth is not an absolute defense.
No, it is more subtle than that: truth is a defence in the UK the problem is that if you are sued for libel it is up to the defendant to prove that what s/he said is true rather than the responsibility of the claimant to prove that it was not true. The result is that you can end up with a large legal bill to defend yourself even if you are speaking the truth hence it can stifle free speech.
No we have not but the reason for that is that enriching uranium ore to the point where you can make a bomb from it is extremely hard to do. It requires a major facility to perform isotope separation and that typically requires a government with a lot of resources. This is why terrorists do not possess nuclear weapons. If all they had to do was dig uranium ore out of the ground and refine it to pure uranium we would have many nuclear armed terrorist groups and the world would be a very different, and likely highly radioactive, place.
The heavy elements on our planet and in your body were creation via fusion in another star, which has already long since died, exploded, and been recycled.
We can do better than that. Based on the current ratio of Uranium-235 and 238 which are created in roughly equal quantities by a supernova we can date the super nova preceding the solar system to about 6 billion years ago. It's also interesting to note that had intelligent life evolved a billion or more years earlier than it did that the uranium ore we dig out of the ground would be weapon's grade without any complex enrichment process required. So there might be a limit on intelligent life evolving too soon after the formation of a planet.
I believe that they are only considering the water molecules: the hydrogen atoms which make up water will be as old as the Big Bang. However since there are ice-based comets out there I hardly find it surprising that there was water in the solar system before the sun formed. Aren't the comets supposed to be the left over debris from the formation of the sun and planets? So this result seems to be just confirmation what we already knew.
Not being familiar with the subject, does his work hold up?
I'm not an expert in the field but what I saw of the comments were very specific about reuse of figures and data without citation. They did not appear to be ad hominem at all but evidence based with image comparisons of figures from different papers. I expect that this is why he got into trouble - a relevant expert from the hiring university would be able to easily evaluate the merits of the comments.
The drivers are needed in case there are unexpected obstructions on the line.
If that were correct how would the Docklands Light Railway operate above ground without any drivers at all? The sad reason that drivers are needed is because of the unions. They automated the Victoria line years ago (1960s) but the unions threatened action and the resulting chaos that a drivers strike would have caused on the lines which were not automated forced them to keep drivers on each train even though they are completed unnecessary.
REALLY want to earn a lot of money, working for others won't make you rich
Tell that to the banks and the finance industry in general. You might not make it to billionaire but millionaire is easily achievable, all for risking other people's money with apparently almost zero risk to yourself even if you are the one responsible for messing up.
...except for Star Wars i.e. it is not cyclical you are just applying a filter and not remembering the crap. This means that there will be short periods when no good films are produced.
The only sad thing about living when we do, is we will never get to watch solar collisions from under 100 AU.
Given that the only star within 100AU is our sun and we are rather reliant on that continuing in a very stable way for our continued existence "sad" is not exactly the word I would use.
Why wouldn't it be stable? More gravity means more fusion, not less.
That's exactly why you might expect it not to be stable for long. The mass transfer to the neutron star would be presumably quite large since it is inside the companion, and then, at some point, it will go nova again. Would the companion star survive that?
Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending.
Rather than cyclical I'd suggest that it might be just the historical filter. The SciFi you remember looking back are the upbeat, wonderful future stories. It's similar to the filter that gets applied to modern music: it always seems to appear that things were better in the past because you forget the bad songs and only remember the good ones.
I expect that part of what colours my experience is that the companies I typically have to call most often for customer support are the ones with the longest waits and slowest response times (that's if you even get one). I suspect that there may be a correlation. The couple of times I've had to contact Apple over the past several years they have been amazingly fast but try talking to Shaw Cable or Air Canada (other than to book a flight) and make sure you can sit by the phone for an hour or more and you can forget email because they certainly seem to!
That's what the summary says but the summary is WRONG. Read what they actually said in the article. Deliberately mis-stating what has been stated to make it ridiculously inflammatory is counterproductive and makes any criticism easy to dismiss. All the BBC says is that pirates use VPN. The troubling part of what they say is not this but that ISPs should act on any wild accusation they get to cut, or restrict, people's internet access. There is plenty to criticize there without the need to make up crazy stuff that was never stated anywhere.
The only difference between Google and most customer service today is that at least Google are honest about it and tell you that you will be ignored. Most other companies will just ignore your email and not tell you or leave you in a call queue for so long that you end up having to hang up and go do something else.
But what exactly are you going to say? Despite the inflammatory slashdot summary the quoted text from the BBC submission only says that pirates use VPNs. This is not at all the same as saying that all VPN users are pirates. The troubling part is that they are advocating that ISPs should throttle and disconnect users based on accusations from other companies which, as we have seen time and time again are often inaccurate.
So lets go after the real issues and not invent new ones based on deliberate misinterpretation since the latter will result in loss of all credibility and leave the field wild open for really draconian suggestions.
The only way this would work is to place height restrictions on the different classes of seat. I'm an academic and when travelling for work I have to purchase the cheapest ticket. Without a height restriction I would then be forced to purchase a ticket for a seat I physically could not sit down it (I already have to pull out the magazines on US carriers to allow blood flow to my feet).
This can then open the debate about whether it is reasonable for an airline to charge someone extra just for being tall - something they had no control over and which is gender-biased. After all they don't charge more to provide special meals for those with dietary preferences or religious beliefs and, with the exception of medical conditions, that is a voluntary choice. Nor, I hope, do they charge disabled passengers extra for transporting wheelchairs etc.
That depends. Having a holistic view of history is a good idea. Having a history teacher try to teach the Big Bang and Cosmology is a very, very bad idea.
Clearly string theorists since, according to the summary, it creates a "dodecadron" cross-section. So having a cross-section somewhere between a 2D dodecagon and a 3D dodecahedron it clearly relies on converting the block into some multi-dimensional object with a strangely dimensioned cross-section.
Takes some seriously Orwellian doublethink to pretend copyright enforcement isn't censorship.
I think this is the result of a very narrow view point when making the map. They seem to only care about censorship by the state through direct laws. Increasingly in the US, and so some extent the rest of the western world, it is not government which restricts our rights but companies. They need to make a second map showing countries where companies have used laws to force, or bully, people into being censored through the threat of massive financial penalties.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive.
I'm not sure I would argue that it will lead to "warp drive" given the major scientific hurdles but I expect it will lead to much, much better rocket technology. Once we have human beings on another planet who are producing an important resource we want here on Earth you have all the makings of interplanetary trade which will provide a fantastic incentive to develop cheaper ways to get there.
Sail was the power used for centuries. Initially boats had to hug coasts and only later did we develop the technology needed to take sails across oceans: developments motivated by wanting faster, better ships for trade. Why not the same with rockets?
Because space is mostly empty, and extremely hostile.
Given the technology available 500+ years ago so was North America: freezing cold winters, strange plants, new diseases etc. Indeed the available technology was barely able to match the challenge and some early colonies failed. However once there, as our knowledge of the new environment and our technology improved it became easy to survive there.
Isn't space exactly the same? Our technology is barely up to the job of keeping us alive on Mars and I expect some of the early colonies will fail. However given time it is likely that survival will become easier and there is a good chance to discover new resources which Earth lacks and which might be very useful in the future e.g. helium-3 on the moon.
Worse, it is not even true. Encryption places nobody above the law all it does do is ensure that you are aware of any legal attempt to access your encrypted data because they will need to get a court order to compel you to disclose the decryption key. Before electronic documents they used to have to do this in more or less the same way (get a search warrant for physical documents) so why can't they manage to do the same now?
I know that over in England the rules are somewhat different, truth is not an absolute defense.
No, it is more subtle than that: truth is a defence in the UK the problem is that if you are sued for libel it is up to the defendant to prove that what s/he said is true rather than the responsibility of the claimant to prove that it was not true. The result is that you can end up with a large legal bill to defend yourself even if you are speaking the truth hence it can stifle free speech.
Right, because we've blown ourselves up.
No we have not but the reason for that is that enriching uranium ore to the point where you can make a bomb from it is extremely hard to do. It requires a major facility to perform isotope separation and that typically requires a government with a lot of resources. This is why terrorists do not possess nuclear weapons. If all they had to do was dig uranium ore out of the ground and refine it to pure uranium we would have many nuclear armed terrorist groups and the world would be a very different, and likely highly radioactive, place.
The heavy elements on our planet and in your body were creation via fusion in another star, which has already long since died, exploded, and been recycled.
We can do better than that. Based on the current ratio of Uranium-235 and 238 which are created in roughly equal quantities by a supernova we can date the super nova preceding the solar system to about 6 billion years ago. It's also interesting to note that had intelligent life evolved a billion or more years earlier than it did that the uranium ore we dig out of the ground would be weapon's grade without any complex enrichment process required. So there might be a limit on intelligent life evolving too soon after the formation of a planet.
I believe that they are only considering the water molecules: the hydrogen atoms which make up water will be as old as the Big Bang. However since there are ice-based comets out there I hardly find it surprising that there was water in the solar system before the sun formed. Aren't the comets supposed to be the left over debris from the formation of the sun and planets? So this result seems to be just confirmation what we already knew.
Not being familiar with the subject, does his work hold up?
I'm not an expert in the field but what I saw of the comments were very specific about reuse of figures and data without citation. They did not appear to be ad hominem at all but evidence based with image comparisons of figures from different papers. I expect that this is why he got into trouble - a relevant expert from the hiring university would be able to easily evaluate the merits of the comments.
The drivers are needed in case there are unexpected obstructions on the line.
If that were correct how would the Docklands Light Railway operate above ground without any drivers at all? The sad reason that drivers are needed is because of the unions. They automated the Victoria line years ago (1960s) but the unions threatened action and the resulting chaos that a drivers strike would have caused on the lines which were not automated forced them to keep drivers on each train even though they are completed unnecessary.
Tall people can afford premium economy.
I am not the one buying the ticket - the government research grant is. I have to follow their rules.
REALLY want to earn a lot of money, working for others won't make you rich
Tell that to the banks and the finance industry in general. You might not make it to billionaire but millionaire is easily achievable, all for risking other people's money with apparently almost zero risk to yourself even if you are the one responsible for messing up.
...except for Star Wars i.e. it is not cyclical you are just applying a filter and not remembering the crap. This means that there will be short periods when no good films are produced.
The only sad thing about living when we do, is we will never get to watch solar collisions from under 100 AU.
Given that the only star within 100AU is our sun and we are rather reliant on that continuing in a very stable way for our continued existence "sad" is not exactly the word I would use.
Why wouldn't it be stable? More gravity means more fusion, not less.
That's exactly why you might expect it not to be stable for long. The mass transfer to the neutron star would be presumably quite large since it is inside the companion, and then, at some point, it will go nova again. Would the companion star survive that?
She saw Russia from her back garden which, given the location of her garden and the curvature of the Earth is unbelievably amazing!
Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending.
Rather than cyclical I'd suggest that it might be just the historical filter. The SciFi you remember looking back are the upbeat, wonderful future stories. It's similar to the filter that gets applied to modern music: it always seems to appear that things were better in the past because you forget the bad songs and only remember the good ones.
I expect that part of what colours my experience is that the companies I typically have to call most often for customer support are the ones with the longest waits and slowest response times (that's if you even get one). I suspect that there may be a correlation. The couple of times I've had to contact Apple over the past several years they have been amazingly fast but try talking to Shaw Cable or Air Canada (other than to book a flight) and make sure you can sit by the phone for an hour or more and you can forget email because they certainly seem to!
That's what the summary says but the summary is WRONG. Read what they actually said in the article. Deliberately mis-stating what has been stated to make it ridiculously inflammatory is counterproductive and makes any criticism easy to dismiss. All the BBC says is that pirates use VPN. The troubling part of what they say is not this but that ISPs should act on any wild accusation they get to cut, or restrict, people's internet access. There is plenty to criticize there without the need to make up crazy stuff that was never stated anywhere.
The only difference between Google and most customer service today is that at least Google are honest about it and tell you that you will be ignored. Most other companies will just ignore your email and not tell you or leave you in a call queue for so long that you end up having to hang up and go do something else.
But what exactly are you going to say? Despite the inflammatory slashdot summary the quoted text from the BBC submission only says that pirates use VPNs. This is not at all the same as saying that all VPN users are pirates. The troubling part is that they are advocating that ISPs should throttle and disconnect users based on accusations from other companies which, as we have seen time and time again are often inaccurate.
So lets go after the real issues and not invent new ones based on deliberate misinterpretation since the latter will result in loss of all credibility and leave the field wild open for really draconian suggestions.
The only way this would work is to place height restrictions on the different classes of seat. I'm an academic and when travelling for work I have to purchase the cheapest ticket. Without a height restriction I would then be forced to purchase a ticket for a seat I physically could not sit down it (I already have to pull out the magazines on US carriers to allow blood flow to my feet).
This can then open the debate about whether it is reasonable for an airline to charge someone extra just for being tall - something they had no control over and which is gender-biased. After all they don't charge more to provide special meals for those with dietary preferences or religious beliefs and, with the exception of medical conditions, that is a voluntary choice. Nor, I hope, do they charge disabled passengers extra for transporting wheelchairs etc.
In this case, though, he's not wrong.
That depends. Having a holistic view of history is a good idea. Having a history teacher try to teach the Big Bang and Cosmology is a very, very bad idea.
Well after this he'll have plenty of great material for a 900-year prequel that will tackle some different, but still very troubling, social issues.
Well, this method comes from physicists.
Clearly string theorists since, according to the summary, it creates a "dodecadron" cross-section. So having a cross-section somewhere between a 2D dodecagon and a 3D dodecahedron it clearly relies on converting the block into some multi-dimensional object with a strangely dimensioned cross-section.
Takes some seriously Orwellian doublethink to pretend copyright enforcement isn't censorship.
I think this is the result of a very narrow view point when making the map. They seem to only care about censorship by the state through direct laws. Increasingly in the US, and so some extent the rest of the western world, it is not government which restricts our rights but companies. They need to make a second map showing countries where companies have used laws to force, or bully, people into being censored through the threat of massive financial penalties.