Worst of all, I think they'll succeed, if they haven't already. As crazy as it may sound, I will be somewhat surprised if the presidential election next year isn't "postponed" due to "extraordinary circumstances". This is the first time in my life that I've actually thought that was a real possibility.
It happens all the time... in other countries.
I think our traditional American complacency (the "oh sure, bad shit happens all over the world but it can't happen here 'cuz this is 'Merica" mindset) is about to get a kick in the nuts. That might actually be a good thing, in the long run, but it won't be pleasant. 9/11 was bad enough in that regard, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. I have the funny feeling we may end up less afraid of terrorism than of our own government (I know I already am.) Terrorists want to kill me to make a political statement and influence our foreign policy. My government wants to strip me of the rights our forefathers fought to win for us, and then wants to own me. You tell me which is worse.
That's a problem in itself. With a PC-based product, they could just sell the program and be done with it: no corporate middleman deciding what is or is not appropriate. Personally, I don't care for that state of affairs, and will stick with PC games for the foreseeable future. I want to be able to support the publishers/developers of my choice, not the hardware manufacturer's.
There was the TV on in the background at their hotel room, and in it a newscaster's voice was being overlaid over some kind of public protest, and his voice could be heard saying, "... California is a Spanish-speaking state, and you Anglos had better get with the program." I laughed, as I was supposed to, I think.
I just spent the better part of past week in Long Beach on business... it's maybe not so funny now.
Well, as I understand it "entrapment" only applies to activities performed by law enforcement. Besides, they aren't encouraging people to illegally download music in order to nail them, they're just observing network activity. Now that in itself might or might not be illegal, but so far as I know it's not entrapment. I'm not a lawyer, so any Slashdotters who are, please feel free to enlighten us.
Yes, the GP is a bit misguided, or maybe just dissembling. I know a number of legal immigrants (my fiancee is one of them.) She was required spend years jumping through the requisite hoops, assimilating into our culture and proving to us that she is a worthy member of our society, a person that we want here because she understands what it means to be an American. In fact, she is as much an American as anyone who was born here. Maybe more, I'd say, because she understands the value of our traditional ideals much more than most "real" Americans, having lived without them for much of her life. When she finally took the test and was formally granted citizenship it was a BIG THING. And when she reads about various plans to grant "amnesty" or "citizenship" to people that just walked across the border, well... frankly, that just torques her into a pretzel. Rightfully so, because she had to prove herself and they don't.
See, people that ramble on about "bigotry" and "racism" and all the other excuses they use to justify illegal immigration on a massive scale do so to obscure this fact: allowing foreign people into your country (whatever country that may be) and possibly naturalizing said people isn't about helping them. It's just not, and anyone that says so is full of hooey. It's about choosing people that that will be good citizens and will be of long-term benefit to your country. That, by the way, is a process, one that takes time and is not fulfilled by simply arriving here in the back of a semitrailer! National governments have the right and the obligation to be selective about those to whom they grant citizenship, because their primary responsibility is to the citizens of their own country. Period. Regarding legal immigration, as the parent poster pointed out America is already pretty damn generous.
So that's what immigration is supposed to be about: it's not about handing out free jobs as yet another disguised form of foreign aid (and speaking of "more than the entire rest of the world combined...") with the added benefit of cheap labor. If Mexico weren't bordering on the U.S., enjoying substantial political influence here, if our corporate masters weren't hooked on what amounts to near-slave labor, there'd be no question whatsoever about defending that border. I mean, if China (or France, or Germany, or any other country) began to send millions of its people here on boats we'd do something about it. At least, I would hope that we would, nor would be be bigots for doing so. We would be defending ourselves and our way of life, and we certainly wouldn't grant them amnesty or make them citizens just "because". "Because" is about the only answer that Congress and the Bush Administration give when asked why they want to throw out a couple centuries of immigration law and open our borders to all comers
Well, they got their training wheels from the old Bell System, which operated along similar lines. Given that there is current no penalty being applied to such bad behavior (other than people "voting with their feet") said attorneys are earning their paychecks. Like it or not, lawyers aren't there to serve as a corporate conscience, they're there to advise the people who are supposed have a reasonable set of scruples. That their masters are just as soulless as they are is not the attorneys fault.
I suppose that after a few high-profile cases where the ISP gets it's head handed to it on a platter they might change their tune. I don't see that happening anytime soon, though. The consumer isn't high on our justice system's short list of people to serve and protect anymore.
And they will eventually be activated by remote command to take their part in the eventual Chinese military takeover of the United States. Everyone wondered why the things needed servo-controlled dual.50 cals, but the Chinese salesmen just said it was an anti-vandalism measure.
Anyway. I'm not sure if copyright should be the law preventing this, I'd much rather have it illegal under some sort of privacy or wiretapping law. I mean, UPS doesn't stick adverts inside mail, and what the ISP is doing is pretty much equivalnt to slapping an advert on the second page of a book they deliver.
You know you're probably right about that. Any way you slice it, this practice is abominable. I hate to quote him (I couldn't stand the man) but Jack Valenti once said something that was actually true: "Just because the technology makes something possible, it doesn't mean you should do it." This is one of those times.
Because there's been so much consolidation in the industry that there is no way for the bulk of users to "vote with their feet". Well, I suppose they could by packing up all their stuff into a big truck and moving somewhere else with a better ISP. That's not really practical for most people though.
The FCC is a big part of this: they need to stop trying to "manage competition". They aren't very good at it. I'm fortunate that I live (for now) in a area with multiple providers (for now.) I currently have the overpriced Comcast as my ISP, because the local phone company only offers 1.5 mb/sec service at the moment. There are several different DSL provicers (including Speakeasy) in my local CO, so when the copper gets upgraded around here I may switch. It would be nice everyone in the country had options like that, but most don't, which is why there's such a "take it or leave it" attitude among many Internet providers. "Yeah, we provide shitty service but who's gonna tell us to do better? You?! Don't make us laugh, you're just the customer."
There are only two reasons that a typical third-rate operation like a Comcast or an SBC will get off their asses and deliver a better product: a. government-instituted quality-of-service standards with teeth and b. heavy competition. Otherwise, given how the modern American business culture is driven from the twin ideal of providing the least amount of quality for the most amount of money, as soon as the pressure is off they'll slack off. And they do, bigtime. The government has proven useless in enforcing any reasonable QOS standards on these people, so the only thing we have left to help us is competition. Around here, if I get crap from Comcast I just mention the dreaded magic letters "DSL" and the problem disappears. But like I said, I'm lucky.
I didn't get that from the OP's post... but the question would seem to be whether inserting an ad would constitute a derivate work, and would (or would not) that be legal to do. I don't know, maybe there's an IP lawyer in the crowd today that could answer that.
Presumably the ISPs involved have lawyers too, and would have researched this question. Still, U.S. copyright law has been used to beat up the consumer lately, so it would be nice to see it work in the consumer's favor.
Maybe so (although some of us prefer to think of it as "restoring civil liberties stripped from us in the name of fighting terrorism") but they sure had a lot of tools at their disposal last time around, and that didn't stop 9/11. Didn't even come close to stopping 9/11. You can have all the tools you want: hell, you can have a bloody totalitarian state if it makes you happy. The thing is, that won't matter in the end, no matter how much you spend, if you don't use your capabilities efficiently and well. The problem with the pre-9/11 era was that law enforcement should have been able to do the job, but suffered from severe systemic and organizational failures. By all accounts, they still are. So, it wasn't because they were lacking sufficient authority: they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.
Time will tell just how well our government officials use the expanded powers they've arrogated to themselves since the original attack. My feeling is that they'll be just about as successful in preventing future acts of terrorism as they have been at stemming the tide of illicit drugs entering this country. In other words... don't hold your breath. Something else is going to blow up sooner or later, no matter how many telephone calls the NSA monitors. In the meantime, a lot of honest Americans are going to get shafted, one way or another, and a bunch of innocent foreigners are going to get ground up as well. We must accept that we are paying a price for Bush's "War on Terror". The only question is whether or not you believe that it has been worth the cost, that it will continue to be worth it.
Fears of terrorism aside, I don't much like the direction this country has taken. Mind you, I'm not just talking about the Bush Administration: we've been off the beam for decades.
The cops are better off having us use the things right out in the open: at least they'll know where they stand. If arresting citizens for videotaping their police in action becomes an offense worthy of arrest, people will simply start using hidden cameras. Google for it... it's astonishing how small CCD imager can be made these days. Hell, the one in my cameraphone is maybe a 32nd of an inch in diameter.
On the other hand, if they went to a torrent-style swarming download scheme bandwidth costs wouldn't be an issue (I assume that's what you are referring to.) Personally, I believe that if Microsoft wants to continue to enjoy their current status as the leading provider of security-challenged applications and operating systems, they should be required to provide free updates. Either that, or Microsoft should have to reimburse everyone else for the bandwidth costs incurred by the hundreds of millions of infected Windows installations worldwide. For that matter, how about all the millions of man-hours lost because of instabilities in Microsoft's products. Heck, I'd say providing Windows updates is the least that company can do, given the grief they've caused so many others.
I've often wondered what would have happened if Windows had never been, if some other OS (say a Unix variant of some kind, or perhaps one of the other OSes that Microsoft eclipsed) had become dominant, one that was fundamentally more secure than Windows. We might never have seen the billions of dollars being lost to spam and armies of rooted Windows boxes. Anyway you look at it, Microsoft has much for which to atone, and doing what it can to keep Windows users from being pwned the minute they jack in their systems or try to read an email isn't asking for much.
Yes and no. Before the Industrial Revolution spread machine technology and machine-made products far and wide, people would automatically assume that anything they couldn't comprehend was magical in nature (and probably black magic at that!) That's entirely to be expected, because they didn't have any referents: nothing to measure their experience against and say, "Ha! That's cool but it's not magic."
Today's world, on the other hand, is infinitely more complex from a technological perspective, and yet people, by and large, have no more grasp of the technoscientific underpinnings of our civilization than they did in 1857. How many individuals understand the operating principle of a Carnot-cycle engine, or have any idea what an Arithmetic Logic Unit might be? The answer is... not many. Note that that doesn't stop them from using those devices to their own advantage.
People today assume that something they cannot comprehend is probably a machine, an artifact created by the hand of Man in a factory somewhere. They may be afraid of it, not because they don't understand how it works (most people don't care how a particular machine works) but because they don't know how to operate it.
If you were to pluck someone from our time and zip him through a wormhole to the future a century from now, he might be amazed at what he sees... but it's unlikely he would think it was magic. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
It was about how the rapid re-introduction of oxygen to deprived cells causes them to self-destruct. The solution is to supply oxygen to starved tissues more slowly so that they won't kill themselves. What was amazing is that tissues which were previously thought to die rapidly when deprived of oxygen (heart and brain cells in particular) actually can survive for extended periods with no oxygen at all. They don't necessarily die during the original attack: they die when the patient is revived and given too much O2. At least, that's what I took away from the Slashdot article on the subject.
This research is apparently causing quite a stir in medical circles, and there's a lot of rethinking going on in the area of emergency medicine.
But our present understanding of physics seems to suggest that there are certain fundamental problems that no technology can possibly bridge over.
And with any luck, that understanding will turn out to have been wrong, or at least incomplete. But yeah, it doesn't look good. Still, one can always hope.
Personally, I'd hate to think we're stuck here forever. On the other hand, if we built ourselves a Dyson Sphere or a Ringworld we might not care so much about colonizing other places. Naturally, there are more fundamental problems with physics when it comes to structures such as those. Niven had to postulate what he called an "unreasonably strong" material to make his Ringworld work, mathematically. He also had to give the aliens that built it free transmutation of the elements, so that they could convert the mass of their solar system into that material. Not the kind of stuff we're likely to be able to handle in the near future.
You're assuming you have to freeze someone. If you could find a way to simply slow life processes down to the point where the subject hibernates for the trip (maybe losing a few years of normal life in the process) you might still have a winner. That's how Clarke envisioned most of the crew of the Discovery making the trip in 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the idea was to conserve resources, not extend their lifespan.
You should read a novella called The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven. A very interesting exploration of how interstellar colonization might work using sub-c vessels.
Consider also that sub-light travel (and concomitant lightspeed communications) would be practical if the human lifespan were on the order of a few thousand years. That's not beyond the realm of possibility, and medical advances in life extension are probably more likely than the discovery of an FTL drive, at least in the near-term. In that vein, Orson Scott Card's Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle goes into what might happen to a technologically-advanced interstellar civilization when suspended animation techniques become well-advanced and readily available, both for interstellar travel and for those who simply wish to skip a few decades... or centuries.
Even if we never do achieve the ability to colonize other star systems (always assuming that they're there for the taking), we should at least begin to develop significant nearspace assets. There have been many stories written about space colonies surviving after Earthbound civilization wipes itself out or otherwise makes the planet uninhabitable for a while. It would grant human life some redundancy that it doesn't currently have.
Not really arguing with you, but I will say that it's not the country that considers this activity legitimate: just the power-hungry types at the top. Of course, honestly that can be said of any nation. My only complaint is that people from other countries frequently make this blanket assumption that all Americans think the same way, and that all Americans support the actions of our current Administration, that all Americans believe that mistreating foreign nationals without cause is justifiable. Wrong on all counts. People from other countries have to realize that Americans are a fractious bunch, divisive as hell in many ways, and really can't agree on much of anything. We do generally agree that hurting people for no reason is wrong, which is why our Imperious Leader isn't too popular right about now. Plus which he lies a lot.
Let's just hope that somebody with some critical-thinking skills ends up in the Oval Office this time around. What concerns me is that the entire Department of Homeland Security, the Transport Safety Administration, and the rest of the massive bureaucracy created because of 9/11 has become too entrenched to ever eliminate. That's what happens when you give a lot of people a lot of money to accomplish something that can't be done. War on Terrorism, War on Drugs, War on Poverty... whenever our government gets a new "War on" you can bet that the organizations charged with prosecuting said "War" will a. never win it, b. cost a lot of money and c. fight tooth and nail to stay relevant long after they've served their purpose. If every terrorist on the planet disappeared tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar (or pound, or whatever) that the DHS people will find some reason to hang on to their jobs.
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Worst of all, I think they'll succeed, if they haven't already. As crazy as it may sound, I will be somewhat surprised if the presidential election next year isn't "postponed" due to "extraordinary circumstances". This is the first time in my life that I've actually thought that was a real possibility.
... in other countries.
It happens all the time
I think our traditional American complacency (the "oh sure, bad shit happens all over the world but it can't happen here 'cuz this is 'Merica" mindset) is about to get a kick in the nuts. That might actually be a good thing, in the long run, but it won't be pleasant. 9/11 was bad enough in that regard, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. I have the funny feeling we may end up less afraid of terrorism than of our own government (I know I already am.) Terrorists want to kill me to make a political statement and influence our foreign policy. My government wants to strip me of the rights our forefathers fought to win for us, and then wants to own me. You tell me which is worse.
That's a problem in itself. With a PC-based product, they could just sell the program and be done with it: no corporate middleman deciding what is or is not appropriate. Personally, I don't care for that state of affairs, and will stick with PC games for the foreseeable future. I want to be able to support the publishers/developers of my choice, not the hardware manufacturer's.
There was the TV on in the background at their hotel room, and in it a newscaster's voice was being overlaid over some kind of public protest, and his voice could be heard saying, "... California is a Spanish-speaking state, and you Anglos had better get with the program." I laughed, as I was supposed to, I think.
... it's maybe not so funny now.
I just spent the better part of past week in Long Beach on business
And again ... and again ... and again. Sometimes it takes a few repeated hammerings for important stuff to penetrate their skulls.
Ah ... you must mean the room with the asbestos walls and the unshielded nuclear reactor in the middle. Yeah, that one.
Well, as I understand it "entrapment" only applies to activities performed by law enforcement. Besides, they aren't encouraging people to illegally download music in order to nail them, they're just observing network activity. Now that in itself might or might not be illegal, but so far as I know it's not entrapment. I'm not a lawyer, so any Slashdotters who are, please feel free to enlighten us.
Yes, the GP is a bit misguided, or maybe just dissembling. I know a number of legal immigrants (my fiancee is one of them.) She was required spend years jumping through the requisite hoops, assimilating into our culture and proving to us that she is a worthy member of our society, a person that we want here because she understands what it means to be an American. In fact, she is as much an American as anyone who was born here. Maybe more, I'd say, because she understands the value of our traditional ideals much more than most "real" Americans, having lived without them for much of her life. When she finally took the test and was formally granted citizenship it was a BIG THING. And when she reads about various plans to grant "amnesty" or "citizenship" to people that just walked across the border, well ... frankly, that just torques her into a pretzel. Rightfully so, because she had to prove herself and they don't.
...") with the added benefit of cheap labor. If Mexico weren't bordering on the U.S., enjoying substantial political influence here, if our corporate masters weren't hooked on what amounts to near-slave labor, there'd be no question whatsoever about defending that border. I mean, if China (or France, or Germany, or any other country) began to send millions of its people here on boats we'd do something about it. At least, I would hope that we would, nor would be be bigots for doing so. We would be defending ourselves and our way of life, and we certainly wouldn't grant them amnesty or make them citizens just "because". "Because" is about the only answer that Congress and the Bush Administration give when asked why they want to throw out a couple centuries of immigration law and open our borders to all comers
See, people that ramble on about "bigotry" and "racism" and all the other excuses they use to justify illegal immigration on a massive scale do so to obscure this fact: allowing foreign people into your country (whatever country that may be) and possibly naturalizing said people isn't about helping them. It's just not, and anyone that says so is full of hooey. It's about choosing people that that will be good citizens and will be of long-term benefit to your country. That, by the way, is a process, one that takes time and is not fulfilled by simply arriving here in the back of a semitrailer! National governments have the right and the obligation to be selective about those to whom they grant citizenship, because their primary responsibility is to the citizens of their own country. Period. Regarding legal immigration, as the parent poster pointed out America is already pretty damn generous.
So that's what immigration is supposed to be about: it's not about handing out free jobs as yet another disguised form of foreign aid (and speaking of "more than the entire rest of the world combined
Well, they got their training wheels from the old Bell System, which operated along similar lines. Given that there is current no penalty being applied to such bad behavior (other than people "voting with their feet") said attorneys are earning their paychecks. Like it or not, lawyers aren't there to serve as a corporate conscience, they're there to advise the people who are supposed have a reasonable set of scruples. That their masters are just as soulless as they are is not the attorneys fault.
I suppose that after a few high-profile cases where the ISP gets it's head handed to it on a platter they might change their tune. I don't see that happening anytime soon, though. The consumer isn't high on our justice system's short list of people to serve and protect anymore.
And they will eventually be activated by remote command to take their part in the eventual Chinese military takeover of the United States. Everyone wondered why the things needed servo-controlled dual .50 cals, but the Chinese salesmen just said it was an anti-vandalism measure.
Anyway. I'm not sure if copyright should be the law preventing this, I'd much rather have it illegal under some sort of privacy or wiretapping law. I mean, UPS doesn't stick adverts inside mail, and what the ISP is doing is pretty much equivalnt to slapping an advert on the second page of a book they deliver.
You know you're probably right about that. Any way you slice it, this practice is abominable. I hate to quote him (I couldn't stand the man) but Jack Valenti once said something that was actually true: "Just because the technology makes something possible, it doesn't mean you should do it." This is one of those times.
Because there's been so much consolidation in the industry that there is no way for the bulk of users to "vote with their feet". Well, I suppose they could by packing up all their stuff into a big truck and moving somewhere else with a better ISP. That's not really practical for most people though.
The FCC is a big part of this: they need to stop trying to "manage competition". They aren't very good at it. I'm fortunate that I live (for now) in a area with multiple providers (for now.) I currently have the overpriced Comcast as my ISP, because the local phone company only offers 1.5 mb/sec service at the moment. There are several different DSL provicers (including Speakeasy) in my local CO, so when the copper gets upgraded around here I may switch. It would be nice everyone in the country had options like that, but most don't, which is why there's such a "take it or leave it" attitude among many Internet providers. "Yeah, we provide shitty service but who's gonna tell us to do better? You?! Don't make us laugh, you're just the customer."
There are only two reasons that a typical third-rate operation like a Comcast or an SBC will get off their asses and deliver a better product: a. government-instituted quality-of-service standards with teeth and b. heavy competition. Otherwise, given how the modern American business culture is driven from the twin ideal of providing the least amount of quality for the most amount of money, as soon as the pressure is off they'll slack off. And they do, bigtime. The government has proven useless in enforcing any reasonable QOS standards on these people, so the only thing we have left to help us is competition. Around here, if I get crap from Comcast I just mention the dreaded magic letters "DSL" and the problem disappears. But like I said, I'm lucky.
I didn't get that from the OP's post ... but the question would seem to be whether inserting an ad would constitute a derivate work, and would (or would not) that be legal to do. I don't know, maybe there's an IP lawyer in the crowd today that could answer that.
Presumably the ISPs involved have lawyers too, and would have researched this question. Still, U.S. copyright law has been used to beat up the consumer lately, so it would be nice to see it work in the consumer's favor.
Maybe so (although some of us prefer to think of it as "restoring civil liberties stripped from us in the name of fighting terrorism") but they sure had a lot of tools at their disposal last time around, and that didn't stop 9/11. Didn't even come close to stopping 9/11. You can have all the tools you want: hell, you can have a bloody totalitarian state if it makes you happy. The thing is, that won't matter in the end, no matter how much you spend, if you don't use your capabilities efficiently and well. The problem with the pre-9/11 era was that law enforcement should have been able to do the job, but suffered from severe systemic and organizational failures. By all accounts, they still are. So, it wasn't because they were lacking sufficient authority: they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.
... don't hold your breath. Something else is going to blow up sooner or later, no matter how many telephone calls the NSA monitors. In the meantime, a lot of honest Americans are going to get shafted, one way or another, and a bunch of innocent foreigners are going to get ground up as well. We must accept that we are paying a price for Bush's "War on Terror". The only question is whether or not you believe that it has been worth the cost, that it will continue to be worth it.
Time will tell just how well our government officials use the expanded powers they've arrogated to themselves since the original attack. My feeling is that they'll be just about as successful in preventing future acts of terrorism as they have been at stemming the tide of illicit drugs entering this country. In other words
Fears of terrorism aside, I don't much like the direction this country has taken. Mind you, I'm not just talking about the Bush Administration: we've been off the beam for decades.
The cops are better off having us use the things right out in the open: at least they'll know where they stand. If arresting citizens for videotaping their police in action becomes an offense worthy of arrest, people will simply start using hidden cameras. Google for it ... it's astonishing how small CCD imager can be made these days. Hell, the one in my cameraphone is maybe a 32nd of an inch in diameter.
Yes, one can see that the Microsoft defense team is alive and well, and rewriting history as usual.
Good luck with that.
On the other hand, if they went to a torrent-style swarming download scheme bandwidth costs wouldn't be an issue (I assume that's what you are referring to.) Personally, I believe that if Microsoft wants to continue to enjoy their current status as the leading provider of security-challenged applications and operating systems, they should be required to provide free updates. Either that, or Microsoft should have to reimburse everyone else for the bandwidth costs incurred by the hundreds of millions of infected Windows installations worldwide. For that matter, how about all the millions of man-hours lost because of instabilities in Microsoft's products. Heck, I'd say providing Windows updates is the least that company can do, given the grief they've caused so many others.
I've often wondered what would have happened if Windows had never been, if some other OS (say a Unix variant of some kind, or perhaps one of the other OSes that Microsoft eclipsed) had become dominant, one that was fundamentally more secure than Windows. We might never have seen the billions of dollars being lost to spam and armies of rooted Windows boxes. Anyway you look at it, Microsoft has much for which to atone, and doing what it can to keep Windows users from being pwned the minute they jack in their systems or try to read an email isn't asking for much.
Yes and no. Before the Industrial Revolution spread machine technology and machine-made products far and wide, people would automatically assume that anything they couldn't comprehend was magical in nature (and probably black magic at that!) That's entirely to be expected, because they didn't have any referents: nothing to measure their experience against and say, "Ha! That's cool but it's not magic."
... not many. Note that that doesn't stop them from using those devices to their own advantage.
... but it's unlikely he would think it was magic. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
Today's world, on the other hand, is infinitely more complex from a technological perspective, and yet people, by and large, have no more grasp of the technoscientific underpinnings of our civilization than they did in 1857. How many individuals understand the operating principle of a Carnot-cycle engine, or have any idea what an Arithmetic Logic Unit might be? The answer is
People today assume that something they cannot comprehend is probably a machine, an artifact created by the hand of Man in a factory somewhere. They may be afraid of it, not because they don't understand how it works (most people don't care how a particular machine works) but because they don't know how to operate it.
If you were to pluck someone from our time and zip him through a wormhole to the future a century from now, he might be amazed at what he sees
It was about how the rapid re-introduction of oxygen to deprived cells causes them to self-destruct. The solution is to supply oxygen to starved tissues more slowly so that they won't kill themselves. What was amazing is that tissues which were previously thought to die rapidly when deprived of oxygen (heart and brain cells in particular) actually can survive for extended periods with no oxygen at all. They don't necessarily die during the original attack: they die when the patient is revived and given too much O2. At least, that's what I took away from the Slashdot article on the subject.
This research is apparently causing quite a stir in medical circles, and there's a lot of rethinking going on in the area of emergency medicine.
But our present understanding of physics seems to suggest that there are certain fundamental problems that no technology can possibly bridge over.
And with any luck, that understanding will turn out to have been wrong, or at least incomplete. But yeah, it doesn't look good. Still, one can always hope.
Personally, I'd hate to think we're stuck here forever. On the other hand, if we built ourselves a Dyson Sphere or a Ringworld we might not care so much about colonizing other places. Naturally, there are more fundamental problems with physics when it comes to structures such as those. Niven had to postulate what he called an "unreasonably strong" material to make his Ringworld work, mathematically. He also had to give the aliens that built it free transmutation of the elements, so that they could convert the mass of their solar system into that material. Not the kind of stuff we're likely to be able to handle in the near future.
You're assuming you have to freeze someone. If you could find a way to simply slow life processes down to the point where the subject hibernates for the trip (maybe losing a few years of normal life in the process) you might still have a winner. That's how Clarke envisioned most of the crew of the Discovery making the trip in 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the idea was to conserve resources, not extend their lifespan.
You should read a novella called The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven. A very interesting exploration of how interstellar colonization might work using sub-c vessels.
... or centuries.
Consider also that sub-light travel (and concomitant lightspeed communications) would be practical if the human lifespan were on the order of a few thousand years. That's not beyond the realm of possibility, and medical advances in life extension are probably more likely than the discovery of an FTL drive, at least in the near-term. In that vein, Orson Scott Card's Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle goes into what might happen to a technologically-advanced interstellar civilization when suspended animation techniques become well-advanced and readily available, both for interstellar travel and for those who simply wish to skip a few decades
Even if we never do achieve the ability to colonize other star systems (always assuming that they're there for the taking), we should at least begin to develop significant nearspace assets. There have been many stories written about space colonies surviving after Earthbound civilization wipes itself out or otherwise makes the planet uninhabitable for a while. It would grant human life some redundancy that it doesn't currently have.
Athens wasn't some pussocracy where "missteps [were] forgiven".
He probably meant to say, "Olympian" rather than "Athenian", although even the Gods had their problems.
SJ: "Look, Billy, we're gonna be releasing Safari for Windows."
BG: "Why bother, Stevie? You really think you're gonna do us any damage with that?"
SJ: "Nah. It's really more an iPhone thing."
BG: "Whatever."
Don't forget the B-word.
Not really arguing with you, but I will say that it's not the country that considers this activity legitimate: just the power-hungry types at the top. Of course, honestly that can be said of any nation. My only complaint is that people from other countries frequently make this blanket assumption that all Americans think the same way, and that all Americans support the actions of our current Administration, that all Americans believe that mistreating foreign nationals without cause is justifiable. Wrong on all counts. People from other countries have to realize that Americans are a fractious bunch, divisive as hell in many ways, and really can't agree on much of anything. We do generally agree that hurting people for no reason is wrong, which is why our Imperious Leader isn't too popular right about now. Plus which he lies a lot.
... whenever our government gets a new "War on" you can bet that the organizations charged with prosecuting said "War" will a. never win it, b. cost a lot of money and c. fight tooth and nail to stay relevant long after they've served their purpose. If every terrorist on the planet disappeared tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar (or pound, or whatever) that the DHS people will find some reason to hang on to their jobs.
Let's just hope that somebody with some critical-thinking skills ends up in the Oval Office this time around. What concerns me is that the entire Department of Homeland Security, the Transport Safety Administration, and the rest of the massive bureaucracy created because of 9/11 has become too entrenched to ever eliminate. That's what happens when you give a lot of people a lot of money to accomplish something that can't be done. War on Terrorism, War on Drugs, War on Poverty