Well, if we cannot do anything about that, why do we need so many climatologists working on AGW problem? I can already see the papers "Please fire us, we do useless research". Not going to happen. They would lose their jobs if AGW is not what they tell us it is, so they have to be telling the truth. It is not possible for scientist to spin the story just to keep his grant intact. I mean, all this is getting peer reviewed by people who would also lose jobs if AGW is not happening, this guarantees no bias.
"Previously, in this place we had barren land. Global warming caused it to become more plant-friendly and we see first meadows forming, with a lot of flowers and grass. Unfortunately, if you have plants, you also have plant diseases. If not for global warming, there would be no plants here, which would also mean no diseases. Global warming spreads disease"
I have no doubt that making a practice speech and then watching yourself on camera can help. People were doing it for ages. Question is if this 'bot' bolted on top of simple visual/audio feedback loop adds any value (or maybe it makes it worse then trying to analyse your performance without hindrance).
If by 'continually in the Top 5' you mean 'already second year in a row in Top 5', then I can agree. But I think that compared to other top-10 languages, 'just very recently became of any importance at all' would be more honest statement.
Situation is similar to having nazi camp guard escaping with photos of the atrocities committed there to give the proof to the world and Germany demanding his extradiction, because he is a criminal and betrayed state secrets. And if you protect him, we will send bunch of V-2 in your direction.
I have bought ebooks from 3 different vendors. Not single of them has any kind of DRM in them. Yes, they sometimes put some kind of watermark to trace pirated copies, but never seen a DRM on ebook yet.
Can you tell me which of major vendors is protecting ebooks in the way that if you send me a copy of file without any passwords/etc, I would not be able to read/convert it using Calibra? Or any ebook which requires connection to online service to be read?
I think that you copy/pasted rant about movies and just changed it to 'books' ?
Yes, Canada has incredibly thin population density. 228th in the world for 243 listed countries. In global scale, you might need maybe 1 acre of forest per person to cover everything. Which means that Canada forests cover for India population. Thats cool. We can probably pair up countries like that and we are ok. Now, let's say that population of India doubles. Do you have spare 1000 million of acres of land in Canada to plant extra trees there?
I would be more ok with reducing population of world, rather than increasing area of forests/desiging more efficient trees. Don't worry, CIA is working on that as well;)
Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.
Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.
I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.
Reminds me of novel Aristoi where all people were conditioned from childhood to respond in certain ways to complicated hand symbols - allowing ruling elite to paralyze them with hand gesture for example. Yes, having your computer glasses compromised because of looking at malicious picture is still far from having you brain 'hacked', but I hope we will get there soon;) Next step could be quick-hacking Google Glass v3 (with bone-transmitted headphones and retinal projector) to perform flashbang kind of attack (maximum sound and flash for short moment) when shown police badge upside down. And the we would have police pacifying riots using virtual lightningbolts...
We don't have 2A in my country, but still when pension privilages for miners are under discussion, 50000 of them go to capital with pickaxes, stand in front of Parliment and threaten to dismantle it stone by stone if anything is taken away from them. And they know their way with pixaxes and destroying stone... and for last 20 years government always yielded, even if it is killing our pension system.
I somehow doubt that 50000 handgun-waving guys would have same pressure power on US Congress.
Influence of people on government is a function of government covardice, not how well people are armed.
Ohhh, it is phoronix, not moronix... they could have chosen better font for logo...
Anyway, I'm confused with the benefits here. From TFA
[...] The Direct3D 10/11 state tracker excitement was ultimately shortlived as the upstream Wine development community wasn't interested in adding support for it since it's a Linux-only solution and at that it's *limited to those using Gallium3D*, which is basically the open-source *Radeon and Nouveau (NVIDIA) users* [...] Direct3D 9 state tracker can work so that the graphics API is natively implemented for the hardware *Gallium3D drivers* [...]
So old one died because it was working only on Gallium3D and nobody wanted to use it because of that, but new one is also targeting Gallium3D, but it will be successful, because it has not died yet due to Gallium3D dependency?
This is why I chose word 'Religion', not 'faith'. Religious claim is that Jesus ressurected people, walked on water and multiplied food. It is no different to some guy believing in dowser/faith healer which happened to die few days ago, so you cannot throw scientific tests on him.
I'm not talking about abstract belief in non-intervening God. I'm talking about all the folklore around, like people getting miracle healings because somebody prayed to deceased Pope.
Why believing in miracle healing when praying to God is ok, while believing in same thing after drinking homeopatic solution is wrong? You can find same 'quality' of proofs for both of them. And miracles ARE a part of religion, so please don't split 'abstract faith' from all the cruft around.
I find it interesting that you have left 'Religion' from the above list... somehow, it is ok to make fun out of people believing in a guy contacting spirits of the dead, but it is not ok to make fun out of people believing in a guy raising dead people. Dowsing water is a cheat, walking on water is acceptable. Giving away your wealth in hope of getting good return on investment if you are fast is stupid, giving away your wealth in promise of 'better life' after death is cool.
Somehow I find it strange that people who have not boycotted music done by Michael "let's cuddle young boys" Jackson are asking to boycott movie done based on book written by guy who doesn't like homosexuals. Despite the OSC bigotry, he was right that these days being homophobic seems to be a bigger moral crime than being a pedophile.
Political correctness becomes ultimate censorship power. Gender, religion, race, sexuality - somebody will shout 'hate speech' and you will get banned/fired/shunned. It is heresy of XXI century - in middle ages you could get burned for saying bad things about God, today you will get 'burned' for hate speech against other people. And same way as in medieval times people were centering their lives around pretending to follow Church, today people are putting mask to match political correctness expectations...
I'm going to see the movie. I like some of Michael Jackson songs. Artist does not 'taint' the work of art. Boycott is just an ultimate form of bullying by stronger group.
If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's.
You are mentioning it as if Star Citizen was already released and delivered what it has promised. We might have similar discussion in another 2 or 3 years, this time mentioning Star Citizen running out of budget and hoping to sell under-developed version on Steam to get some more money...
On contrary - even with good technology, it is very hard to detect human activity from far away. We were quite 'noisy' for 50-100 years, but thats not the case anymore. Switching from big radio antennas for radio radiating in all directions to low-power satellites broadcasting downwards and fiberoptic cables is making us more and more silent. And for detecting changes in atmosphere - despite of what climate-change aware people are claiming, man-made changes are nothing compared to what planet was going through in more exciting times.
If there is an alien civilisation outside of, let's say 100-200 lightyears radios, chances of getting background activity from us are quite low. On the other hand, if they are that far, then even if they pick up our signal and send something back, there is a good chance we will be technologically extinct by then. By 'technological extinction' I mean things like getting into bad war/supervolcano explosion and surviving as million-population caveman level, getting into pro-life mood and surviving as 50-billion society with no erg spare to waste on things like SETI, using up all easily accesible fuel without investing into long-term replacement, etc.
Please note that lisp stuff above is taken from Harlan - so if you complain about it being ugly, please take it with the guy who came up with Harlan in first place. It _might_ be possible to do better DSL in Lisp, but I was complaining about the route which Harlan has taken.
Scheme/lisp was a bit helpful in the way it has a lot of features simplifying code generation. In fact, lisp is ultimate example of programmers bending towards making things easiest for compilers. It is a lot easier to transform lisp-like code into other representation - you don't really need to write lex/bison-like parser part of the grammar, you can immediately start with transforms.
But it doesn't make it simplier for people using the final language - just for the guy writing the compiler. You have to be masochist to prefer to write
(define (point-add x y)
(match x
((point3 a b c)
(match y
((point3 x y z)
(point3 (+ a x) (+ b y) (+ c z)))))))
instead of something like
define operator+(point3 a, point3 b) = point3(a.x+b.x,a.y+b.y,a.z+b.z)
Lisp makes writing DSLs easy - but resulting DSLs are still Lisp. In the era of things like XText, which provide full IDE with autocompletion, project management, outlines etc on top of your DSL, there is no real excuse to make things harder then needed
What happened to Mutually Assured Destruction
on
Beware the Internet
·
· Score: 0
What Mr Samuelson is really complaining about is not a danger of internet as such, but rather fact that US is not a superpower on this arena as it would like to be.
US is very much used to be the biggest player in the world, military-wise. Yes, they were losing wars (Vietnam etc), but these were wars on foreign soil. Only USSR could threaten the US itself - and it was a biggest problem for US for 50 years or so. It was a race with arms versus defenses, but with advent of MIRVs, defence game lost - so the new doctrine was MAD. USSR would not attack US, because it would get obliterated in return - and as Sting hoped, Russians loved their children enough to not let it happen.
These days, nobody can reach US military-wise. Yes, you can put few suicide bombers, maybe kidnap a plane and crash it into a building, but as much tragic these situations are, they are hardly a danger for the country itself (a lot bigger danger to citizen freedom and quality of life, which make sit worthwhile as psychological war but thats different story). And US enjoys that - as much as North Korea can wave their few puny atomic missiles, US can obliterate NK at any point, without taking any significant damage itself.
Cue internet. New arena of warfare, next to land, air, naval, submarine and missile. And it is now very similar to situation with nuclear MIRV missiles - it has reached the stage where you cannot mount proper defense against capable and determined foe. And same way as USSR has stockpiled nuclear missiles, quite a few countries/groups in the world stockpiled adept hackers, zero day exploits and dormant botnets. Yes, barrier of entry was considerably lower than with creating intercontinental missiles and proper A-bomb, but this is not a crux of the issue.
Problem is that US is now in cold war with MAD situation against quite a few countries. It has an advantage - after all-out cyberattack, it can repay in same way PLUS nuke them to oblivion - which in longer run is going to hurt more (cyberstrikes has a lot less half-time of decay than nuclear fallout...). But still, it is positioned in another cold war. And same way it was not able to slap USSR for sending AK47 to guerilla in various countries, it is now not able to slap Iran for funding some terrorist groups - because Iran will escalate.
And the real real problem is that we cannot be sure than Iranians love their children same way Russians did. Not talking about civilians, but about people on the top. As crazy as Russians were, they were still living in this world and were aiming to conquer _this_ world. Maybe picking up on Iran is confusing things - but at some point, some fanatic islamic government might decide they don't care about _this_ world and just lash out. All their children will die in jihad, which is good thing, isn't it? Or maybe it wn't be fanatic islam, maybe just demented enough leader of NK? In any case, people who don't necessarily value our world same way as US and Russia did are now part of the game.
And this is what is scary for WP writer. Not that there is somebody out there with unstoppable weapon of mass destruction - but that that guy is not afraid of dying himself from retribution. And you cannot apply MAD rules to religious fanatics or single demented dictators.
To be exact, 'precusor' molecules were found so far. They have like half of complexity of what we are talking about, which makes it quite probable that amino acids are out there.
But there is a far way from single particle of adenine to DNA chain. (a lot, lot further than from single atoms flying in space to group of 7or so atoms in adenine). And then there is a mystery of DNA/RNA replicating with help of cellular structures which themselves are encoded in DNA...
It is a bit like throwing a CD with cd-ripper program on top of pile of pure silicon wafers, hoping that somehow they will turn into PC with CD drive, read the program and start copying the CD around.
Of course, at high speed you will get problems with acceleration... fortunately, your fuel will get heavier as well. It all depends on that imaginary, perfect 0.1g engine which can sustain it even at close-to-lightspeed pace.
Don't know where you got these numbers from, but: - There is no way this ion engine can produce 0.3g acceleration on 2000kg probe; something is way off. - in addition to propellant, ion engine requires power - a lot of power ; you need to add weight of nuclear reactor on top of that (which is probably only thing able to produce enough power for long term with small amount of consumable fuel); for 2000N you would need something like 50MW of constant power supply
But yes, if you can create imaginary engine giving you even 0.1g of constant acceleration for spaceship over period of few decades, entire galaxy is yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if we cannot do anything about that, why do we need so many climatologists working on AGW problem? I can already see the papers "Please fire us, we do useless research". Not going to happen. They would lose their jobs if AGW is not what they tell us it is, so they have to be telling the truth. It is not possible for scientist to spin the story just to keep his grant intact. I mean, all this is getting peer reviewed by people who would also lose jobs if AGW is not happening, this guarantees no bias.
"Previously, in this place we had barren land. Global warming caused it to become more plant-friendly and we see first meadows forming, with a lot of flowers and grass. Unfortunately, if you have plants, you also have plant diseases. If not for global warming, there would be no plants here, which would also mean no diseases. Global warming spreads disease"
I have no doubt that making a practice speech and then watching yourself on camera can help. People were doing it for ages. Question is if this 'bot' bolted on top of simple visual/audio feedback loop adds any value (or maybe it makes it worse then trying to analyse your performance without hindrance).
If by 'continually in the Top 5' you mean 'already second year in a row in Top 5', then I can agree. But I think that compared to other top-10 languages, 'just very recently became of any importance at all' would be more honest statement.
Surprised nobody done it yet in this thread...
Situation is similar to having nazi camp guard escaping with photos of the atrocities committed there to give the proof to the world and Germany demanding his extradiction, because he is a criminal and betrayed state secrets. And if you protect him, we will send bunch of V-2 in your direction.
I have bought ebooks from 3 different vendors. Not single of them has any kind of DRM in them. Yes, they sometimes put some kind of watermark to trace pirated copies, but never seen a DRM on ebook yet.
Can you tell me which of major vendors is protecting ebooks in the way that if you send me a copy of file without any passwords/etc, I would not be able to read/convert it using Calibra? Or any ebook which requires connection to online service to be read?
I think that you copy/pasted rant about movies and just changed it to 'books' ?
Yes, Canada has incredibly thin population density. 228th in the world for 243 listed countries. In global scale, you might need maybe 1 acre of forest per person to cover everything. Which means that Canada forests cover for India population. Thats cool. We can probably pair up countries like that and we are ok.
Now, let's say that population of India doubles. Do you have spare 1000 million of acres of land in Canada to plant extra trees there?
I would be more ok with reducing population of world, rather than increasing area of forests/desiging more efficient trees. Don't worry, CIA is working on that as well ;)
Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.
Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.
I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.
Reminds me of novel Aristoi where all people were conditioned from childhood to respond in certain ways to complicated hand symbols - allowing ruling elite to paralyze them with hand gesture for example. Yes, having your computer glasses compromised because of looking at malicious picture is still far from having you brain 'hacked', but I hope we will get there soon ;) Next step could be quick-hacking Google Glass v3 (with bone-transmitted headphones and retinal projector) to perform flashbang kind of attack (maximum sound and flash for short moment) when shown police badge upside down.
And the we would have police pacifying riots using virtual lightningbolts...
We don't have 2A in my country, but still when pension privilages for miners are under discussion, 50000 of them go to capital with pickaxes, stand in front of Parliment and threaten to dismantle it stone by stone if anything is taken away from them. And they know their way with pixaxes and destroying stone... and for last 20 years government always yielded, even if it is killing our pension system.
I somehow doubt that 50000 handgun-waving guys would have same pressure power on US Congress.
Influence of people on government is a function of government covardice, not how well people are armed.
Ohhh, it is phoronix, not moronix... they could have chosen better font for logo...
Anyway, I'm confused with the benefits here. From TFA
[...]
The Direct3D 10/11 state tracker excitement was ultimately shortlived as the upstream Wine development community wasn't interested in adding support for it since it's a Linux-only solution and at that it's *limited to those using Gallium3D*, which is basically the open-source *Radeon and Nouveau (NVIDIA) users*
[...]
Direct3D 9 state tracker can work so that the graphics API is natively implemented for the hardware *Gallium3D drivers*
[...]
So old one died because it was working only on Gallium3D and nobody wanted to use it because of that, but new one is also targeting Gallium3D, but it will be successful, because it has not died yet due to Gallium3D dependency?
This is why I chose word 'Religion', not 'faith'. Religious claim is that Jesus ressurected people, walked on water and multiplied food. It is no different to some guy believing in dowser/faith healer which happened to die few days ago, so you cannot throw scientific tests on him.
I'm not talking about abstract belief in non-intervening God. I'm talking about all the folklore around, like people getting miracle healings because somebody prayed to deceased Pope.
Why believing in miracle healing when praying to God is ok, while believing in same thing after drinking homeopatic solution is wrong? You can find same 'quality' of proofs for both of them. And miracles ARE a part of religion, so please don't split 'abstract faith' from all the cruft around.
I find it interesting that you have left 'Religion' from the above list... somehow, it is ok to make fun out of people believing in a guy contacting spirits of the dead, but it is not ok to make fun out of people believing in a guy raising dead people. Dowsing water is a cheat, walking on water is acceptable. Giving away your wealth in hope of getting good return on investment if you are fast is stupid, giving away your wealth in promise of 'better life' after death is cool.
Somehow I find it strange that people who have not boycotted music done by Michael "let's cuddle young boys" Jackson are asking to boycott movie done based on book written by guy who doesn't like homosexuals. Despite the OSC bigotry, he was right that these days being homophobic seems to be a bigger moral crime than being a pedophile.
Political correctness becomes ultimate censorship power. Gender, religion, race, sexuality - somebody will shout 'hate speech' and you will get banned/fired/shunned. It is heresy of XXI century - in middle ages you could get burned for saying bad things about God, today you will get 'burned' for hate speech against other people. And same way as in medieval times people were centering their lives around pretending to follow Church, today people are putting mask to match political correctness expectations...
I'm going to see the movie. I like some of Michael Jackson songs. Artist does not 'taint' the work of art. Boycott is just an ultimate form of bullying by stronger group.
As long as we can behead them if they don't deliver what we asked for, I'm ok with that. If you want medieval rules, let's go all the way.
If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's.
You are mentioning it as if Star Citizen was already released and delivered what it has promised. We might have similar discussion in another 2 or 3 years, this time mentioning Star Citizen running out of budget and hoping to sell under-developed version on Steam to get some more money...
On contrary - even with good technology, it is very hard to detect human activity from far away. We were quite 'noisy' for 50-100 years, but thats not the case anymore. Switching from big radio antennas for radio radiating in all directions to low-power satellites broadcasting downwards and fiberoptic cables is making us more and more silent. And for detecting changes in atmosphere - despite of what climate-change aware people are claiming, man-made changes are nothing compared to what planet was going through in more exciting times.
If there is an alien civilisation outside of, let's say 100-200 lightyears radios, chances of getting background activity from us are quite low. On the other hand, if they are that far, then even if they pick up our signal and send something back, there is a good chance we will be technologically extinct by then. By 'technological extinction' I mean things like getting into bad war/supervolcano explosion and surviving as million-population caveman level, getting into pro-life mood and surviving as 50-billion society with no erg spare to waste on things like SETI, using up all easily accesible fuel without investing into long-term replacement, etc.
Please note that lisp stuff above is taken from Harlan - so if you complain about it being ugly, please take it with the guy who came up with Harlan in first place. It _might_ be possible to do better DSL in Lisp, but I was complaining about the route which Harlan has taken.
I think it can, but seems it is so complicated and unreadable that sample project at https://github.com/csabahruska/GFXDemo is using gsl for shaders...
Scheme/lisp was a bit helpful in the way it has a lot of features simplifying code generation. In fact, lisp is ultimate example of programmers bending towards making things easiest for compilers. It is a lot easier to transform lisp-like code into other representation - you don't really need to write lex/bison-like parser part of the grammar, you can immediately start with transforms.
But it doesn't make it simplier for people using the final language - just for the guy writing the compiler. You have to be masochist to prefer to write
(define (point-add x y)
(match x
((point3 a b c)
(match y
((point3 x y z)
(point3 (+ a x) (+ b y) (+ c z)))))))
instead of something like
define operator+(point3 a, point3 b) = point3(a.x+b.x,a.y+b.y,a.z+b.z)
Lisp makes writing DSLs easy - but resulting DSLs are still Lisp. In the era of things like XText, which provide full IDE with autocompletion, project management, outlines etc on top of your DSL, there is no real excuse to make things harder then needed
What Mr Samuelson is really complaining about is not a danger of internet as such, but rather fact that US is not a superpower on this arena as it would like to be.
US is very much used to be the biggest player in the world, military-wise. Yes, they were losing wars (Vietnam etc), but these were wars on foreign soil. Only USSR could threaten the US itself - and it was a biggest problem for US for 50 years or so. It was a race with arms versus defenses, but with advent of MIRVs, defence game lost - so the new doctrine was MAD. USSR would not attack US, because it would get obliterated in return - and as Sting hoped, Russians loved their children enough to not let it happen.
These days, nobody can reach US military-wise. Yes, you can put few suicide bombers, maybe kidnap a plane and crash it into a building, but as much tragic these situations are, they are hardly a danger for the country itself (a lot bigger danger to citizen freedom and quality of life, which make sit worthwhile as psychological war but thats different story). And US enjoys that - as much as North Korea can wave their few puny atomic missiles, US can obliterate NK at any point, without taking any significant damage itself.
Cue internet. New arena of warfare, next to land, air, naval, submarine and missile. And it is now very similar to situation with nuclear MIRV missiles - it has reached the stage where you cannot mount proper defense against capable and determined foe. And same way as USSR has stockpiled nuclear missiles, quite a few countries/groups in the world stockpiled adept hackers, zero day exploits and dormant botnets. Yes, barrier of entry was considerably lower than with creating intercontinental missiles and proper A-bomb, but this is not a crux of the issue.
Problem is that US is now in cold war with MAD situation against quite a few countries. It has an advantage - after all-out cyberattack, it can repay in same way PLUS nuke them to oblivion - which in longer run is going to hurt more (cyberstrikes has a lot less half-time of decay than nuclear fallout...). But still, it is positioned in another cold war. And same way it was not able to slap USSR for sending AK47 to guerilla in various countries, it is now not able to slap Iran for funding some terrorist groups - because Iran will escalate.
And the real real problem is that we cannot be sure than Iranians love their children same way Russians did. Not talking about civilians, but about people on the top. As crazy as Russians were, they were still living in this world and were aiming to conquer _this_ world. Maybe picking up on Iran is confusing things - but at some point, some fanatic islamic government might decide they don't care about _this_ world and just lash out. All their children will die in jihad, which is good thing, isn't it? Or maybe it wn't be fanatic islam, maybe just demented enough leader of NK? In any case, people who don't necessarily value our world same way as US and Russia did are now part of the game.
And this is what is scary for WP writer. Not that there is somebody out there with unstoppable weapon of mass destruction - but that that guy is not afraid of dying himself from retribution. And you cannot apply MAD rules to religious fanatics or single demented dictators.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/dna-and-amino-acid-precursor-molecules-discovered-in-interstellar-space
To be exact, 'precusor' molecules were found so far. They have like half of complexity of what we are talking about, which makes it quite probable that amino acids are out there.
But there is a far way from single particle of adenine to DNA chain. (a lot, lot further than from single atoms flying in space to group of 7or so atoms in adenine). And then there is a mystery of DNA/RNA replicating with help of cellular structures which themselves are encoded in DNA...
It is a bit like throwing a CD with cd-ripper program on top of pile of pure silicon wafers, hoping that somehow they will turn into PC with CD drive, read the program and start copying the CD around.
Not for the people on spaceship - and you care about them, not Earth. You can colonize the galaxy, you just cannot exploit settlers afterwards.
http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q917.html
0.9c 2.29
0.99c 7.08
[...]
0.999999c 707.1
0.9999999c 2236.0
Of course, at high speed you will get problems with acceleration... fortunately, your fuel will get heavier as well. It all depends on that imaginary, perfect 0.1g engine which can sustain it even at close-to-lightspeed pace.
Don't know where you got these numbers from, but:
- There is no way this ion engine can produce 0.3g acceleration on 2000kg probe; something is way off.
- in addition to propellant, ion engine requires power - a lot of power ; you need to add weight of nuclear reactor on top of that (which is probably only thing able to produce enough power for long term with small amount of consumable fuel); for 2000N you would need something like 50MW of constant power supply
But yes, if you can create imaginary engine giving you even 0.1g of constant acceleration for spaceship over period of few decades, entire galaxy is yours.
I wonder if they had felt a specific impulse to switch it off?