Otherwise the entire genre of comedy would get to ignore copyright.
No, because even if what you are doing is satire, you still have to be careful about the amount of the work you use. For example, I could satirize a BP statement by showing the (former ha ha) CEO talking about how personally hurt he was by this tragedy, then cut to Dana Carvey as the Church Lady saying "Isn't that special?" That'd probably be fine, even though I'm not satirizing the Church Lady. Cutting to an entire Church Lady skit would probably not be fine.
These planets are "Earth-like" in the same sense that noxious, caustic, stifling, lung-crushing Venus is "Earth-like"... if that.
I think it would technically be acidic, since the atmosphere contains sulfuric acid, and 'caustic' conventionally refers only to bases.;)
Anyway, yeah, these are earth-like in the same sense as Venus.
Maybe even less so, since Kepler would not have been able to detect a planet in a Venus-like orbit yet. So more like... earth-like in the same sense as Mercury.:)
There are 'super Earth' planets, but at those distances we really don't know how much gas vs rock there is.
Well we kinda do, because we can also measure the size of the planet, and based on that get its density. The super-earths appear far too dense to be gaseous.
I agree. Water presence? Temperature within habitable range? At least a primordial atmosphere? Not sure if Kepler is the right tool to collect that kind of data, but to call them "earth like" seems premature.
Exoplanet spectroscopy has been done, but is a very new science and extremely difficult. And first, we have to be looking at a specific planet with specific instruments.
Kepler, on the other hand, is continuously monitoring a region of the sky and some hundreds of thousands of stars for signs of planets. It detects planets by the "transit method", which means you watch all the stars, and see if any of them dim slightly. You keep watching and if you see it dim again, you might have found a planet (rather than a one-time passing object between us and the star). To be fairly sure it's a planet, you need to see a third dimming with the same time delay as between the first two, showing that it's periodic. Ideally you want to see a 4th event to confirm, but 3 is good enough to call it a candidate -- or maybe they say candidate after 2? I'm not sure.
Note that this means Kepler only sees planets whose orbits happen to be about "edge on" from our perspective. So there could be many systems that Kepler simply can't see -- and given how many it has seen, I think it's safe to say that there are many such systems.
Anyway, from this data, Kepler can figure out the approximate orbital distance and mass of the planet. That's it. You can estimate temperature from proximity to the star, too.
Personally, given Kepler's limited-but-awesome capabilities, I wouldn't mind them saying "earth-like" simply to describe roughly earth-size planets that are in the habitable zone of their star. But I doubt that's the case for most of these, since Kepler has only been running for half a year, and for Kepler to detect something in an earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star, it would take between 2 and 3 years of observation. The only planets Kepler can find up to this point are ones that orbit closely to their star. So most of these are not going to be in the habitable zone.
You are of course correct, but there's also been a push towards larger and larger wafers, last from 200 mm to 300 mm. Currently they are experimenting with 450 mm wafers, which would increase surface area per wafer by 125%.
That's a very good point. I thought to mention how that affects the situation, but figured it doesn't happen often enough to dominate in the long term. But I may be underestimating this factor as just another way to get around the cost problem.
Having gotten used to a SSD, I can tell you that going back to work with a HDD as main drive is frustrating...
I don't have an SSD, but I think they're ready to replace or augment many HDDs, especially in consumer computers. Though speaking of work, I'm pretty sure my work place's data center is going to be placing value on storage/price for quite some time, and frankly I'm glad to have them do so (since it's networked anyway).
What about Von Neumann Probes? Why haven't we even seen any of them? They would hypothetically proliferate much faster than giant colony ships and should also be here by now.
Heh. Aside from all the reasons that apply to alien radio signals or colony ships... And the same question of "would they necessarily want to?" I personally think it would be the height of irresponsibility to send out fully autonomous self-replicating probes. There's a thin line between a Von Neumann Probe and a Slylandro Probe. I would like an operator in the loop that verifies that the life-detection instruments are fully working before giving the go-ahead to eat and reproduce in a new system. But aside from that?
How do you know there isn't a probe coasting past our solar system, checking us out, right now as we speak? It's not obvious that we could even see a probe at that distance even if we knew exactly where to look.
That's why I ultimately find the Fermi Paradox silly to think of as a real mind-boggling paradox or proof of alien non-existence. "Why haven't we already seen solid evidence of aliens?" is so ridiculously far from being the same question as "Why isn't there evidence of aliens that could hypothetically be seen by us?" that taking the former to imply the latter is lunacy.
The idea that we've done an exhaustive search of our little neighborhood of the galaxy and concluded that nope, there's no life here, is just completely divorced from reality.
Does anyone who has ever rubbed their eyes still doubt that we are living in a simulation? I mean, why else would you wind up with an input error grid?
I see shit just by closing my eyes. Sparks, flashes, spirals, floating and spinning Rubik's Cubes and kaleidoscope-like shapes, and if I really pay attention under it all is a very organic-looking "grid" of red, blue, and green "pixels".
The paradox only requires the assumption that at least one does.
It requires that they do want to, and that they do have the resources to do it, and that they do succeed (what could possibly go wrong?!), and that they maintain their desire to repeat this procedure for countless generations.
Let's add those factors to the Drake Equation and call it the Fermi Equation, which is the number of civilizations which successfully expand exponentially across the galaxy. For very plausible numbers, N < 1. So where's the paradox?
Your answer requires than none do.
Nope. Mine only requires that few enough do that the rest of the probabilities involved end up making perfect sense as to why aliens aren't already known to exist.
Which there are about a million other explanations for anyway, up to and including that aliens have exponentially colonized the universe, are in fact occupying every nearby star system, and our instruments are still too primitive to tell. Seriously. "If aliens exist why haven't they already swooped down and said 'hi'?" is the silliest paradox ever.
Or possibly that their world/sun/system is about to undergo changes that will make their world uninhabitable for their type of life. And that they have enough time to construct and launch a ship before this takes place.
A very reasonable possibility, one would presume nearly all civilizations would be motivated to emigrate under those conditions if they could. If we take that to be the only circumstance under which they do so, that changes the time constant to possibly hundreds of millions to billions of years, in which case even an actual exponentially expanding race would not have crossed the galaxy.
That's assuming they even decide to split -- reasonable for the sake of 'redundancy', but if they had all this time to prepare maybe they picked the one system that gave them the best chance. Who would want to be on the "B" ship in that case? All the telephone cleaners?
No it doesn't. It merely assumes that a majority of them would eventually become wealthy enough to afford to create a colony or two and would do so just as their parent did. You can give each colony a thousand years to mature and still fill the galaxy pretty damn quickly.
Right but the very fact that they are wealthy and advanced enough to create multi-generational colony ships makes me wonder why they would want to. The only obvious one is population growth exceeding the capacity of their world, but look at our world (as we naturally must for all such predictions): The richest portions of the world are the ones with the lowest population growth, including negative. People traditionally had many children because of 1) lack of birth control 2) needing extra labor for their farms 3) high mortality rate among children from illness etc. That only leaves culture as a reason to reproduce beyond replacement rate, so sure maybe the Space Catholics will have population issues but otherwise it seems plausible that wealthy and advanced civilizations will stabilize not grow unbounded.
Then what? Resources? To even make the colony ship work I'm going to assume they have a Mr. Fusion, and once you have that you can do a hell of a lot with the resources of just one system (especially given a bounded population) and every energy-intensive recycling technique is suddenly much more feasible. Sending a small fraction of the population off in expensive colony ships is only going to exacerbate a resource problem anyway. Exploration, sense of adventure? Explorers are people who want to explore, not people who want to maybe enable their great-great-grandchild to explore.
I'm not saying it isn't possible. I'm saying that the answer to the Fermi "Paradox" could be as simple as: Maybe the assumption that civilizations will engage in exponential galactic colonization endeavors is wrong.
Correct me if I'm wrong here - and I usually am wrong -
I'm usually right... but that statement might be one of the exceptions.:)
TFA doesn't actually make any arguments about price directly. It indirectly suggests price of the drives is related to lithography resolution, but provides nothing to back that up.
It seems to me that over time as yields on current technology increase and fab costs are recouped, the price of current technology will go down.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer. Therefore the more die fit on a wafer, the cheaper each chip becomes. The two main ways to do this are by reducing the amount of functionality on each chip (undesirable when the goal is to increase capacity), or to move to a smaller lithography so you can fit many more die on a wafer. While new lithography generations have frequently allowed greater performance, even if they don't they are deployed anyway because it reduces cost for the manufacturer.
Yield improvements and paying off R&D both will help cost, but only to a limited extent. Yields for a production lithography should already be quite high and will asymptotically approach 1. Once R&D is payed off the cost will drop, but there still remains a very large fixed cost per wafer. Neither is going to come close to the cost benefit of being able to, say, go from a 45nm to 32nm process and get roughly 40% more die per wafer.
So yeah price will come down for other reasons, but in the long term price reductions in flash memory devices are going to depend on using smaller lithographies just like it does for other semiconductor devices. The author probably just didn't think to explain this aspect of it, since it's such a well-known aspect of the silicon industry.
On the other hand, people were saying that CMOS processes used in CPUs were going to reach fundamental limits 20 years ago. And 15. And 10. And 5. And oh sure, some of those limits were reached, but then clever people worked around them. The statement in the article amounts to "We can't just blindly reduce lithography size without changing anything else indefinitely", which is true but also kinda pointless since the people working on smaller lithographies for flash are probably aware. In the end exponential progressions like this can't last for ever, but I'm not about to tell the process engineers that they aren't going to be able to find enough tricks to keep it going long enough.
Dogs are still a single species, but I imagine if you kept specializing them, they would eventually become separate ones.
The main reason this hasn't happened yet I would wager is because despite the best efforts of pureblood dog breeders, their dogs still manage to find and hump other dogs of whatever breed. No dog population is so isolated that it doesn't share genetic material with others.
So, we create the word "species" to mean a group of individuals with similar enough DNA that they can interbreed.
Even only taking into consideration sexually reproducing organisms, "species" is still more expansive than that. "Can't produce viable offspring" is a good starting point for what isn't a member of a species, and even works for applicable ring species if you don't assume the species relationship is transitive.
But biologists often define things as different species even if they are biologically capable of producing viable offspring, if despite being capable of doing so they, for whatever reason (often geography), simply don't. Or don't too often, enough that they maintain genetically distinguishable populations. Canis lupis and Canis familiaris can interbreed and you can have dogs with varying degrees of wolf in them, but they're considered separate species. The Golden Fronted Woodpecker and the Red Bellied Woodpecker are separate species who reside in largely non-overlapping territories, but in the region where they do overlap hybrids are quite common. The Tufted Titmouse and the Black-crested Titmouse were once considered separate species, then they decided after studying breeding habits that they were really just different breeds of the same species, then after further study they changed their mind again.
All of which is just to say that "species" is not a particularly rigidly defined term, basically because like you said it is not an intrinsic property of organisms but rather our attempt to classify and organize them. It's a natural inclination of the human mind, convenient and even useful to attempt to do so. It is not a natural, measurable attribute of organisms and biology accurately represents this.
I fail to see how they provide "Criticism or Comment" of the original work.
You don't have to be criticizing the work itself for the Fair Use provision for satire to be allowed, and thus presumably also with this exception to the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA.
Oh man you missed the best one! Star Control 2 was just great, especially if you had a buddy to beat up on.
I only missed it for a while; I've played the shit out of Ur-Quan Masters (see link earlier in thread) which is the legally released source code and assets from SC2 ported to various operating systems. It runs natively on Linux, and has some improvements like anti-aliasing of the sprites.
If both ships are travelling at ".5 above light speed", then the ship that turns tighter takes less parsecs to make a turn, and thus would arrive at the finish sooner.
Yes, but not necessarily sooner than a ship that actually went faster but couldn't cut corners as well.
Which is why "distance traveled" is a stupid way to measure performance in a race that's about arriving sooner, and a stupid way to brag about how fast one's ship is. If your ship is equally fast as every other ship, but more maneuverable, you say that. Nobody is going to report race results as if all ships are precisely the same speed when they clearly aren't; the Falcon escapes from ships all the time in a flat-out race in open space. It's a fast ship.
There's another explanation where he's referring to the degree of length dilation due to Special Relativity, which would directly relate distance and velocity. Except the SR equation doesn't apply to velocities over c, and gives imaginary answers if you try. At anything c or less, 12 parsecs is still over 30 light years so Han would have spent most of his life running the race with no time left for becoming a smuggler.
Though it's still less ridiculous to imagine Relativity somehow applies to Star Wars light speed engines than it is to figure that race results are reported in distance traveled and not time to reach the finish. Do people do that for actual rally races? No, because that would be dumb.
There are pretty much only two explanations that make sense: 1) Han was talking out his ass, and was just bullshitting to try to impress what he thought were a pair of country bumpkins. 2) Lucas was talking out his ass, and didn't know what a "parsec" was except that it sounded futuristic and space-y.
Or is this against some lets-fight-retarded-in-space treaty?
No, it's the Audiences Find Space Flight Confusing So Lets Act Like It's The Same As Atmospheric Flight -- BUT IN SPAAACE treaty.
The AFSPFCSLALITSAAF--BUTINSPAAACE treaty is responsible for some of the craziest representations of space combat in movies, and by extension video games. Star Trek is not a signatory, but did feel pressured to conform to some of the standards, like ships all keep essentially the same vertical orientation, and turn in slow arcs like naval ships. In recent years upstarts like Battlestar Galactica, termed "rogue fictions" by members of the AFSPFCSLALITSAAF--BUTINSPAAACE Alliance, have completely abandoned these the societal conventions the treaty is based up, in that they have ships that operate based on Newtonian physics in a vacuum, and also don't have laser blasters at all. But they aren't so crazy that they don't have sound in space. That's only for the real extremists like Kubrik or Wedon.
You presume that additional regulations would fix the problem, when in fact they would be just as useless as our current regulations given the same level of enforcement. You yourself highlighted the problem - enforcement. What the industry needs first is vigorous enforcement of existing laws, and that requires a shakeup within our government.
That's kinda funny, because I expressly stated that new regulations will only work if there is a major house cleaning in MMS and all the corrupt agents and administrators replaced with people who believe the regulations are important, and thus enforce them.
That's okay though, because it means we actually agree completely. Though I do think this incident reveals deficiencies in the regulations themselves, the most important thing is that those regulations must be enforced by an agency who is actually motivated to enforce them.
MMS was operating under an anti-regulation philosophy such that if they had the choice they would have eliminated the regulations entirely. Instead they did the next best thing and didn't enforce them. It's utterly hilarious that anyone would argue that the consequent disaster is an argument for the anti-regulation philosophy.
The evidence suggests that enforcing existing regulations would have prevented this spill from happening. Therefore this spill is a terrible argument for new regulations.
The evidence suggests that some factors would have been prevented by enforcement of existing regulations, and other factors that existing regulation would not have prevented. You can argue that sufficient factors would have been eliminated to prevent the spill in this case, ergo no new regulations are needed. However if you're actually interested in preventing future spills, you can't act like every future situation will always be exactly like this one, and must learn from all the deficiencies, including those which are not covered by existing regulation.
There are no regulations whose enforcement would have changed the scenario when a spill occurs from months of waiting for the relief wells to be drilled. That absolutely should change.
The people in charge who want to use this spill to pass further regulations were the people in charge when the regulations were not being enforced. I love how its the fault of people who don't like government regulations that the people who favor government regulations failed to enforce the regulations.
The MMS agents who failed to apply what regulations remained were appointed and directed by an aggressively anti-regulation Administration. You can blame Obama for either not realizing or choosing to fix the problem within MMS, and that is a completely valid criticism that I think should be remembered. Yet that still involves accepting that the anti-regulation philosophy endemic within MMS was foolish and needed to be fixed.
MMS was acting as your philosophy -- and obviously the philosophy of the last administration -- would have them act by not regulating. You can try to pass blame around for that reality however you want, it only emphasizes how obvious a mistake that was.
Because at the end of the day, no matter who you blame, it still remains true that it is the anti-regulation let-industry-police-itself philosophy that was tried, and found woefully inadequate.
However, I am always opposed to new regulations to address a problem that appears to have happened largely because exisitng regulations were not being followed. If regulators have failed to enforce existing regulations, what makes anyone think they will enforce any new regulations?
Because the lack of regulations, and the lack of regulatory enforcement, are closely related phenomenon. Both are the consequence of a government who, like you, viewed government regulation as a bad thing, and felt that industry was best left to itself. So they relaxed the regulations. And while they didn't succeed in getting rid of all regulations, that same philosophy carried over into the hiring and management of the regulatory body -- that the regulations they were supposed to be enforcing were not important, and industry should be given every benefit of the doubt that they were doing the right thing regardless of the letter of the law. Fundamentally, the the enforcers of the regulations didn't think the regulations should be enforced, and so they didn't.
In other words, it was the anti-regulation philosophy that caused the regulations to not be enforced.
You say that the problem was caused by the lack of regulation. But that presumes that the oil companies would not perform proper maintenance and safety procedures unless forced to. It presumes that the default case in the absence of regulation would be that BP shirked their responsibility and allowed this spill to occur. MMS needed to have prevented the spill which BP would have otherwise caused. Which is an accurate view of reality, but the opposite of the anti-regulation philosophy.
So there are two ways in which the anti-regulation philosophy falls short. Blaming the lack of regulatory enforcement for the spill is a perfect example of how.
And as to why anyone would think new regulations would be enforced? I think they would be, provided the enactment of new regulations -- which suggests a belief that regulations are important just like the repealing of regulations suggests a belief that they are not -- is coincident with a housecleaning of MMS and the hiring of people who are not of the anti-regulation philosophy and a director-level-on-down belief that yes, these regulations are important.
Do I think this certainly will happen? Not at all. The firing of the MMS director is just the start of a long road I'm not sure they're going to walk down. However, arguing that because regulations we demonstrably need to make industry do the right thing may not be sufficiently enforced, is not a reason to not have the regulations! It's an argument to press the government to focus on making sure their agents do enforce them.
If you're anti-regulation, latching onto the failure of MMS to keep BP as evidence of your cause is the last thing you want to do.
Besides, compared to regular inspections of safety equipment and so on, simply regulating the need for relief wells to be pre-drilled in case all the other safety regulations aren't followed would be quite likely to succeed. Your general dislike of regulation does not outweigh the need for simple improvements like this.
No, because they knew (or at least would know in a few years, I don't know when the orbit of Pluto was nailed down well enough) that Pluto crossed the orbit of Neptune and that it was a lot less massive than Neptune. The same heuristic argument that was made in 2006 could have been made in or shortly after 1930 and it would have the same result.
Pluto's orbit doesn't cross Neptune's orbit. It gets closer to the Sun than Neptune at one point in its orbit, but the orbits aren't actually close to each other because at that point Pluto is also well above the ecliptic. The IAU definition does not say orbits are not allowed to cross in any case, and it certainly doesn't say the planet must have a constant closer/farther relationship with other planets. Neptune has nothing to do with Pluto's definition as a dwarf planet.
Pluto is excluded because Pluto's own orbit has many asteroids in it that total up to many times Pluto's mass. It has not cleared its neighborhood, ergo it is not a planet.
They thought Pluto had roughly the mass of earth. They thought it was the only significant object in its orbit. They would have called it a planet by the IAU definition. They would have been -- were -- wrong.
Very salient information about Pluto has been acquired since it was first called a planet. Information that had it been known in 1930 would have prevented Pluto from ever being called a planet. It's the same story as with Ceres.
But no complaints about Ceres' status. How odd.
Nonsense. The definition only applies to the Solar System. The IAU said so. If you recall, this was one of my original complaints about the definition!
Yes, they didn't want to presume to define "planet" for ever system in the universe when our knowledge of other solar systems is so primitive. Yet, at the same time, one can craft the definition such that is amenable to extension to other systems. As we study other systems, we may learn that our definition isn't applicable at all and must be wildly revised. Or, because of their foresight, they can simply state that the definition does apply to all solar systems and there we go.
You're complaining about one of the wisest things they did.
And I don't see the advantages of creating an interminable argument over whether something is or isn't a planet (say, Pluto for example) simply because the original definition blew off defining a key term.
Because that's how you deal with the reality of the universe, that it frequently defies the human desire for strict classification. You don't draw an arbitrary line with infinite precision where no such line exists. That would be arbitrary and unscientific. Yes, it's true -- real science often involves accepting ambiguity.
However, there is no argument over whether or not Pluto is a planet amongst those who accept the IAU definition. The definition is completely unambiguous when it comes to every known object in our solar system. The only argument comes from those who want to draw a precise line so that Pluto is a planet.
For example, the heuristic I mentioned back a couple of posts happens to be a way to define a neighborhood of Pluto in a way that would be consistent with the IAU definition and Pluto as planet. The neighborhood just so happens to be defined to not contain Neptune.
As I said before, your heuristic requires drawing a very arbitrary line right in the middle of a huge gray area where there are many objects that are within a few percent of making or not making the cut. Your definition would also have included Haumea, Makemake, and Eris as planets as well as Ceres. You could jiggle your definition a tiny bit to exclude Haumea and Makemake maybe, but you can't include Pluto without including Eris and Ceres. But why exactly there? Why don't Haumea and Makemake or other slightly smaller objects not make the cut? There's absolutely no reason for such a precise line to be drawn through a freaking asteroid belt
I remember reading a story which went exactly like that. They were all "I'm sorry, he scored too high."
The Twilight Zone was probably ripped straight from the book (or was simply an adaptation). They said the same thing. The parents, who at the beginning had told their son it was important to do his best, took the news basically like they'd been told their son had died on the operating table -- a tragedy they just had to accept. Indicating that the program was working.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise the entire genre of comedy would get to ignore copyright.
No, because even if what you are doing is satire, you still have to be careful about the amount of the work you use. For example, I could satirize a BP statement by showing the (former ha ha) CEO talking about how personally hurt he was by this tragedy, then cut to Dana Carvey as the Church Lady saying "Isn't that special?" That'd probably be fine, even though I'm not satirizing the Church Lady. Cutting to an entire Church Lady skit would probably not be fine.
These planets are "Earth-like" in the same sense that noxious, caustic, stifling, lung-crushing Venus is "Earth-like"... if that.
I think it would technically be acidic, since the atmosphere contains sulfuric acid, and 'caustic' conventionally refers only to bases. ;)
Anyway, yeah, these are earth-like in the same sense as Venus.
Maybe even less so, since Kepler would not have been able to detect a planet in a Venus-like orbit yet. So more like... earth-like in the same sense as Mercury. :)
There are 'super Earth' planets, but at those distances we really don't know how much gas vs rock there is.
Well we kinda do, because we can also measure the size of the planet, and based on that get its density. The super-earths appear far too dense to be gaseous.
I agree. Water presence? Temperature within habitable range? At least a primordial atmosphere? Not sure if Kepler is the right tool to collect that kind of data, but to call them "earth like" seems premature.
Exoplanet spectroscopy has been done, but is a very new science and extremely difficult. And first, we have to be looking at a specific planet with specific instruments.
Kepler, on the other hand, is continuously monitoring a region of the sky and some hundreds of thousands of stars for signs of planets. It detects planets by the "transit method", which means you watch all the stars, and see if any of them dim slightly. You keep watching and if you see it dim again, you might have found a planet (rather than a one-time passing object between us and the star). To be fairly sure it's a planet, you need to see a third dimming with the same time delay as between the first two, showing that it's periodic. Ideally you want to see a 4th event to confirm, but 3 is good enough to call it a candidate -- or maybe they say candidate after 2? I'm not sure.
Note that this means Kepler only sees planets whose orbits happen to be about "edge on" from our perspective. So there could be many systems that Kepler simply can't see -- and given how many it has seen, I think it's safe to say that there are many such systems.
Anyway, from this data, Kepler can figure out the approximate orbital distance and mass of the planet. That's it. You can estimate temperature from proximity to the star, too.
Personally, given Kepler's limited-but-awesome capabilities, I wouldn't mind them saying "earth-like" simply to describe roughly earth-size planets that are in the habitable zone of their star. But I doubt that's the case for most of these, since Kepler has only been running for half a year, and for Kepler to detect something in an earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star, it would take between 2 and 3 years of observation. The only planets Kepler can find up to this point are ones that orbit closely to their star. So most of these are not going to be in the habitable zone.
You are of course correct, but there's also been a push towards larger and larger wafers, last from 200 mm to 300 mm. Currently they are experimenting with 450 mm wafers, which would increase surface area per wafer by 125%.
That's a very good point. I thought to mention how that affects the situation, but figured it doesn't happen often enough to dominate in the long term. But I may be underestimating this factor as just another way to get around the cost problem.
Having gotten used to a SSD, I can tell you that going back to work with a HDD as main drive is frustrating...
I don't have an SSD, but I think they're ready to replace or augment many HDDs, especially in consumer computers. Though speaking of work, I'm pretty sure my work place's data center is going to be placing value on storage/price for quite some time, and frankly I'm glad to have them do so (since it's networked anyway).
What about Von Neumann Probes? Why haven't we even seen any of them? They would hypothetically proliferate much faster than giant colony ships and should also be here by now.
Heh. Aside from all the reasons that apply to alien radio signals or colony ships... And the same question of "would they necessarily want to?" I personally think it would be the height of irresponsibility to send out fully autonomous self-replicating probes. There's a thin line between a Von Neumann Probe and a Slylandro Probe. I would like an operator in the loop that verifies that the life-detection instruments are fully working before giving the go-ahead to eat and reproduce in a new system. But aside from that?
How do you know there isn't a probe coasting past our solar system, checking us out, right now as we speak? It's not obvious that we could even see a probe at that distance even if we knew exactly where to look.
That's why I ultimately find the Fermi Paradox silly to think of as a real mind-boggling paradox or proof of alien non-existence. "Why haven't we already seen solid evidence of aliens?" is so ridiculously far from being the same question as "Why isn't there evidence of aliens that could hypothetically be seen by us?" that taking the former to imply the latter is lunacy.
The idea that we've done an exhaustive search of our little neighborhood of the galaxy and concluded that nope, there's no life here, is just completely divorced from reality.
Does anyone who has ever rubbed their eyes still doubt that we are living in a simulation? I mean, why else would you wind up with an input error grid?
I see shit just by closing my eyes. Sparks, flashes, spirals, floating and spinning Rubik's Cubes and kaleidoscope-like shapes, and if I really pay attention under it all is a very organic-looking "grid" of red, blue, and green "pixels".
And no, LSD is not to blame. :)
The paradox only requires the assumption that at least one does.
It requires that they do want to, and that they do have the resources to do it, and that they do succeed (what could possibly go wrong?!), and that they maintain their desire to repeat this procedure for countless generations.
Let's add those factors to the Drake Equation and call it the Fermi Equation, which is the number of civilizations which successfully expand exponentially across the galaxy. For very plausible numbers, N < 1. So where's the paradox?
Your answer requires than none do.
Nope. Mine only requires that few enough do that the rest of the probabilities involved end up making perfect sense as to why aliens aren't already known to exist.
Which there are about a million other explanations for anyway, up to and including that aliens have exponentially colonized the universe, are in fact occupying every nearby star system, and our instruments are still too primitive to tell. Seriously. "If aliens exist why haven't they already swooped down and said 'hi'?" is the silliest paradox ever.
Or possibly that their world/sun/system is about to undergo changes that will make their world uninhabitable for their type of life. And that they have enough time to construct and launch a ship before this takes place.
A very reasonable possibility, one would presume nearly all civilizations would be motivated to emigrate under those conditions if they could. If we take that to be the only circumstance under which they do so, that changes the time constant to possibly hundreds of millions to billions of years, in which case even an actual exponentially expanding race would not have crossed the galaxy.
That's assuming they even decide to split -- reasonable for the sake of 'redundancy', but if they had all this time to prepare maybe they picked the one system that gave them the best chance. Who would want to be on the "B" ship in that case? All the telephone cleaners?
No it doesn't. It merely assumes that a majority of them would eventually become wealthy enough to afford to create a colony or two and would do so just as their parent did. You can give each colony a thousand years to mature and still fill the galaxy pretty damn quickly.
Right but the very fact that they are wealthy and advanced enough to create multi-generational colony ships makes me wonder why they would want to. The only obvious one is population growth exceeding the capacity of their world, but look at our world (as we naturally must for all such predictions): The richest portions of the world are the ones with the lowest population growth, including negative. People traditionally had many children because of 1) lack of birth control 2) needing extra labor for their farms 3) high mortality rate among children from illness etc. That only leaves culture as a reason to reproduce beyond replacement rate, so sure maybe the Space Catholics will have population issues but otherwise it seems plausible that wealthy and advanced civilizations will stabilize not grow unbounded.
Then what? Resources? To even make the colony ship work I'm going to assume they have a Mr. Fusion, and once you have that you can do a hell of a lot with the resources of just one system (especially given a bounded population) and every energy-intensive recycling technique is suddenly much more feasible. Sending a small fraction of the population off in expensive colony ships is only going to exacerbate a resource problem anyway. Exploration, sense of adventure? Explorers are people who want to explore, not people who want to maybe enable their great-great-grandchild to explore.
I'm not saying it isn't possible. I'm saying that the answer to the Fermi "Paradox" could be as simple as: Maybe the assumption that civilizations will engage in exponential galactic colonization endeavors is wrong.
Correct me if I'm wrong here - and I usually am wrong -
I'm usually right... but that statement might be one of the exceptions. :)
TFA doesn't actually make any arguments about price directly. It indirectly suggests price of the drives is related to lithography resolution, but provides nothing to back that up.
It seems to me that over time as yields on current technology increase and fab costs are recouped, the price of current technology will go down.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer. Therefore the more die fit on a wafer, the cheaper each chip becomes. The two main ways to do this are by reducing the amount of functionality on each chip (undesirable when the goal is to increase capacity), or to move to a smaller lithography so you can fit many more die on a wafer. While new lithography generations have frequently allowed greater performance, even if they don't they are deployed anyway because it reduces cost for the manufacturer.
Yield improvements and paying off R&D both will help cost, but only to a limited extent. Yields for a production lithography should already be quite high and will asymptotically approach 1. Once R&D is payed off the cost will drop, but there still remains a very large fixed cost per wafer. Neither is going to come close to the cost benefit of being able to, say, go from a 45nm to 32nm process and get roughly 40% more die per wafer.
So yeah price will come down for other reasons, but in the long term price reductions in flash memory devices are going to depend on using smaller lithographies just like it does for other semiconductor devices. The author probably just didn't think to explain this aspect of it, since it's such a well-known aspect of the silicon industry.
On the other hand, people were saying that CMOS processes used in CPUs were going to reach fundamental limits 20 years ago. And 15. And 10. And 5. And oh sure, some of those limits were reached, but then clever people worked around them. The statement in the article amounts to "We can't just blindly reduce lithography size without changing anything else indefinitely", which is true but also kinda pointless since the people working on smaller lithographies for flash are probably aware. In the end exponential progressions like this can't last for ever, but I'm not about to tell the process engineers that they aren't going to be able to find enough tricks to keep it going long enough.
Dogs are still a single species, but I imagine if you kept specializing them, they would eventually become separate ones.
The main reason this hasn't happened yet I would wager is because despite the best efforts of pureblood dog breeders, their dogs still manage to find and hump other dogs of whatever breed. No dog population is so isolated that it doesn't share genetic material with others.
So, we create the word "species" to mean a group of individuals with similar enough DNA that they can interbreed.
Even only taking into consideration sexually reproducing organisms, "species" is still more expansive than that. "Can't produce viable offspring" is a good starting point for what isn't a member of a species, and even works for applicable ring species if you don't assume the species relationship is transitive.
But biologists often define things as different species even if they are biologically capable of producing viable offspring, if despite being capable of doing so they, for whatever reason (often geography), simply don't. Or don't too often, enough that they maintain genetically distinguishable populations. Canis lupis and Canis familiaris can interbreed and you can have dogs with varying degrees of wolf in them, but they're considered separate species. The Golden Fronted Woodpecker and the Red Bellied Woodpecker are separate species who reside in largely non-overlapping territories, but in the region where they do overlap hybrids are quite common. The Tufted Titmouse and the Black-crested Titmouse were once considered separate species, then they decided after studying breeding habits that they were really just different breeds of the same species, then after further study they changed their mind again.
All of which is just to say that "species" is not a particularly rigidly defined term, basically because like you said it is not an intrinsic property of organisms but rather our attempt to classify and organize them. It's a natural inclination of the human mind, convenient and even useful to attempt to do so. It is not a natural, measurable attribute of organisms and biology accurately represents this.
I fail to see how they provide "Criticism or Comment" of the original work.
You don't have to be criticizing the work itself for the Fair Use provision for satire to be allowed, and thus presumably also with this exception to the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA.
Oh man you missed the best one! Star Control 2 was just great, especially if you had a buddy to beat up on.
I only missed it for a while; I've played the shit out of Ur-Quan Masters (see link earlier in thread) which is the legally released source code and assets from SC2 ported to various operating systems. It runs natively on Linux, and has some improvements like anti-aliasing of the sprites.
If both ships are travelling at ".5 above light speed", then the ship that turns tighter takes less parsecs to make a turn, and thus would arrive at the finish sooner.
Yes, but not necessarily sooner than a ship that actually went faster but couldn't cut corners as well.
Which is why "distance traveled" is a stupid way to measure performance in a race that's about arriving sooner, and a stupid way to brag about how fast one's ship is. If your ship is equally fast as every other ship, but more maneuverable, you say that. Nobody is going to report race results as if all ships are precisely the same speed when they clearly aren't; the Falcon escapes from ships all the time in a flat-out race in open space. It's a fast ship.
There's another explanation where he's referring to the degree of length dilation due to Special Relativity, which would directly relate distance and velocity. Except the SR equation doesn't apply to velocities over c, and gives imaginary answers if you try. At anything c or less, 12 parsecs is still over 30 light years so Han would have spent most of his life running the race with no time left for becoming a smuggler.
Though it's still less ridiculous to imagine Relativity somehow applies to Star Wars light speed engines than it is to figure that race results are reported in distance traveled and not time to reach the finish. Do people do that for actual rally races? No, because that would be dumb.
There are pretty much only two explanations that make sense:
1) Han was talking out his ass, and was just bullshitting to try to impress what he thought were a pair of country bumpkins.
2) Lucas was talking out his ass, and didn't know what a "parsec" was except that it sounded futuristic and space-y.
Or is this against some lets-fight-retarded-in-space treaty?
No, it's the Audiences Find Space Flight Confusing So Lets Act Like It's The Same As Atmospheric Flight -- BUT IN SPAAACE treaty.
The AFSPFCSLALITSAAF--BUTINSPAAACE treaty is responsible for some of the craziest representations of space combat in movies, and by extension video games. Star Trek is not a signatory, but did feel pressured to conform to some of the standards, like ships all keep essentially the same vertical orientation, and turn in slow arcs like naval ships. In recent years upstarts like Battlestar Galactica, termed "rogue fictions" by members of the AFSPFCSLALITSAAF--BUTINSPAAACE Alliance, have completely abandoned these the societal conventions the treaty is based up, in that they have ships that operate based on Newtonian physics in a vacuum, and also don't have laser blasters at all. But they aren't so crazy that they don't have sound in space. That's only for the real extremists like Kubrik or Wedon.
Hm weird where that went. Oh well.
I was a big fan of Star Control (mostly just melee mode, not so much campaign mode), but never got a chance to play Star Control 2.
Bless Toys for Bob and the folks behind Ur-Quan Masters for my being able to play that game so many years later. It's so god damn sweet.
You presume that additional regulations would fix the problem, when in fact they would be just as useless as our current regulations given the same level of enforcement. You yourself highlighted the problem - enforcement. What the industry needs first is vigorous enforcement of existing laws, and that requires a shakeup within our government.
That's kinda funny, because I expressly stated that new regulations will only work if there is a major house cleaning in MMS and all the corrupt agents and administrators replaced with people who believe the regulations are important, and thus enforce them.
That's okay though, because it means we actually agree completely. Though I do think this incident reveals deficiencies in the regulations themselves, the most important thing is that those regulations must be enforced by an agency who is actually motivated to enforce them.
MMS was operating under an anti-regulation philosophy such that if they had the choice they would have eliminated the regulations entirely. Instead they did the next best thing and didn't enforce them. It's utterly hilarious that anyone would argue that the consequent disaster is an argument for the anti-regulation philosophy.
The evidence suggests that enforcing existing regulations would have prevented this spill from happening. Therefore this spill is a terrible argument for new regulations.
The evidence suggests that some factors would have been prevented by enforcement of existing regulations, and other factors that existing regulation would not have prevented. You can argue that sufficient factors would have been eliminated to prevent the spill in this case, ergo no new regulations are needed. However if you're actually interested in preventing future spills, you can't act like every future situation will always be exactly like this one, and must learn from all the deficiencies, including those which are not covered by existing regulation.
There are no regulations whose enforcement would have changed the scenario when a spill occurs from months of waiting for the relief wells to be drilled. That absolutely should change.
The people in charge who want to use this spill to pass further regulations were the people in charge when the regulations were not being enforced. I love how its the fault of people who don't like government regulations that the people who favor government regulations failed to enforce the regulations.
The MMS agents who failed to apply what regulations remained were appointed and directed by an aggressively anti-regulation Administration. You can blame Obama for either not realizing or choosing to fix the problem within MMS, and that is a completely valid criticism that I think should be remembered. Yet that still involves accepting that the anti-regulation philosophy endemic within MMS was foolish and needed to be fixed.
MMS was acting as your philosophy -- and obviously the philosophy of the last administration -- would have them act by not regulating. You can try to pass blame around for that reality however you want, it only emphasizes how obvious a mistake that was.
Because at the end of the day, no matter who you blame, it still remains true that it is the anti-regulation let-industry-police-itself philosophy that was tried, and found woefully inadequate.
However, I am always opposed to new regulations to address a problem that appears to have happened largely because exisitng regulations were not being followed. If regulators have failed to enforce existing regulations, what makes anyone think they will enforce any new regulations?
Because the lack of regulations, and the lack of regulatory enforcement, are closely related phenomenon. Both are the consequence of a government who, like you, viewed government regulation as a bad thing, and felt that industry was best left to itself. So they relaxed the regulations. And while they didn't succeed in getting rid of all regulations, that same philosophy carried over into the hiring and management of the regulatory body -- that the regulations they were supposed to be enforcing were not important, and industry should be given every benefit of the doubt that they were doing the right thing regardless of the letter of the law. Fundamentally, the the enforcers of the regulations didn't think the regulations should be enforced, and so they didn't.
In other words, it was the anti-regulation philosophy that caused the regulations to not be enforced.
You say that the problem was caused by the lack of regulation. But that presumes that the oil companies would not perform proper maintenance and safety procedures unless forced to. It presumes that the default case in the absence of regulation would be that BP shirked their responsibility and allowed this spill to occur. MMS needed to have prevented the spill which BP would have otherwise caused. Which is an accurate view of reality, but the opposite of the anti-regulation philosophy.
So there are two ways in which the anti-regulation philosophy falls short. Blaming the lack of regulatory enforcement for the spill is a perfect example of how.
And as to why anyone would think new regulations would be enforced? I think they would be, provided the enactment of new regulations -- which suggests a belief that regulations are important just like the repealing of regulations suggests a belief that they are not -- is coincident with a housecleaning of MMS and the hiring of people who are not of the anti-regulation philosophy and a director-level-on-down belief that yes, these regulations are important.
Do I think this certainly will happen? Not at all. The firing of the MMS director is just the start of a long road I'm not sure they're going to walk down. However, arguing that because regulations we demonstrably need to make industry do the right thing may not be sufficiently enforced, is not a reason to not have the regulations! It's an argument to press the government to focus on making sure their agents do enforce them.
If you're anti-regulation, latching onto the failure of MMS to keep BP as evidence of your cause is the last thing you want to do.
Besides, compared to regular inspections of safety equipment and so on, simply regulating the need for relief wells to be pre-drilled in case all the other safety regulations aren't followed would be quite likely to succeed. Your general dislike of regulation does not outweigh the need for simple improvements like this.
Somehow, I feel ashamed to know that fact, but I couldn't let it slide. ;)
I wouldn't feel ashamed for knowing. I'd be ashamed for not being able to let it slide. ;)
Having a gun pointed your head is something that I'm sure that teller is liable to remember far less than pleasantly for a long, long, time to come.
Yeah for sure, but he lived, and I'm not him and don't know him.
"Comedy is tragedy plus distance" -- my high school English teacher.
or for a more twisted take:
"Tragedy is if I get a paper cut. . . . Comedy is if you fall into an open sewer and die." --Mel Brooks
No, because they knew (or at least would know in a few years, I don't know when the orbit of Pluto was nailed down well enough) that Pluto crossed the orbit of Neptune and that it was a lot less massive than Neptune. The same heuristic argument that was made in 2006 could have been made in or shortly after 1930 and it would have the same result.
Pluto's orbit doesn't cross Neptune's orbit. It gets closer to the Sun than Neptune at one point in its orbit, but the orbits aren't actually close to each other because at that point Pluto is also well above the ecliptic. The IAU definition does not say orbits are not allowed to cross in any case, and it certainly doesn't say the planet must have a constant closer/farther relationship with other planets. Neptune has nothing to do with Pluto's definition as a dwarf planet.
Pluto is excluded because Pluto's own orbit has many asteroids in it that total up to many times Pluto's mass. It has not cleared its neighborhood, ergo it is not a planet.
They thought Pluto had roughly the mass of earth. They thought it was the only significant object in its orbit. They would have called it a planet by the IAU definition. They would have been -- were -- wrong.
Very salient information about Pluto has been acquired since it was first called a planet. Information that had it been known in 1930 would have prevented Pluto from ever being called a planet. It's the same story as with Ceres.
But no complaints about Ceres' status. How odd.
Nonsense. The definition only applies to the Solar System. The IAU said so. If you recall, this was one of my original complaints about the definition!
Yes, they didn't want to presume to define "planet" for ever system in the universe when our knowledge of other solar systems is so primitive. Yet, at the same time, one can craft the definition such that is amenable to extension to other systems. As we study other systems, we may learn that our definition isn't applicable at all and must be wildly revised. Or, because of their foresight, they can simply state that the definition does apply to all solar systems and there we go.
You're complaining about one of the wisest things they did.
And I don't see the advantages of creating an interminable argument over whether something is or isn't a planet (say, Pluto for example) simply because the original definition blew off defining a key term.
Because that's how you deal with the reality of the universe, that it frequently defies the human desire for strict classification. You don't draw an arbitrary line with infinite precision where no such line exists. That would be arbitrary and unscientific. Yes, it's true -- real science often involves accepting ambiguity.
However, there is no argument over whether or not Pluto is a planet amongst those who accept the IAU definition. The definition is completely unambiguous when it comes to every known object in our solar system. The only argument comes from those who want to draw a precise line so that Pluto is a planet.
For example, the heuristic I mentioned back a couple of posts happens to be a way to define a neighborhood of Pluto in a way that would be consistent with the IAU definition and Pluto as planet. The neighborhood just so happens to be defined to not contain Neptune.
As I said before, your heuristic requires drawing a very arbitrary line right in the middle of a huge gray area where there are many objects that are within a few percent of making or not making the cut. Your definition would also have included Haumea, Makemake, and Eris as planets as well as Ceres. You could jiggle your definition a tiny bit to exclude Haumea and Makemake maybe, but you can't include Pluto without including Eris and Ceres. But why exactly there? Why don't Haumea and Makemake or other slightly smaller objects not make the cut? There's absolutely no reason for such a precise line to be drawn through a freaking asteroid belt
I remember reading a story which went exactly like that. They were all "I'm sorry, he scored too high."
The Twilight Zone was probably ripped straight from the book (or was simply an adaptation). They said the same thing. The parents, who at the beginning had told their son it was important to do his best, took the news basically like they'd been told their son had died on the operating table -- a tragedy they just had to accept. Indicating that the program was working. :)