I agreee, and don't see Relativity as reason why FTL travel cannot happen. The idea that FTL violates causality is based on an extrapolation of Relativity.
Suppose you are holding a flashlight. You accelerate. No matter how fast you go, the light from your flashlight still seems to you to move away from yourself at light speed. You can be going nearly lightspeed, let's say 1000 kph slower than light, relative to other observers, and they will see the light from your flashlight moving only a little faster than you, and certainly not away from you at lightspeed. To them, it will appear to be moving at lightspeed relative to them, and you will appear to be moving at slightly less than lightspeed. Yet even as the observer sees the light from your flashlight moving away from you only 1000 kph faster than you, you see the light from your flashlight moving away from yourself at lightspeed. This inconsistency is resolved by time. You experience time more slowly than the observer. Your experience of time is slowed so that both you and the observer see the light from your flashlight moving at lightspeed.
The extrapolation is that to go faster than light, an object would have to experience time going backwards so that light still appears to move away at light speed. Experiencing time going backwards violates causality, causing all kinds of time travel paradoxes.
Why shouldn't it be possible to travel faster than light and not violate causality, not have to travel backwards in time? An object could go faster than light and still not arrive before it left. Maybe FTL can't be done with rocket motors, even hypothetical super rockets that don't have fuel problems, but warp drive could do it. Seems to me more likely that Relativity is not a complete explanation of the universe than that FTL travel is impossible.
I have no doubt that torrentz.eu would be seen as infringing copyright material.
I'm not so sure. Torrent sites merely link to material that may or may not be mostly copyrighted; they do not host it themselves.
If it were to go to court, based on the law as is written
Possibly even here, they would be declared innocent. But the law may have clauses that declare activities like merely linking, or not responding to takedown requests in a timely fashion, are infringing, and they'd be found guilty. Or the legal system may feel pressured to find them guilty even if the law doesn't have any such clauses. Hard to guess how a court case would turn out.
As to views on copyright, I too have at least one complication I haven't worked out, which is that copyleft depends on copyright. I would like to see copyright abolished. Patents too. But I like copyleft, and would like some means of keeping that viable. I think the intent of copyleft can be preserved through other means, and we can repeal copyright law. Then we could at last have our digital public library. As to how artists would make a living without copyright, I think there are sufficient other ways that they could be fairly compensated, even better than they are now under our current very poor system.
You are talking like a law and order person who never questions whether copyright is good, fair, and balanced. You just jumped right to an examination of whether torrentz.eu aids others to infringe on copyrights as if its beyond question that that's Bad, and declared that its so obvious that torrentz.eu does so that anyone who tries to argue otherwise is being stupid, and that there's no doubt torrent sites are Guilty Guilty Guilty.
Of course they link to pirated material! But is that so bad, really? It's actually the opposite. The right to share knowledge is fundamental to our civilization, and we should not allow some private interests to buffalo us into accepting a false equivalence between property rights for material things and copyright law. Every time someone asserts that copying is stealing, that's what they do. Piracy is good. The real crime is the suppression of our rights, and the criminals are not torrentz.eu operators or even users, but this police force and their real masters who seem to prefer to remain in the shadows.
Evidently these masters don't like the glare of publicity, and the most probable reason for that dislike is that they know the public would strongly disapprove of their conduct and motives. From what I've read elsewhere in these threads, this City of London Police is a weird little police force more answerable to corporations than the public. Well now they've done it. They've called international attention upon themselves. They've clothed themselves as police, as guardians of law and order, and it's not at all clear that they should be allowed to continue to do so. I should not be too surprised to see talk of reining in this "police" force and forcing them back under the rock from which they crawled. And if they won't back down, then they will be changed, perhaps disbanded.
Publishers, especially Elsevier, deserve a good kicking. They've profited by screwing authors and customers. They've done all in their power to hold back progress, for the sake of their antiquated and extremely inefficient business model. They've crossed the line repeatedly, suing customers, clinging hard to bad logic (copying = stealing, DRM is good and it works). and spewing propaganda based on it.
Authors, whom one might expect to be just a little wiser, a little more in touch with reality, have, with a few notable exceptions, fallen for publisher bull. It's hard to be sympathetic to the struggling authors who insist that their customers stick with dead trees or wear DRM chains because that's the only way they can think to make the system work so they can earn a living. Telling fans that not wearing DRM chains is somehow unfair to authors is a fast way to lose them. That's logic from the same murky depths of religious dogma that says because the Bible is the Word of God, and it says God created the World and everything in it in 7 days, so therefore evolution is false. I talked with a number of authors at a GenCon, and found a mix of denial, despair, and anger over their imagined plight. I was quite disappointed with Nebula Award winning author Ursula LeGuin when she complained about Cory Doctorow over a usage issue. Many of her works are very liberal, and to see that apparently old age has turned her into not just a conservative on this issue, but a wrong-headed one, is sad. Good authors are supposed to be progressive thinkers, supposed to challenge our dogma, our assumptions, and help us take the tints off the glasses through which we all view the world.
Speaking of fantasies, how about the flying car? Some people still play with jetpacks. The problem is not just energy, but that controlled flight takes a lot more brains than was appreciated. And our mechanical prowess has never been up to the delicacy required to build light enough wings that flap well enough to actually achieve flight, so we've had to compromise with fixed wing designs.
As to wrong science, one idea from the 19th century was "calorie", a fluid that moved heat. Wikipedia has a nice list of wrong ideas in science that gained some popularity and acceptance.
Circumstances are changing. The way our road system and automobiles work now, yes, efficiency at low speeds is more important. But improvements to combustion engines won't amount to much if we all end up switching to electric cars as I think likely in the next few decades. However, aerodynamics will still be important. Going electric will address the issue of low speed efficiency so well that we'll have to look elsewhere for improvements. Being able to shut down while waiting at a red light is a huge gain, and electric motors can handle that easily.
Another definite possibility is switching to driverless cars, and the removal of all traffic lights as such cars would coordinate so well with each other that lights would no longer be needed. We'd be traveling around faster, and that would of course make aerodynamics more important.
Only way aerodynamics won't matter is if we travel in a vacuum, and that's not too likely any time soon. Can't see the gains of enclosing a highway in an airtight tube and pumping out all the air as ever more than the costs of building and maintaining it and equipping cars with pressurized cabins and fresh air. Might compromise and go with reduced air pressure, but then aerodynamics would still matter.
Yes, dimples work. Dimples are one kind of vortex generator. But, a golf ball has to have dimples all over it because it tumbles. On a car, vortex generators are best on trailing edges only. Likely Mythbusters would have gotten even better fuel economy if they'd used dimples only in the right places. The Corbin Motors Sparrow had some. There are also vortex generators intended to be added to the sides and tops of truck trailers, at the rear edge.
Here are some hard numbers: the Aerocivic. With home made modifications to the shape, this guy doubled the fuel economy of an ordinary Honda Civic, from its pretty good factory rating of about 47 mpg to 95 mpg.
10%+ increase in efficiency gets automakers' attention? No it doesn't.
If they were really serious about fuel economy, they'd go to work on the aerdynamics for starters. Current vehicles have far too much air resistance. And actually they know this. They don't improve the aerodynamics for several reasons. They're afraid the public will think it ugly, and they think it will cost more to manufacture. One of the simplest improvements are skirts for the rear wheels. Every time it's been tried, the public rejects it. Another easy improvement is smoothing the underside. But that costs more, and not just during manufacturing. It also increases maintenance costs as it's one more item that has to be removed to service much of the car.
For me, cutting back on sugar was the breakthrough. No more soft drinks or sugar candies. Altoids, Starburst, and Skittles are 99% sugar with a little flavoring. I still like all those junk foods, but I stay away. Tried dried and sugared mangoes, but still too much. Don't eat anything that's more than 1/3 sugar, and seldom eat things that are between 1/4 and 1/3 sugar. That includes quite a few brands and varieties of supposedly healthy granola bars. Some of those granola bars are worse than candy bars.
My acne is far better. Entirely gone for days at a time, and when a pimple does show it's because I backslid a bit and had something sweet, usually a shake or some ice cream, and that always at the urgings of family. I would not have any if I wasn't being so polite and social. Why others just have to press junk food on me is a bit of a mystery. It's like they subconsciously or perhaps consciously hope to make me fat like them.
When will public libraries be allowed to go fully digital? Put the entire Library of Congress and more online, for free, no copyright restrictions. Research would be freely available and easily found, not locked behind paywalls. It would be a huge public good. But I can't see this ever happening while copyright law exists. Seems like the law is slower than glacial, and lawmakers' thinking is stuck in the 1950s and turned towards money, not the public good. I think it would be best to abolish copyright, perhaps replacing it with some other kind of right, something more enforceable and fairer, like a "public performance right". Copyleft would also change. Though I don't think it will happen that way. Instead, in 100 years I suspect we'll still have some law called copyright, but it will be so radically altered that the name won't fit it any more.
Don't feel too sure about Google books either. A private corporation gets to index everything, while we sit idle and wonder what price Google will eventually slip us.
The most offensive part of the publishing industry is research. We, the people, pay for all this research out of our tax money, employing thousands of professors and researchers at hundreds of universities to do research and review each others' works at our expense, then these private publishers are allowed to lock it all away. That's the very thing Aaron Swartz was protesting.
I think advertising is only one of the symptoms, a part of a pattern of lies and bull. We've made educational achievement worth less than it used to be. Kids aren't stupid. When they see the straight A student not getting the job, the girl or boy, or any kind of reward, and indeed see this student vilified for being nerdy, spoiling the curve, and making everyone else look bad, what are they to think? At least the hate shows that people value intelligence if only in a backhanded way. But then the nice jobs go to the bosses' relatives and friends, the football coach is the highest paid employee of the school system, the teachers (many of whom were themselves poor achievers when they were the students) show jealousy and prejudice against intelligence, and many rich kids behave horribly and irresponsibly, maybe getting high and drunk and accidentally mowing down a hapless pedestrian with their high end sports car, and are let off easy. As adults, many move on to Wall Street, cheat and make a killing, then when the economy crashes, buffalo the entire nation into letting bygones be bygones because they're Too Big To Fail. Meanwhile, the intelligent kids who make a mistake get the book thrown at them because they're smart and should have known better.
There still has to be a pretense of a reason for making an unfair decision, but the veneer is pretty see-through thin.
That's a bad analogy. Copying does not compare with a shooting. Much better to compare copying to consensual sex.
If there are no spies, moles, blackmailers and the like among the participants, the chance of outsiders learning that it happened is very low. If all parties are virus free, no one gets hurt. If they're also using contraceptives effectively, consequences are limited to whatever 3rd parties might discover and become sanctimonious, jealous and angry about. But copying is even easier. Two people can swap flash drives even faster and more discretely than they can have sex. They can also do it more anonymously than even two partners separated by a wall with a glory hole. Can use a drop off, so they don't have to both be present at the same time. Minors down to the age of 2 could swap flash drives.
Laws against sex with minors are difficult to enforce, but desirable and doable. The public wants these. Still, there are pitfalls. For instance, if someone draws cartoons of child porn, is that illegal? On the other hand, laws against sodomy don't have much public support. What harm are two consenting adults doing to society by so engaging? None at all. This point goes double for copying. No one is getting hurt, except in the imaginations of intellectual property supporters. Do you think a levy upon sex could ever be successfully imposed? Think of the businesses that are hurt because they can't collect levies on every act of sex!
Obviously, sex is absolutely vital to our survival. Sharing is almost that important. One of the biggest transfers of information is school. We freely educate our children. We provide them with textbooks. We ought to do a better job with those books, stop handing millions to publishers whom we do not need, and instead create open ebooks. It's beginning to happen. Our civilization depends on this transfer of knowledge to our children. Science also depends upon sharing of knowledge. We have a number of urgent problems we need to work on. If our civilization collapses because we didn't puzzle it through fast enough because we were all forced to wait around for permission to share, it may be no more than we deserve for being such idiots. That is the activity that these parasites of the intellect want to restrict and control, claiming it is for the sake of those poor starving artists who have so many other ways to make a living from art.
You want what they make, and you don't want to pay for it
No! For starters, we demand a share of the vast savings technology has enabled. We built the Internet. It's far, far cheaper to download an ebook or mp3 file than to obtain a paperback or a CD. An author's share of a sale via physical media was a dismally low percentage of somewhere around 5%. With much of the overhead eliminated, that should improve. Industry has grudgingly accepted this, but that's only the start, and they're still a bit high.
But the core of the matter has not been addressed. Copying is so cheap and easy that trying to regulate, tax, and impose levies on it is now the biggest impediment to sharing. It's like being asked to pay stud fees to breed horses for riding, when we all use cars now. It's an obsolete and harmful business model. A good near term goal is the digitization of our public libraries. We should be able to download anything the library has, anytime we want. No trip to a library building needed, no waiting in line at the counter to check out physical media, no having to return physical copies by a certain date or get hammered with late fees, even to the point of having a warrant put out. And no more card catalogs. The library would be so much more searchable. Why can't we have this? There are business models that work well with the digital public library, but the dinosaurs of Big Media refuse to believe any of them could really work, and instead have done all they can to block and delay progress.
they're not stealing from me!
They are stealing from us. What do you think copyright term extensions are? Suddenly everything created after 1926 was snatched back out of the public domain. And, are you aware of the raw deal researchers get? Turn over all rights, for the privilege of getting published. Technically, researchers can't give out copies of their own works, without permission from the publisher! Some publishers have tried to take advantage of this by locking everything behind paywalls. Research paid for by the public, denied to all of us and the authors! You heard about Aaron Swartz, didn't you?
But the biggest theft is that we can't legally create a digital public library, and reap the immense savings and huge increases in capabilities and capacities going digital would bring. Are we all just going to sit this out, while the likes of Google puts together their version of the digital library that isn't quite as public as it ought to be?
The thing is, I haven't come across any material I consider essential. Didn't know about Pike's work. Online documentation is too often lacking. A lot of books are crap. There are good ones, but programming is such a large subject that a few books can't cover everything. A programming language is only the surface. Should also have references to libraries, references to helper tools like the make utility, organizational tools like a guide to Agile programming techniques and a reference to a code repository management tool like CVS. General usage information like "man bash", a small reference of essential vi or emacs commands, and maybe some handy debugger commands for gdb, and some knowledge of the base utilities and layout of a typical UNIX like system so one knows that "ls/usr/bin" lists several hundred utilities that may be worth looking up in "man". Sure, an integrated development environment like Eclipse can replace some of that, but not all. Some knowledge of heavy duty utilities like a database (MariaDB), and especially the basics of SQL, can also be good to have. Then there's networking. One ought to know of sockets and enough TCP/IP to put them to use where appropriate. Not necessary to know the gory details, just need some knowledge of their abilities and limitations and how to call on them. Another essential area of knowledge closely related to networking is the World Wide Web. Know enough HTML to construct a simple web page. Some knowledge of the capabilities and options in Apache configuration files can be of use. System administration is another area that's good to have some experience in, say by trying to install Linux on your own PC and, once that's done, tinkering with firewall rules, setting up a mail server, configuring some hardware, and so on. All this is knowledge of the craft. Also important is the science, and for that, need to have studied a little algorithms, enough to have an idea what Big O is about.
Of the good books, many like Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Lieserson, and Rivest are really rather narrow. The pseudocode is good enough that a person can translate the examples into a working programming language without entirely understanding the algorithm, and get a working function. And yet, the sort of programmers who spend all their time gluing library functions together are not going to find this book of much use.
A decent reference book for the programming language of the day is useful. The Camel book for Perl is still good, as Perl 6 still hasn't been released last time I checked. Not that I've looked all that hard, but I haven't found any book about Javascript that covers the language with minimal to no flowery verbiage, and is also up to date. No book on Javascript published before 2010 is going to cover certain very important improvements. There are hundreds of books about C/C++, and most of them seem to be garbage. Java has a similar problem. Some take 10 pages to flog a trivial example to death, to explain something that should have taken one paragraph. Many get lost in the trivia, covering the details of something like operator overloading, with overly simplistic examples that come across as contrived and so fail to show the usefulness. Very hard to show the value of OOP with tiny trivial examples that fit on 1 or 2 pages, so they resort to basically saying "trust us, OOP really is a useful time saver and organizer for large projects".
Books about utilities can be good. But they are of course also quite narrow. For instance, the book about GNU Make covers its subject well. Books about CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, or whatever repository software is being used are hit and miss, sometimes okay, and sometimes barely edited assemblages of online documentation that could have used some polishing but didn't get any. HTML is another narrow subject that can burn up more shelf space. Some of these books are massive tomes that seem only to have all those pages to look more impressive.
Much of this conversation is beside the point. You talk like DRM is an acceptable tool for a desirable motive. It is neither.
Not only is DRM an unsound idea that simply does not work, it and the idea of intellectual property it's meant to protect are immoral. That's right, immoral. Our very ability to communicate with each other, and share valuable ideas and information, is at the core of our intelligence, and is what put us on top of the animal kingdom. Sharing is a natural right. To give that up, voluntarily give that up, is to embrace a new status making us no better than sheep, fit only to be fleeced repeatedly. These scumbags in the content industries have misunderstood, perhaps deliberately, the differences between ownership and authorship, and the material and scarce vs the immaterial. Authorship does not mean the power to deny all usage and derivate work, until they get around to individually approving each proposal and only if they please. They are out to control all communications, stifling that which they can't manage, which by necessity would be the bulk of all communication as they haven't the means to handle the sheer quantity, by asserting that they should be compensated every time people share anything they were in any way involved in, and that the only fair way to accomplish this is by controlling all copying so every single occurrence of it can be taxed. And of course to do that requires extreme control of the sort necessary to make DRM actually function somewhat.
If there are risks in fighting DRM, it is our civic duty to take those risks, to preserve the freedoms our ancestors fought so hard to win for us. The risks are in any case little enough. The control freaks who want to monopolize and monetize all content do not have the power to go after everyone. There are other ways to compensate artists. Big Media still doesn't want to be bothered trying them, and admitting that they might work. Instead they have the gall to ask the rest of us to make the truly insane sacrifices it would take to really make their horrible vision work, and act as if they aren't asking much, putting on this hurt and baffled attitude and crying that artists will surely starve. We are NOT going to give up the Internet, flash drives, cell phones, home movie theaters, or even public libraries and used book stores. We are not going to turn the clock back to the 1980s, and artists will not starve and art will still be created.
This ramming of DRM down our collective throats and into the HTML standard is at best a waste of effort that will have no effect. At worst, it will harm the Internet, slowing it down and blocking some things. If, somehow, it kills the Internet, Big Media would celebrate. That's the kind of trolls they are. But it won't accomplish the destruction of the Internet or the elimination of piracy. I think the only reason the DRM was allowed is that we knew it would be ineffective and only slightly damaging if that, and so we could afford to humor them in this matter. And they problably bribed key people, maybe tried some threats too.
This is what I'd like to see next, an orbiter for each planet. Perhaps orbiters for planets that have not yet had one should be the top space exploration priority. And, launch one for Neptune first because that's the longer trip.
After our own solar system is thoroughly explored, what's next? Giant telescope arrays orbiting the sun as far out or further than the gas giants? An interstellar probe? A close look at Proxima and Alpha Centauri would be fantastic, but getting a working probe there is beyond our current technology. We can't accelerate a probe to 1% of light speed and make it last the approximate 700 years needed for that trip, or any other combination of time and speed. Or, colonize Mars? That one is appealing, but I think too hard for now. Just getting a man to Mars is I think further away than most people realize. Months in space, have to handle radiation, lots of supplies or get better at recycling, and for what? Nothing that a robot can't do for far less risk and money.
Sometimes I test surveillance. I look at porno sites, for just that purpose. (Really! Okay, I also sometimes look at those sites for fun.) See if any agency is dumb enough to let me know they're spying on me by telling me what a naughty person I am for looking at such things. So far, no warnings about that.
I also sometimes download content that may be copyrighted, again to test the temper. So far, my ISP has not sent me any warnings that they've detected piracy, no threats to cut my service. Nor have I received any threatening letters from the entertainment industry, no attempt to shake me down for $3000 for one song.
Still, I am also a little careful. Don't talk in certain ways about terrorism, assassination, wacky fringe politics and religion, etc. Remember Steve Jackson Games vs. the US Secret Service, when some idiot enforcers took a game seriously and went ape.
The one time I did detect snooping was in the mid 90s, when my ISP was Prodigy. They were big on "protecting" their customers from the big bad scary Internet, and if that meant being a little nosy, well that was just the price customers were expected to live with. I was writing a complaint about the service when my modem mysteriously dropped the call. Dialed back in and surfed for a few moments to check that all was well, and saw no problems. Started my complaint again, and halfway into it, was dropped again. Tried a 3rd time with the same result. Canceled Prodigy the next day.
Now, now, just because life isn't infinitely valuable doesn't mean it's cheap. We like to feel that life is priceless, but that's a conceit. We could make roads much safer, reducing fatalities to almost none by reducing speed limits everywhere to 20 mph, but we have not. We can have middle ground on this. We can accept principles such as weregild that have influenced our laws for centuries.
As for this call to average the economic damage over industries, I think nuclear power is worth using, if the only alternative is coal. Nuclear is better than coal. But coal is not the only other option. That's another fallacious point I often see in favor of nuclear, this deliberate disregard of solar and wind, and hydro. "Alternative" fuels are quickly dismissed as inadequate, too hard to scale up to the amounts needed to replace coal. Although they too have some problems. scale isn't an insurmountable one with them. It's quite doable, and will create far more jobs than that miserable Keystone XL pipeline. Oh, and climate change damage of solar, wind, and hydro? Practically none, same as nuclear.
Apologies to people who have lost friends or relatives in plane crashes, but we haven't called for bans on planes because crashes, while tragic, simply aren't that devastating. We have however made other changes, banning planes from certain areas. We have considered banning offshore oil drilling altogether, because of the dangers. Climate Disruption, dire though it may be, is not as bad as "Nuclear Twilight" which according to what I've heard, would occur even if we had only a small nuclear war, like Pakistan vs India. Cold is not the worst problem, it's the blocking of sunlight for years which would kill all our crops. Most of us would starve. We might all end up dead in that scenario, some killed off by the initial blasts, some by radiation poisoning, some by severe cold weather, and the rest by starvation and each other, fighting over what was left. Climate Disruption could also push us over the edge, triggering food shortages that some nations may be willing to go to war, even nuclear war, to deal with even though it's not really a solution. But there is hope we would not go to that extreme, even in the face of death by starvation.
Using number of deaths as a measure of danger is misleading. By a measure like that, Hurricane Andrew was a lesser disaster than some bus crashes. Hydroelectric power could be considered extremely dangerous, thanks to the Banqiao Dam.
A better measure could be the economic damage. Fukushima is estimated to cost $500 billion. The Banqiao Dam failure is part of the damage caused by Typhoon Nina, which is estimated at $1.2 billion in 1975 dollars. Bhopal is a bit more difficult to fix a cost, but damage payouts total about $500 million. There's no denying that chemical plants can cause big disasters, but from these numbers we see that chemical plants and dams simply aren't in the same league as nuclear power plants.
Do you have any problem with the fact that some time in the distant future, the sun will stop shining? Maybe 5 billion years from now? No problem?
Okay, how about the fact that rivers change course? The Mississippi might have already switched to the Atchafalaya, if not for our meddling. We don't want New Orleans made useless. No problem with that either?
Then, what of the fact that large and powerful corporations lie, and engage in propaganda campaigns? You know, like Big Tobacco did? And like Wall Street did not too long ago with home mortgages? And like Big Oil does now? Big Oil lies about a lot of things, like the safety of offshore oil drilling. An accident like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn't supposed to happen. When it did, they kept right on lying, about the rate of the leak and the amount of damage it was doing. Are we still okay here? Corporations routinely tell self serving lies, agreed? And surely you see that, whether or not Climate Disruption is real, Big Oil is highly motivated to be dismissive of warnings about it. If Climate Disruption is real and a huge problem, and Big Oil knows it, would they attempt to distract and deceive the public with propaganda campaigns? Yes, yes, they would. Still with me, I hope?
Now let's look at the other side. Either a) scientists are right and Climate Disruption is real, happening right now, and will cause huge problems. Or b) scientists are united in a big conspiracy to lie about Climate Disruption because it gets them more grant money, or c) scientists are morons and are getting it all wrong. The trouble with b) and c) is that they are not at all credible. I hope no one seriously credits c), it's just too implausible. As for b), you do realize that the flow of grant money does not much depend on the subject matter. If anything, being forced to study and restudy the climate takes away money that could have been used for other science. The public has turned negative and cut back funding for all science, so I'd have to say the Great Conspiracy, if it exists, is not working and if anything is backfiring. And do you suppose smarties like scientists wouldn't see that? And if their main interest was grant money, wouldn't they change their tune to the nicey nicey good news the public seems to want? Why haven't they done so then? Why haven't they dropped this story of Climate Disruption like a radioactive spud, given the damage it's doing to scientific funding? Could it be because it's real, and scientists are honestly worried about it?
Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public key encryption schemes.
As for the evidence you demand, the "large scale changes", you have only to open your eyes and admit that what's right in front of your nose is indeed exactly that. Just 180 years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about 280 ppm. Now it's 400ppm, certainly higher than it has been in nearly 1 million years, and probably higher than any level in the last 20 million years. That is a very fast change. We're seeing ocean acidification. And we are indeed seeing higher average temperatures. In recent years, we've had far more record highs than record lows. The Arctic Ice Cap is smaller than it has ever been in recorded history. Antarctic ice shelves such as Larson A and B have collapsed. How can you hear of such events and not think they are significant?
He's in favor of nuclear power? I would be too, except for certain kinds of problems.
Yes, nuclear power can be generated safely. That is, we can keep the risks to acceptably low levels. We also have vastly improved designs we can employ, and there are huge quantities of thorium we could use in a different kind of reactor. We may eventually figure a way to economically generate power from fusion rather than fission. Getting rid of radioactive material in a reactor designed for that could make the environment cleaner. Replacing coal power plants with something better is highly desirable.
The problem is, as I keep saying, the human factor. Mistakes have horrible consequences because we can't easily clean up the mess from an accident. If we didn't have to wait centuries before contaminated land was again safe to inhabit because we could clean up after a disaster, it would be different. How long will it take for the Gulf of Mexico to fully recover from the BP oil spill? Decades, it seems. But that's better than the prospects of recovery from a nuclear accident.
Sooner or later, at a few nuclear power plants, the management team reaches a critical mass of idiocy. Fukushima showed that. So do many oil spills. The fools among the managers will cut corners if allowed. They will cut back on inspections and maintenance. They will neglect safety systems, even going as far as never building them adequately in the first place. They will bully engineers, pressure them to go along. They don't care about the risks they are taking, all they care about is the bottom line and the immediate.
The other huge human problem with nuclear power is weaponization. If I understand the issues correctly, there is no good reason for a nation like Iran to be attempting to build the particular kinds of reactors they might claim are only for generating power. Other kinds of reactors would be all around better-- easier to build, more economical to run, and safer. Today, the only reason to build reactors that require enriched uranium is that it's the easiest fuel to convert to nuclear bombs. The Cold War is over, but the danger that a nuclear war could break out is still high, maybe higher now than during most of the Cold War.
Nearly everyone fights change. In the absence of good reasons, MS will desperately push out slanted, factually incorrect studies with huge omissions. And it works. Local governments gratefully seize on these as the excuses to keep their old Windows systems.
Software is a big excuse. For example, somehow, computers in the public library can't simply be connected to the Internet, no. They have to have nannyware. On further inquiry, it turns out that such software has to be approved, and approval is a lengthy process. Naturally, the approved nannyware is Windows only. (What nannyware is there for Linux?) They will wax poetic about how they don't want the town to be sued because Little Johnny saw something inappropriate on a computer at the library. Yes, Little Johnny's eyes are why they can't switch away from Windows, even in the back office in city hall.
The most likely way to get the local politicians and bureaucrats to move on something like that is to make them more afraid of not doing it. Repeat, over and over, that Windows is much less secure. Ask them if they'd enjoy being sued because Big John had his passwords intercepted on a library computer. Or sued because hackers broke into their database and got all their information about property owners in the town. Would they enjoy being another Target? Saving money also gets their attention, but not as much as fear.
You'd think that the military, an organization that is under constant attack, would want more security than Windows has. Maybe more than plain Linux, maybe SELinux, or OpenBSD. Or make their own, which they can afford to do. But no. The soldiers are mostly young men who grew up with PCs that had Windows installed. The officers will argue that it is also important that soldiers be able to do their jobs, and that's why they have to have Windows, because that's what they know. Train them on other OSes? Never! The officers aren't experts with computers either, and will demand contradictory and downright stupid things of any proposed replacement. They will also want to be in control, and try to keep everything secret, thus virtually guaranteeing that any project they launch will fail. Though they have the resources, their ability to make their own is poor. Another excuse in the US is the home grown argument. MS is American, Linux is not. Who knows what hacks some foreigners might have inserted in Linux, as if, unlike MS's code, they can't check the source themselves, and as if MS never outsources any software engineering work or hires foreigners.
If a competent programmer who knows SQL and C/C++, and a few other languages, maybe Java and LISP, can't learn enough NoSQL and Python in two weeks to start being productive, then NoSQL and Python are bad platforms and languages. A newcomer will not learn all the quirks, tricks, and libraries in 2 weeks, but doesn't have to. Don't have to know half of the typical bloated language to do useful work in it. As for the cloud, someone experienced with system administration ought to be able to pick up enough to make some good use of it in less than a week.
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I agreee, and don't see Relativity as reason why FTL travel cannot happen. The idea that FTL violates causality is based on an extrapolation of Relativity.
Suppose you are holding a flashlight. You accelerate. No matter how fast you go, the light from your flashlight still seems to you to move away from yourself at light speed. You can be going nearly lightspeed, let's say 1000 kph slower than light, relative to other observers, and they will see the light from your flashlight moving only a little faster than you, and certainly not away from you at lightspeed. To them, it will appear to be moving at lightspeed relative to them, and you will appear to be moving at slightly less than lightspeed. Yet even as the observer sees the light from your flashlight moving away from you only 1000 kph faster than you, you see the light from your flashlight moving away from yourself at lightspeed. This inconsistency is resolved by time. You experience time more slowly than the observer. Your experience of time is slowed so that both you and the observer see the light from your flashlight moving at lightspeed.
The extrapolation is that to go faster than light, an object would have to experience time going backwards so that light still appears to move away at light speed. Experiencing time going backwards violates causality, causing all kinds of time travel paradoxes.
Why shouldn't it be possible to travel faster than light and not violate causality, not have to travel backwards in time? An object could go faster than light and still not arrive before it left. Maybe FTL can't be done with rocket motors, even hypothetical super rockets that don't have fuel problems, but warp drive could do it. Seems to me more likely that Relativity is not a complete explanation of the universe than that FTL travel is impossible.
I have no doubt that torrentz.eu would be seen as infringing copyright material.
I'm not so sure. Torrent sites merely link to material that may or may not be mostly copyrighted; they do not host it themselves.
If it were to go to court, based on the law as is written
Possibly even here, they would be declared innocent. But the law may have clauses that declare activities like merely linking, or not responding to takedown requests in a timely fashion, are infringing, and they'd be found guilty. Or the legal system may feel pressured to find them guilty even if the law doesn't have any such clauses. Hard to guess how a court case would turn out.
As to views on copyright, I too have at least one complication I haven't worked out, which is that copyleft depends on copyright. I would like to see copyright abolished. Patents too. But I like copyleft, and would like some means of keeping that viable. I think the intent of copyleft can be preserved through other means, and we can repeal copyright law. Then we could at last have our digital public library. As to how artists would make a living without copyright, I think there are sufficient other ways that they could be fairly compensated, even better than they are now under our current very poor system.
You are talking like a law and order person who never questions whether copyright is good, fair, and balanced. You just jumped right to an examination of whether torrentz.eu aids others to infringe on copyrights as if its beyond question that that's Bad, and declared that its so obvious that torrentz.eu does so that anyone who tries to argue otherwise is being stupid, and that there's no doubt torrent sites are Guilty Guilty Guilty.
Of course they link to pirated material! But is that so bad, really? It's actually the opposite. The right to share knowledge is fundamental to our civilization, and we should not allow some private interests to buffalo us into accepting a false equivalence between property rights for material things and copyright law. Every time someone asserts that copying is stealing, that's what they do. Piracy is good. The real crime is the suppression of our rights, and the criminals are not torrentz.eu operators or even users, but this police force and their real masters who seem to prefer to remain in the shadows.
Evidently these masters don't like the glare of publicity, and the most probable reason for that dislike is that they know the public would strongly disapprove of their conduct and motives. From what I've read elsewhere in these threads, this City of London Police is a weird little police force more answerable to corporations than the public. Well now they've done it. They've called international attention upon themselves. They've clothed themselves as police, as guardians of law and order, and it's not at all clear that they should be allowed to continue to do so. I should not be too surprised to see talk of reining in this "police" force and forcing them back under the rock from which they crawled. And if they won't back down, then they will be changed, perhaps disbanded.
Publishers, especially Elsevier, deserve a good kicking. They've profited by screwing authors and customers. They've done all in their power to hold back progress, for the sake of their antiquated and extremely inefficient business model. They've crossed the line repeatedly, suing customers, clinging hard to bad logic (copying = stealing, DRM is good and it works). and spewing propaganda based on it.
Authors, whom one might expect to be just a little wiser, a little more in touch with reality, have, with a few notable exceptions, fallen for publisher bull. It's hard to be sympathetic to the struggling authors who insist that their customers stick with dead trees or wear DRM chains because that's the only way they can think to make the system work so they can earn a living. Telling fans that not wearing DRM chains is somehow unfair to authors is a fast way to lose them. That's logic from the same murky depths of religious dogma that says because the Bible is the Word of God, and it says God created the World and everything in it in 7 days, so therefore evolution is false. I talked with a number of authors at a GenCon, and found a mix of denial, despair, and anger over their imagined plight. I was quite disappointed with Nebula Award winning author Ursula LeGuin when she complained about Cory Doctorow over a usage issue. Many of her works are very liberal, and to see that apparently old age has turned her into not just a conservative on this issue, but a wrong-headed one, is sad. Good authors are supposed to be progressive thinkers, supposed to challenge our dogma, our assumptions, and help us take the tints off the glasses through which we all view the world.
Speaking of fantasies, how about the flying car? Some people still play with jetpacks. The problem is not just energy, but that controlled flight takes a lot more brains than was appreciated. And our mechanical prowess has never been up to the delicacy required to build light enough wings that flap well enough to actually achieve flight, so we've had to compromise with fixed wing designs.
As to wrong science, one idea from the 19th century was "calorie", a fluid that moved heat. Wikipedia has a nice list of wrong ideas in science that gained some popularity and acceptance.
Circumstances are changing. The way our road system and automobiles work now, yes, efficiency at low speeds is more important. But improvements to combustion engines won't amount to much if we all end up switching to electric cars as I think likely in the next few decades. However, aerodynamics will still be important. Going electric will address the issue of low speed efficiency so well that we'll have to look elsewhere for improvements. Being able to shut down while waiting at a red light is a huge gain, and electric motors can handle that easily.
Another definite possibility is switching to driverless cars, and the removal of all traffic lights as such cars would coordinate so well with each other that lights would no longer be needed. We'd be traveling around faster, and that would of course make aerodynamics more important.
Only way aerodynamics won't matter is if we travel in a vacuum, and that's not too likely any time soon. Can't see the gains of enclosing a highway in an airtight tube and pumping out all the air as ever more than the costs of building and maintaining it and equipping cars with pressurized cabins and fresh air. Might compromise and go with reduced air pressure, but then aerodynamics would still matter.
Yes, dimples work. Dimples are one kind of vortex generator. But, a golf ball has to have dimples all over it because it tumbles. On a car, vortex generators are best on trailing edges only. Likely Mythbusters would have gotten even better fuel economy if they'd used dimples only in the right places. The Corbin Motors Sparrow had some. There are also vortex generators intended to be added to the sides and tops of truck trailers, at the rear edge.
Here are some hard numbers: the Aerocivic. With home made modifications to the shape, this guy doubled the fuel economy of an ordinary Honda Civic, from its pretty good factory rating of about 47 mpg to 95 mpg.
10%+ increase in efficiency gets automakers' attention? No it doesn't.
If they were really serious about fuel economy, they'd go to work on the aerdynamics for starters. Current vehicles have far too much air resistance. And actually they know this. They don't improve the aerodynamics for several reasons. They're afraid the public will think it ugly, and they think it will cost more to manufacture. One of the simplest improvements are skirts for the rear wheels. Every time it's been tried, the public rejects it. Another easy improvement is smoothing the underside. But that costs more, and not just during manufacturing. It also increases maintenance costs as it's one more item that has to be removed to service much of the car.
For me, cutting back on sugar was the breakthrough. No more soft drinks or sugar candies. Altoids, Starburst, and Skittles are 99% sugar with a little flavoring. I still like all those junk foods, but I stay away. Tried dried and sugared mangoes, but still too much. Don't eat anything that's more than 1/3 sugar, and seldom eat things that are between 1/4 and 1/3 sugar. That includes quite a few brands and varieties of supposedly healthy granola bars. Some of those granola bars are worse than candy bars.
My acne is far better. Entirely gone for days at a time, and when a pimple does show it's because I backslid a bit and had something sweet, usually a shake or some ice cream, and that always at the urgings of family. I would not have any if I wasn't being so polite and social. Why others just have to press junk food on me is a bit of a mystery. It's like they subconsciously or perhaps consciously hope to make me fat like them.
When will public libraries be allowed to go fully digital? Put the entire Library of Congress and more online, for free, no copyright restrictions. Research would be freely available and easily found, not locked behind paywalls. It would be a huge public good. But I can't see this ever happening while copyright law exists. Seems like the law is slower than glacial, and lawmakers' thinking is stuck in the 1950s and turned towards money, not the public good. I think it would be best to abolish copyright, perhaps replacing it with some other kind of right, something more enforceable and fairer, like a "public performance right". Copyleft would also change. Though I don't think it will happen that way. Instead, in 100 years I suspect we'll still have some law called copyright, but it will be so radically altered that the name won't fit it any more.
Don't feel too sure about Google books either. A private corporation gets to index everything, while we sit idle and wonder what price Google will eventually slip us.
The most offensive part of the publishing industry is research. We, the people, pay for all this research out of our tax money, employing thousands of professors and researchers at hundreds of universities to do research and review each others' works at our expense, then these private publishers are allowed to lock it all away. That's the very thing Aaron Swartz was protesting.
I think advertising is only one of the symptoms, a part of a pattern of lies and bull. We've made educational achievement worth less than it used to be. Kids aren't stupid. When they see the straight A student not getting the job, the girl or boy, or any kind of reward, and indeed see this student vilified for being nerdy, spoiling the curve, and making everyone else look bad, what are they to think? At least the hate shows that people value intelligence if only in a backhanded way. But then the nice jobs go to the bosses' relatives and friends, the football coach is the highest paid employee of the school system, the teachers (many of whom were themselves poor achievers when they were the students) show jealousy and prejudice against intelligence, and many rich kids behave horribly and irresponsibly, maybe getting high and drunk and accidentally mowing down a hapless pedestrian with their high end sports car, and are let off easy. As adults, many move on to Wall Street, cheat and make a killing, then when the economy crashes, buffalo the entire nation into letting bygones be bygones because they're Too Big To Fail. Meanwhile, the intelligent kids who make a mistake get the book thrown at them because they're smart and should have known better.
There still has to be a pretense of a reason for making an unfair decision, but the veneer is pretty see-through thin.
That's a bad analogy. Copying does not compare with a shooting. Much better to compare copying to consensual sex.
If there are no spies, moles, blackmailers and the like among the participants, the chance of outsiders learning that it happened is very low. If all parties are virus free, no one gets hurt. If they're also using contraceptives effectively, consequences are limited to whatever 3rd parties might discover and become sanctimonious, jealous and angry about. But copying is even easier. Two people can swap flash drives even faster and more discretely than they can have sex. They can also do it more anonymously than even two partners separated by a wall with a glory hole. Can use a drop off, so they don't have to both be present at the same time. Minors down to the age of 2 could swap flash drives.
Laws against sex with minors are difficult to enforce, but desirable and doable. The public wants these. Still, there are pitfalls. For instance, if someone draws cartoons of child porn, is that illegal? On the other hand, laws against sodomy don't have much public support. What harm are two consenting adults doing to society by so engaging? None at all. This point goes double for copying. No one is getting hurt, except in the imaginations of intellectual property supporters. Do you think a levy upon sex could ever be successfully imposed? Think of the businesses that are hurt because they can't collect levies on every act of sex!
Obviously, sex is absolutely vital to our survival. Sharing is almost that important. One of the biggest transfers of information is school. We freely educate our children. We provide them with textbooks. We ought to do a better job with those books, stop handing millions to publishers whom we do not need, and instead create open ebooks. It's beginning to happen. Our civilization depends on this transfer of knowledge to our children. Science also depends upon sharing of knowledge. We have a number of urgent problems we need to work on. If our civilization collapses because we didn't puzzle it through fast enough because we were all forced to wait around for permission to share, it may be no more than we deserve for being such idiots. That is the activity that these parasites of the intellect want to restrict and control, claiming it is for the sake of those poor starving artists who have so many other ways to make a living from art.
You want what they make, and you don't want to pay for it
No! For starters, we demand a share of the vast savings technology has enabled. We built the Internet. It's far, far cheaper to download an ebook or mp3 file than to obtain a paperback or a CD. An author's share of a sale via physical media was a dismally low percentage of somewhere around 5%. With much of the overhead eliminated, that should improve. Industry has grudgingly accepted this, but that's only the start, and they're still a bit high.
But the core of the matter has not been addressed. Copying is so cheap and easy that trying to regulate, tax, and impose levies on it is now the biggest impediment to sharing. It's like being asked to pay stud fees to breed horses for riding, when we all use cars now. It's an obsolete and harmful business model. A good near term goal is the digitization of our public libraries. We should be able to download anything the library has, anytime we want. No trip to a library building needed, no waiting in line at the counter to check out physical media, no having to return physical copies by a certain date or get hammered with late fees, even to the point of having a warrant put out. And no more card catalogs. The library would be so much more searchable. Why can't we have this? There are business models that work well with the digital public library, but the dinosaurs of Big Media refuse to believe any of them could really work, and instead have done all they can to block and delay progress.
they're not stealing from me!
They are stealing from us. What do you think copyright term extensions are? Suddenly everything created after 1926 was snatched back out of the public domain. And, are you aware of the raw deal researchers get? Turn over all rights, for the privilege of getting published. Technically, researchers can't give out copies of their own works, without permission from the publisher! Some publishers have tried to take advantage of this by locking everything behind paywalls. Research paid for by the public, denied to all of us and the authors! You heard about Aaron Swartz, didn't you?
But the biggest theft is that we can't legally create a digital public library, and reap the immense savings and huge increases in capabilities and capacities going digital would bring. Are we all just going to sit this out, while the likes of Google puts together their version of the digital library that isn't quite as public as it ought to be?
The thing is, I haven't come across any material I consider essential. Didn't know about Pike's work. Online documentation is too often lacking. A lot of books are crap. There are good ones, but programming is such a large subject that a few books can't cover everything. A programming language is only the surface. Should also have references to libraries, references to helper tools like the make utility, organizational tools like a guide to Agile programming techniques and a reference to a code repository management tool like CVS. General usage information like "man bash", a small reference of essential vi or emacs commands, and maybe some handy debugger commands for gdb, and some knowledge of the base utilities and layout of a typical UNIX like system so one knows that "ls /usr/bin" lists several hundred utilities that may be worth looking up in "man". Sure, an integrated development environment like Eclipse can replace some of that, but not all. Some knowledge of heavy duty utilities like a database (MariaDB), and especially the basics of SQL, can also be good to have. Then there's networking. One ought to know of sockets and enough TCP/IP to put them to use where appropriate. Not necessary to know the gory details, just need some knowledge of their abilities and limitations and how to call on them. Another essential area of knowledge closely related to networking is the World Wide Web. Know enough HTML to construct a simple web page. Some knowledge of the capabilities and options in Apache configuration files can be of use. System administration is another area that's good to have some experience in, say by trying to install Linux on your own PC and, once that's done, tinkering with firewall rules, setting up a mail server, configuring some hardware, and so on. All this is knowledge of the craft. Also important is the science, and for that, need to have studied a little algorithms, enough to have an idea what Big O is about.
Of the good books, many like Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Lieserson, and Rivest are really rather narrow. The pseudocode is good enough that a person can translate the examples into a working programming language without entirely understanding the algorithm, and get a working function. And yet, the sort of programmers who spend all their time gluing library functions together are not going to find this book of much use.
A decent reference book for the programming language of the day is useful. The Camel book for Perl is still good, as Perl 6 still hasn't been released last time I checked. Not that I've looked all that hard, but I haven't found any book about Javascript that covers the language with minimal to no flowery verbiage, and is also up to date. No book on Javascript published before 2010 is going to cover certain very important improvements. There are hundreds of books about C/C++, and most of them seem to be garbage. Java has a similar problem. Some take 10 pages to flog a trivial example to death, to explain something that should have taken one paragraph. Many get lost in the trivia, covering the details of something like operator overloading, with overly simplistic examples that come across as contrived and so fail to show the usefulness. Very hard to show the value of OOP with tiny trivial examples that fit on 1 or 2 pages, so they resort to basically saying "trust us, OOP really is a useful time saver and organizer for large projects".
Books about utilities can be good. But they are of course also quite narrow. For instance, the book about GNU Make covers its subject well. Books about CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, or whatever repository software is being used are hit and miss, sometimes okay, and sometimes barely edited assemblages of online documentation that could have used some polishing but didn't get any. HTML is another narrow subject that can burn up more shelf space. Some of these books are massive tomes that seem only to have all those pages to look more impressive.
Much of this conversation is beside the point. You talk like DRM is an acceptable tool for a desirable motive. It is neither.
Not only is DRM an unsound idea that simply does not work, it and the idea of intellectual property it's meant to protect are immoral. That's right, immoral. Our very ability to communicate with each other, and share valuable ideas and information, is at the core of our intelligence, and is what put us on top of the animal kingdom. Sharing is a natural right. To give that up, voluntarily give that up, is to embrace a new status making us no better than sheep, fit only to be fleeced repeatedly. These scumbags in the content industries have misunderstood, perhaps deliberately, the differences between ownership and authorship, and the material and scarce vs the immaterial. Authorship does not mean the power to deny all usage and derivate work, until they get around to individually approving each proposal and only if they please. They are out to control all communications, stifling that which they can't manage, which by necessity would be the bulk of all communication as they haven't the means to handle the sheer quantity, by asserting that they should be compensated every time people share anything they were in any way involved in, and that the only fair way to accomplish this is by controlling all copying so every single occurrence of it can be taxed. And of course to do that requires extreme control of the sort necessary to make DRM actually function somewhat.
If there are risks in fighting DRM, it is our civic duty to take those risks, to preserve the freedoms our ancestors fought so hard to win for us. The risks are in any case little enough. The control freaks who want to monopolize and monetize all content do not have the power to go after everyone. There are other ways to compensate artists. Big Media still doesn't want to be bothered trying them, and admitting that they might work. Instead they have the gall to ask the rest of us to make the truly insane sacrifices it would take to really make their horrible vision work, and act as if they aren't asking much, putting on this hurt and baffled attitude and crying that artists will surely starve. We are NOT going to give up the Internet, flash drives, cell phones, home movie theaters, or even public libraries and used book stores. We are not going to turn the clock back to the 1980s, and artists will not starve and art will still be created.
This ramming of DRM down our collective throats and into the HTML standard is at best a waste of effort that will have no effect. At worst, it will harm the Internet, slowing it down and blocking some things. If, somehow, it kills the Internet, Big Media would celebrate. That's the kind of trolls they are. But it won't accomplish the destruction of the Internet or the elimination of piracy. I think the only reason the DRM was allowed is that we knew it would be ineffective and only slightly damaging if that, and so we could afford to humor them in this matter. And they problably bribed key people, maybe tried some threats too.
This is what I'd like to see next, an orbiter for each planet. Perhaps orbiters for planets that have not yet had one should be the top space exploration priority. And, launch one for Neptune first because that's the longer trip. After our own solar system is thoroughly explored, what's next? Giant telescope arrays orbiting the sun as far out or further than the gas giants? An interstellar probe? A close look at Proxima and Alpha Centauri would be fantastic, but getting a working probe there is beyond our current technology. We can't accelerate a probe to 1% of light speed and make it last the approximate 700 years needed for that trip, or any other combination of time and speed. Or, colonize Mars? That one is appealing, but I think too hard for now. Just getting a man to Mars is I think further away than most people realize. Months in space, have to handle radiation, lots of supplies or get better at recycling, and for what? Nothing that a robot can't do for far less risk and money.
Sometimes I test surveillance. I look at porno sites, for just that purpose. (Really! Okay, I also sometimes look at those sites for fun.) See if any agency is dumb enough to let me know they're spying on me by telling me what a naughty person I am for looking at such things. So far, no warnings about that.
I also sometimes download content that may be copyrighted, again to test the temper. So far, my ISP has not sent me any warnings that they've detected piracy, no threats to cut my service. Nor have I received any threatening letters from the entertainment industry, no attempt to shake me down for $3000 for one song.
Still, I am also a little careful. Don't talk in certain ways about terrorism, assassination, wacky fringe politics and religion, etc. Remember Steve Jackson Games vs. the US Secret Service, when some idiot enforcers took a game seriously and went ape.
The one time I did detect snooping was in the mid 90s, when my ISP was Prodigy. They were big on "protecting" their customers from the big bad scary Internet, and if that meant being a little nosy, well that was just the price customers were expected to live with. I was writing a complaint about the service when my modem mysteriously dropped the call. Dialed back in and surfed for a few moments to check that all was well, and saw no problems. Started my complaint again, and halfway into it, was dropped again. Tried a 3rd time with the same result. Canceled Prodigy the next day.
silly principles like a concern for human life.
Now, now, just because life isn't infinitely valuable doesn't mean it's cheap. We like to feel that life is priceless, but that's a conceit. We could make roads much safer, reducing fatalities to almost none by reducing speed limits everywhere to 20 mph, but we have not. We can have middle ground on this. We can accept principles such as weregild that have influenced our laws for centuries.
As for this call to average the economic damage over industries, I think nuclear power is worth using, if the only alternative is coal. Nuclear is better than coal. But coal is not the only other option. That's another fallacious point I often see in favor of nuclear, this deliberate disregard of solar and wind, and hydro. "Alternative" fuels are quickly dismissed as inadequate, too hard to scale up to the amounts needed to replace coal. Although they too have some problems. scale isn't an insurmountable one with them. It's quite doable, and will create far more jobs than that miserable Keystone XL pipeline. Oh, and climate change damage of solar, wind, and hydro? Practically none, same as nuclear.
Apologies to people who have lost friends or relatives in plane crashes, but we haven't called for bans on planes because crashes, while tragic, simply aren't that devastating. We have however made other changes, banning planes from certain areas. We have considered banning offshore oil drilling altogether, because of the dangers. Climate Disruption, dire though it may be, is not as bad as "Nuclear Twilight" which according to what I've heard, would occur even if we had only a small nuclear war, like Pakistan vs India. Cold is not the worst problem, it's the blocking of sunlight for years which would kill all our crops. Most of us would starve. We might all end up dead in that scenario, some killed off by the initial blasts, some by radiation poisoning, some by severe cold weather, and the rest by starvation and each other, fighting over what was left. Climate Disruption could also push us over the edge, triggering food shortages that some nations may be willing to go to war, even nuclear war, to deal with even though it's not really a solution. But there is hope we would not go to that extreme, even in the face of death by starvation.
Using number of deaths as a measure of danger is misleading. By a measure like that, Hurricane Andrew was a lesser disaster than some bus crashes. Hydroelectric power could be considered extremely dangerous, thanks to the Banqiao Dam.
A better measure could be the economic damage. Fukushima is estimated to cost $500 billion. The Banqiao Dam failure is part of the damage caused by Typhoon Nina, which is estimated at $1.2 billion in 1975 dollars. Bhopal is a bit more difficult to fix a cost, but damage payouts total about $500 million. There's no denying that chemical plants can cause big disasters, but from these numbers we see that chemical plants and dams simply aren't in the same league as nuclear power plants.
Do you have any problem with the fact that some time in the distant future, the sun will stop shining? Maybe 5 billion years from now? No problem?
Okay, how about the fact that rivers change course? The Mississippi might have already switched to the Atchafalaya, if not for our meddling. We don't want New Orleans made useless. No problem with that either?
Then, what of the fact that large and powerful corporations lie, and engage in propaganda campaigns? You know, like Big Tobacco did? And like Wall Street did not too long ago with home mortgages? And like Big Oil does now? Big Oil lies about a lot of things, like the safety of offshore oil drilling. An accident like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn't supposed to happen. When it did, they kept right on lying, about the rate of the leak and the amount of damage it was doing. Are we still okay here? Corporations routinely tell self serving lies, agreed? And surely you see that, whether or not Climate Disruption is real, Big Oil is highly motivated to be dismissive of warnings about it. If Climate Disruption is real and a huge problem, and Big Oil knows it, would they attempt to distract and deceive the public with propaganda campaigns? Yes, yes, they would. Still with me, I hope?
Now let's look at the other side. Either a) scientists are right and Climate Disruption is real, happening right now, and will cause huge problems. Or b) scientists are united in a big conspiracy to lie about Climate Disruption because it gets them more grant money, or c) scientists are morons and are getting it all wrong. The trouble with b) and c) is that they are not at all credible. I hope no one seriously credits c), it's just too implausible. As for b), you do realize that the flow of grant money does not much depend on the subject matter. If anything, being forced to study and restudy the climate takes away money that could have been used for other science. The public has turned negative and cut back funding for all science, so I'd have to say the Great Conspiracy, if it exists, is not working and if anything is backfiring. And do you suppose smarties like scientists wouldn't see that? And if their main interest was grant money, wouldn't they change their tune to the nicey nicey good news the public seems to want? Why haven't they done so then? Why haven't they dropped this story of Climate Disruption like a radioactive spud, given the damage it's doing to scientific funding? Could it be because it's real, and scientists are honestly worried about it?
Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public key encryption schemes.
As for the evidence you demand, the "large scale changes", you have only to open your eyes and admit that what's right in front of your nose is indeed exactly that. Just 180 years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about 280 ppm. Now it's 400ppm, certainly higher than it has been in nearly 1 million years, and probably higher than any level in the last 20 million years. That is a very fast change. We're seeing ocean acidification. And we are indeed seeing higher average temperatures. In recent years, we've had far more record highs than record lows. The Arctic Ice Cap is smaller than it has ever been in recorded history. Antarctic ice shelves such as Larson A and B have collapsed. How can you hear of such events and not think they are significant?
So they're getting ready for rising sea levels?
He's in favor of nuclear power? I would be too, except for certain kinds of problems.
Yes, nuclear power can be generated safely. That is, we can keep the risks to acceptably low levels. We also have vastly improved designs we can employ, and there are huge quantities of thorium we could use in a different kind of reactor. We may eventually figure a way to economically generate power from fusion rather than fission. Getting rid of radioactive material in a reactor designed for that could make the environment cleaner. Replacing coal power plants with something better is highly desirable.
The problem is, as I keep saying, the human factor. Mistakes have horrible consequences because we can't easily clean up the mess from an accident. If we didn't have to wait centuries before contaminated land was again safe to inhabit because we could clean up after a disaster, it would be different. How long will it take for the Gulf of Mexico to fully recover from the BP oil spill? Decades, it seems. But that's better than the prospects of recovery from a nuclear accident.
Sooner or later, at a few nuclear power plants, the management team reaches a critical mass of idiocy. Fukushima showed that. So do many oil spills. The fools among the managers will cut corners if allowed. They will cut back on inspections and maintenance. They will neglect safety systems, even going as far as never building them adequately in the first place. They will bully engineers, pressure them to go along. They don't care about the risks they are taking, all they care about is the bottom line and the immediate.
The other huge human problem with nuclear power is weaponization. If I understand the issues correctly, there is no good reason for a nation like Iran to be attempting to build the particular kinds of reactors they might claim are only for generating power. Other kinds of reactors would be all around better-- easier to build, more economical to run, and safer. Today, the only reason to build reactors that require enriched uranium is that it's the easiest fuel to convert to nuclear bombs. The Cold War is over, but the danger that a nuclear war could break out is still high, maybe higher now than during most of the Cold War.
Nearly everyone fights change. In the absence of good reasons, MS will desperately push out slanted, factually incorrect studies with huge omissions. And it works. Local governments gratefully seize on these as the excuses to keep their old Windows systems.
Software is a big excuse. For example, somehow, computers in the public library can't simply be connected to the Internet, no. They have to have nannyware. On further inquiry, it turns out that such software has to be approved, and approval is a lengthy process. Naturally, the approved nannyware is Windows only. (What nannyware is there for Linux?) They will wax poetic about how they don't want the town to be sued because Little Johnny saw something inappropriate on a computer at the library. Yes, Little Johnny's eyes are why they can't switch away from Windows, even in the back office in city hall.
The most likely way to get the local politicians and bureaucrats to move on something like that is to make them more afraid of not doing it. Repeat, over and over, that Windows is much less secure. Ask them if they'd enjoy being sued because Big John had his passwords intercepted on a library computer. Or sued because hackers broke into their database and got all their information about property owners in the town. Would they enjoy being another Target? Saving money also gets their attention, but not as much as fear.
You'd think that the military, an organization that is under constant attack, would want more security than Windows has. Maybe more than plain Linux, maybe SELinux, or OpenBSD. Or make their own, which they can afford to do. But no. The soldiers are mostly young men who grew up with PCs that had Windows installed. The officers will argue that it is also important that soldiers be able to do their jobs, and that's why they have to have Windows, because that's what they know. Train them on other OSes? Never! The officers aren't experts with computers either, and will demand contradictory and downright stupid things of any proposed replacement. They will also want to be in control, and try to keep everything secret, thus virtually guaranteeing that any project they launch will fail. Though they have the resources, their ability to make their own is poor. Another excuse in the US is the home grown argument. MS is American, Linux is not. Who knows what hacks some foreigners might have inserted in Linux, as if, unlike MS's code, they can't check the source themselves, and as if MS never outsources any software engineering work or hires foreigners.
If a competent programmer who knows SQL and C/C++, and a few other languages, maybe Java and LISP, can't learn enough NoSQL and Python in two weeks to start being productive, then NoSQL and Python are bad platforms and languages. A newcomer will not learn all the quirks, tricks, and libraries in 2 weeks, but doesn't have to. Don't have to know half of the typical bloated language to do useful work in it. As for the cloud, someone experienced with system administration ought to be able to pick up enough to make some good use of it in less than a week.