It would be hard for one who has the moral conviction that human life is not superior to animal life to live a morally consistent life.
Hardly. For example it would be perfectly consistent to consider any individual human more valuable than any individual other animal, while still thinking that a population of animals is more valuable than an individual human, and/or thinking that a species of animals is more valuable than a population of humans.
With moral values something like this, if there was a choice between extinction of a species, and moving almost all humans out of an area to be made a nature preserve, then it's a no-brainer that humans need to move, if that will prevent an entire species from going extinct.
Now you're free disagree with this, but that doesn't make it inconsistent.
If only it were that simple... Well, if it were, then communism would have worked... But it's humans we're dealing with here. That kind of strictly organized society just isn't very workable, it will be ruined by greed and jealousy, people wanting to do things their way, people wanting power over other people, and all the other human qualities, both "good" and "bad".
But that's beside the point. Population growth is exponential. It might be three times of Texas now, but after a few hundred years of procreating, it'd be the whole globe...
Well, unless you manage to solve the population growth problem, manage to overcome the tautology of natural selection: those that have most offspring have most offspring, who will also have the genetic traits that helped their parents to have the most offspring....
The root of the problem with reducing population growth is evolution. If reproduction is somehow restricted (for example, by high standard of living causing many to not want children 'cos it would interfere with their lifestyle), then those that aren't affected by the reduction will spread their "resistant" genes.
Evolution is indeed a bitch. Whatever you do, those that reproduce the most will generate offspring with the same genes that help in reproduction. In a few generations most people will have these genes, and whatever method you used for reducing population growth no longer work. And this is assuming you have stable enough culture to be able to maintain reduced birth rate for a few generations somehow (not necessarily by force, see first paragraph above).
But if we'd collectively realize it, perhaps we could change our culture to tackle this problem in a "nice" way. Alternative is the "natural" way, dying when there's not enough food, or dying when somebody takes your food by force, or dying when somebody defends the food you're trying to take by force.
This isn't prejudice. It doesn't stop moms putting up pictures of themselves and their babies. It doesn't even stop them putting up pictures of breastfeeding. It's just a very specific kind pictures of breastfeeding that aren't allowed.
So yes, this is way different from restricting pictures based on race or culture or religion. Well, unless your religion requires you to show your nipples to the world when breastfeeding...
Maybe when life was harder we were more clever because we had to be, but if an alien cognition researcher plucked Joe the Plumber out of middle America and put him to a test of higher cognitive power - I bet he'd come up lacking.
I think you're underestimating the skill and intelligence required for being a passable plumber, let alone a good plumber... And none of it is based on instincts or reflexes, it's all intelligence based stuff.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
I think you're not qualified to decide who get to call themselves Christians. After all, that's one of the few things where the truth really is decided on popular vote... Only the worst fundamentalist christians believes that all the christians that believe differently from them are not Real Christians(tm).
Well, in XBox360 controller, there's the big XBox logo thingy, which you can also press to access external stuff. So any XBox360 player would immediately get the Office logo thingy (well, it didn't, but that proves nothing!). And anybody who doesn't own XBox360 doesn't deserve to use other MS products anyway, so it all works out perfectly.
Your arrogance disgusts me. It's always English, English, English!
I think your point of view is that of somebody who lives in a country that uses some a major continental European language (German, French).
But if you gather a group of people from a few European countries at random, guess what will be the common language they'll be forced to use?
English, English, English!;-)
Sure, it may be that everybody in the group speaks German or French or Spanish. But English is very likely to be the only language everybody speaks.
And it's a good thing too for everybody who's native language isn't one of the "big" languages. For us, it's very important that there is one "universal" language, it just makes life so much easier.
Of course if I were omnipotent, I'd immediately change the language to be something else than English, but until then:
I believe that our knowledge about the universe is quite limited. I can imagine the scientists of the future will laugh about how we could seriously consider dark matter and dark energy.
I don't think scientists will laugh about it. I mean, there was phloginston, there was lamarckism, there was aether. We don't laugh about 19th century scintists considering them and taking them seriously. We might laugh if somebody still considered them seriously after a mountain of evidence showing they're not true.
I believe there will be another Einstein who will shed light upon this "mistery" and everything will be simple again.
Uh huh. I find "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be remarkably simple ideas.
Especially "dark matter" is very intuitive. I mean, it's pretty certain that there are particles we don't know about. There's always stuff we don't know about. That some of the unknown stuff happens to be the mass of "dark matter" that seems to be out there, well, that's very simple and very plausible.
"Dark energy" is a bit murkier and perhaps more likely to be explained in some other way. But again, it's not hard to believe that universe is more complex than we thought. I mean, that's what Einstein did, showed that space and time are much more complex than the Newtonian physics assumes. And if "dark energy" is of the "cosmological constant" type, then it's very simple, since we already have room for it in the Theory of Relativity, and no actual new stuff is needed.
Nope. Dark energy is something that fits into our current equations. But we don't know what it is, and there are several alternatives that match the observations.
Then there's the alternative explanation, that our equations are wrong and there is no dark energy.
The support seems to be gathering on the side of dark energy (and dark matter too) being real, but it's still far from being "a fact".
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
Think about obtaining keys for encrypted data.
Just keep torturing until the data is unencrypted, or until the subject becomes too mindless to say or do anything coherent.
Of course there are ways to get around this, ie. giving the wrong encryption information that encrypts some fake data. But there are also ways around that for the interrogator, like simply keep torturing after the first decryption keys, just in case the subject will tell more stuff.
Also, if there are several subjects to interrogate, then it's easy to check if they tell the same story. You know, like what is used in normal police interrogation, except with torture the subjects don't have the option to just say nothing.
My point is, there are plenty of cases where correctness of information can be determined. There are also cases where it may be enough to get some clues to bind together other information that is known from other sources.
I beg to disagree. And I pity anybody who thinks all of life is suffering. I know for a fact that it isn't.
Well, unless you start re-defining words, but if you say life=suffering, then what do you call the thing I call suffering? If you say they're the same thing, then either you don't know what suffering is, or you don't know what not suffering is, because there is a difference.
Or perhaps you mean to say that all of life involves suffering? In that case it's equally valid to say that all of life is enjoyable, because in my experience, all of life involves enjoyment too. Often it's a lot harder to find than suffering though, but that's beside the point that both exist.
All of life is bliss. All you need to do is realize that.
I assume that MAP-enforcer would not be coming after you, they'd want to go after the guy who sold the stuff to you cheaper than they were supposed to. If you go up the chain, then at some point there will be a retailer who made some sort of contract with price stipulations. So either somebody lower in the chain without any contract is making a loss, or somebody higher in the chain and with a contract is breaching the contract by selling too cheaply.
Wait a minute. Are you seriously saying, than in the USA, a manufacturer or official retailer or some such may come after a consumer who is selling 2nd hand (even if it's unused) product below certain price?
You've gotta be kidding me!
If you're serious, then seriously, get out of there while you can!
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at? Or what rights do I have to then your apple at all?
Simple. Before selling that apple, you make a contract that says what the buyer can do with it. If he does something else with it, it's a breach of that contract.
So if we want to prevent for example these MAPs, or any other similar thing, we need a law specifically saying that such contracts aren't valid.
It's always a trade-off, because here we have two private parties (seller and buyer), and then we make legislation about what kind of contracts they may make between them. Ie. it limits freedom of people and freedom of trade. Then again, it may help prevent monopolies or other bad stuff that would in effect limit freedoms even more.
As far as I can see, it's a slippery slope both ways, and right now it's earthquake season too... We need to try to stay at the top, but it requires constant vigilance.
It's not just computing power. We'd actually need to catch enough reflected photons that originated from the Earth, so we'd have anything at all to process.
I think it would be a problem even if there was no other light except what we want to observe, ie. there would be no external noise.
Also, the "mirror" isn't a flat plane, so we'd get a bunch of "Earth photons" that originatead at different times, reflected at different times, and then arrive at our telescope at the same time.
To get anything useful, we'd need to have a very sharp focus, and then move the focus at the speed of light, so we'd collect photons that originated at the same time, but reflected at different times.
So sharpness of focus would determine temporal resolution. If we'd want to catch an apple falling, we'd need temporal resolution of maybe 1/10th of a second (and that would still be quite a blurr), so focus would have to be 1/10th of a light second... I don't know that much about optics, but achieving that at a distance of hundreds of light years would be quite a feat too... Will a telescope array help with achieving a sharp focus at a great distance?
More like the opposite. As far as particle physics and quantum mechanics are concerned, it looks very much like there are just a few different possible charges (for example). The multitude of different particles is a combination of very limited set of properties (electric charge being one of them).
In a designed universe, every particle could have been designed different. In an universe that has developed as dictated by rather simple laws, every particle also follows these laws, and in this case it means that no, electrons could not be different from each others.
Similarity of particles does not disprove a creator, of course. It does tell us that if the universe was "created", it was probably created by creating universal laws of physics, not by creating individual particles like electrons.
Too bad that "universe created by creating some universal laws of physics" is indistinguishable from "universe arising from a random quantum fluctuation with certain properties, we call the universal laws of physics" or some other non-creator origin theory...
I would not say it's a question if timescales, but a question of energy balance.
No matter the timescale, you can't use X amount of hydrogen to get more than X hydrogen. You need extra energy just to get your original amount of hydrogen, and even more extra energy to get more than you originally had. So it's not a source, it's a storage with energy loss, it has negative energy balance.
But you can use X amount of oil (and no other energy) to survey and pump up more oil, and you'll end up with more than X. So it's a source, it has positive energy balance.
Of course at some point oil will stop being an energy source, 'cos pumping and refining it will require more energy than is recovered. Mineral oil can still be used as a very efficient energy storage for a long time, but the extra energy to pump and refine it will have to come from something else (ie. either from sun or from nuclear energy).
That's also the only comfortable solution to peak oil, if we start doing it early enough: build enough non-fossil power plants and use their energy to convert energy-negative oil reserves into usable oil and gas, ready to be transported and used like conventional oil products.
I bet that cost factors in stuff like design. Making a new replacement bag and tools must cost quite a bit less, even factoring in the cost of fuel to send it to ISS. Well, unless they're made by a subcontractor, and the contract says NASA has to pay a fixed high price for a replacement.
Except they probably have extra sets already, so they don't even need to make a replacement. Then the real extra cost is only the cost of fuel. Hmm, plus the cost of bureaucracy... Ok, so maybe that $100,000.00 figure is correct after all;-)
In corporate e-mails top-posting is the only sensible way to go. New recipients might be added at any time, and with e-mails there's no way for them to get the old messages. And editing a message to cut out anything irrelevant while keeping everything relevant is waste of time=money, and disk space is cheap today.
Also, to share files via e-mail in any other way except attachments lacks a standard, and no software support. To use FTP or something like that, you'll need to do everything manually (including stuff like creating user accounts for e-mail recipients). No way. This works somewhat when linking to files in shared network disks, but that's only practical with internal e-mails, ie when everybody has access to shared disks. And even then there's the problem of the e-mail being archived, while somebody might delete or change the linked file at any time.
It's not a user problem, it's protocol and software problem, a standards problem. But regular e-mail is so broken anyway (just look at all the spam) and yet no new protocol has been accepted, so I wouldn't hold my breath for something better just to make quoting and file attachments more efficient.
Unless the astronaut imparted enough force into the object to either give it escape velocity or cause it to reenter the atmosphere, shouldn't she (in theory) just be able to wait the 90 or so minutes till the next orbit and grab it when the two orbits intersect?
I think the object will have a different orbital perioid. Or to put it the other way, if the object is moving at just 1 m/s relative to the astronaut, then ninety minutes later it'll be over 5 kilometers away. And I don't think being in orbit changes this at all. Just think about it from the astronauts point of view, there is no force that would suddenly make the lost object get closer, it'll keep getting farther and farther away until it's on the other side of the planet, which will take quite a while.
Nethack and the like would be boring without the sadistic part, without the constant threat of dying of unfair causes. It helps the game to stay somewhat challenging even after completing it many times. It makes every game intense and exciting.
Besides, many unfair deaths aren't really unfair deaths, but instead deaths that could have been avoided by playing better (preparing better, being more cautious, being less greedy, etc). This is especially true when you get further along in the game and have more to lose. Truly unfair deaths where you do everything right and then you just die anyway are quite rare.
Note: I'm not saying you're "wrong" to not play Nethack 'cos you think it's too sadistic. Then it's just not a game that's entertaining for you. I'm just saying that it would be worse if it wasn't like that, it would be just plain boring.
But the expelled matter doesn't magically fall back.
It's not magic, it's just turbulence. "Orbits" in a galaxy aren't ever going to be stable over cosmological time scales... and the ring outside the empty zone is still the densest part of the galaxy. It's going to spread out and flatten until the average density around the black hole starts increasing again, no?
Well, if the article is correct, then apparently not. As far as I understand, the growth would have to be very slow, or the radiation pressure would blow the rest of the matter away and again stop the growth.
Also, once the immediate vicinity of the black hole is empty, it's sphere of influence is really very small in galactic scale. Anything falling towards it would have to hit it quite exactly, or it'd just zip past it without getting sucked in, and then perhaps make another pass in a few million years, again probably missing it. The neighborhood of the black hole would be rather empty, everything either having fallen in or been blown away by the earlier radiation, so there wouldn't be much resistance either. And any occasional star getting ripped apart by the black hole would create a burst of radiation that would keep the vicinity of the black hole clear of gas and dust.
Something like a merger of galaxies might create brief periods of faster growth, giving the black hole new mass to swallow. But again the radiation pressure would blow most of the new matter away quickly, so compared to the total mass of the black hole, the relative growth would be very little.
Indeed, that's my point. One the black hole has cleared its surroundings to the point where it's no longer growing, then the radiation emitted from this source will drop until it starts growing again.
But the expelled matter doesn't magically fall back. The matter that didn't fall in was forced into a stable orbit around the galactic center by the radiation pressure. There'd be only random wandering stars that by chance get too close to the central black hole in their orbits. But even a galactic black hole is a tiny tiny dot in the center of a galaxy, so these unlucky stars would be few and far between.
So in practice the black hole stops growing in a galactic environment. It could grow if it got some mass, but it just can't get that mass from anywhere. A star per millenium (or whatever) doesn't do much for a black hole this big, not even in cosmological time scales.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be hard for one who has the moral conviction that human life is not superior to animal life to live a morally consistent life.
Hardly. For example it would be perfectly consistent to consider any individual human more valuable than any individual other animal, while still thinking that a population of animals is more valuable than an individual human, and/or thinking that a species of animals is more valuable than a population of humans.
With moral values something like this, if there was a choice between extinction of a species, and moving almost all humans out of an area to be made a nature preserve, then it's a no-brainer that humans need to move, if that will prevent an entire species from going extinct.
Now you're free disagree with this, but that doesn't make it inconsistent.
If only it were that simple... Well, if it were, then communism would have worked... But it's humans we're dealing with here. That kind of strictly organized society just isn't very workable, it will be ruined by greed and jealousy, people wanting to do things their way, people wanting power over other people, and all the other human qualities, both "good" and "bad".
But that's beside the point. Population growth is exponential. It might be three times of Texas now, but after a few hundred years of procreating, it'd be the whole globe...
Well, unless you manage to solve the population growth problem, manage to overcome the tautology of natural selection: those that have most offspring have most offspring, who will also have the genetic traits that helped their parents to have the most offspring....
The root of the problem with reducing population growth is evolution. If reproduction is somehow restricted (for example, by high standard of living causing many to not want children 'cos it would interfere with their lifestyle), then those that aren't affected by the reduction will spread their "resistant" genes.
Evolution is indeed a bitch. Whatever you do, those that reproduce the most will generate offspring with the same genes that help in reproduction. In a few generations most people will have these genes, and whatever method you used for reducing population growth no longer work. And this is assuming you have stable enough culture to be able to maintain reduced birth rate for a few generations somehow (not necessarily by force, see first paragraph above).
But if we'd collectively realize it, perhaps we could change our culture to tackle this problem in a "nice" way. Alternative is the "natural" way, dying when there's not enough food, or dying when somebody takes your food by force, or dying when somebody defends the food you're trying to take by force.
This isn't prejudice. It doesn't stop moms putting up pictures of themselves and their babies. It doesn't even stop them putting up pictures of breastfeeding. It's just a very specific kind pictures of breastfeeding that aren't allowed.
So yes, this is way different from restricting pictures based on race or culture or religion. Well, unless your religion requires you to show your nipples to the world when breastfeeding...
Maybe when life was harder we were more clever because we had to be, but if an alien cognition researcher plucked Joe the Plumber out of middle America and put him to a test of higher cognitive power - I bet he'd come up lacking.
I think you're underestimating the skill and intelligence required for being a passable plumber, let alone a good plumber... And none of it is based on instincts or reflexes, it's all intelligence based stuff.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
I think you're not qualified to decide who get to call themselves Christians. After all, that's one of the few things where the truth really is decided on popular vote... Only the worst fundamentalist christians believes that all the christians that believe differently from them are not Real Christians(tm).
Well, in XBox360 controller, there's the big XBox logo thingy, which you can also press to access external stuff. So any XBox360 player would immediately get the Office logo thingy (well, it didn't, but that proves nothing!). And anybody who doesn't own XBox360 doesn't deserve to use other MS products anyway, so it all works out perfectly.
Your arrogance disgusts me. It's always English, English, English!
I think your point of view is that of somebody who lives in a country that uses some a major continental European language (German, French).
But if you gather a group of people from a few European countries at random, guess what will be the common language they'll be forced to use?
English, English, English! ;-)
Sure, it may be that everybody in the group speaks German or French or Spanish. But English is very likely to be the only language everybody speaks.
And it's a good thing too for everybody who's native language isn't one of the "big" languages. For us, it's very important that there is one "universal" language, it just makes life so much easier.
Of course if I were omnipotent, I'd immediately change the language to be something else than English, but until then:
English, English, English! ;-)
I believe that our knowledge about the universe is quite limited. I can imagine the scientists of the future will laugh about how we could seriously consider dark matter and dark energy.
I don't think scientists will laugh about it. I mean, there was phloginston, there was lamarckism, there was aether. We don't laugh about 19th century scintists considering them and taking them seriously. We might laugh if somebody still considered them seriously after a mountain of evidence showing they're not true.
I believe there will be another Einstein who will shed light upon this "mistery" and everything will be simple again.
Uh huh. I find "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be remarkably simple ideas.
Especially "dark matter" is very intuitive. I mean, it's pretty certain that there are particles we don't know about. There's always stuff we don't know about. That some of the unknown stuff happens to be the mass of "dark matter" that seems to be out there, well, that's very simple and very plausible.
"Dark energy" is a bit murkier and perhaps more likely to be explained in some other way. But again, it's not hard to believe that universe is more complex than we thought. I mean, that's what Einstein did, showed that space and time are much more complex than the Newtonian physics assumes. And if "dark energy" is of the "cosmological constant" type, then it's very simple, since we already have room for it in the Theory of Relativity, and no actual new stuff is needed.
Nope. Dark energy is something that fits into our current equations. But we don't know what it is, and there are several alternatives that match the observations.
Then there's the alternative explanation, that our equations are wrong and there is no dark energy.
The support seems to be gathering on the side of dark energy (and dark matter too) being real, but it's still far from being "a fact".
Think about obtaining keys for encrypted data.
Just keep torturing until the data is unencrypted, or until the subject becomes too mindless to say or do anything coherent.
Of course there are ways to get around this, ie. giving the wrong encryption information that encrypts some fake data. But there are also ways around that for the interrogator, like simply keep torturing after the first decryption keys, just in case the subject will tell more stuff.
Also, if there are several subjects to interrogate, then it's easy to check if they tell the same story. You know, like what is used in normal police interrogation, except with torture the subjects don't have the option to just say nothing.
My point is, there are plenty of cases where correctness of information can be determined. There are also cases where it may be enough to get some clues to bind together other information that is known from other sources.
All of life is suffering.
I beg to disagree. And I pity anybody who thinks all of life is suffering. I know for a fact that it isn't.
Well, unless you start re-defining words, but if you say life=suffering, then what do you call the thing I call suffering? If you say they're the same thing, then either you don't know what suffering is, or you don't know what not suffering is, because there is a difference.
Or perhaps you mean to say that all of life involves suffering? In that case it's equally valid to say that all of life is enjoyable, because in my experience, all of life involves enjoyment too. Often it's a lot harder to find than suffering though, but that's beside the point that both exist.
All of life is bliss. All you need to do is realize that.
I assume that MAP-enforcer would not be coming after you, they'd want to go after the guy who sold the stuff to you cheaper than they were supposed to. If you go up the chain, then at some point there will be a retailer who made some sort of contract with price stipulations. So either somebody lower in the chain without any contract is making a loss, or somebody higher in the chain and with a contract is breaching the contract by selling too cheaply.
If not, then see my other response.
Wait a minute. Are you seriously saying, than in the USA, a manufacturer or official retailer or some such may come after a consumer who is selling 2nd hand (even if it's unused) product below certain price?
You've gotta be kidding me!
If you're serious, then seriously, get out of there while you can!
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at? Or what rights do I have to then your apple at all?
Simple. Before selling that apple, you make a contract that says what the buyer can do with it. If he does something else with it, it's a breach of that contract.
So if we want to prevent for example these MAPs, or any other similar thing, we need a law specifically saying that such contracts aren't valid.
It's always a trade-off, because here we have two private parties (seller and buyer), and then we make legislation about what kind of contracts they may make between them. Ie. it limits freedom of people and freedom of trade. Then again, it may help prevent monopolies or other bad stuff that would in effect limit freedoms even more.
As far as I can see, it's a slippery slope both ways, and right now it's earthquake season too... We need to try to stay at the top, but it requires constant vigilance.
It's not just computing power. We'd actually need to catch enough reflected photons that originated from the Earth, so we'd have anything at all to process.
I think it would be a problem even if there was no other light except what we want to observe, ie. there would be no external noise.
Also, the "mirror" isn't a flat plane, so we'd get a bunch of "Earth photons" that originatead at different times, reflected at different times, and then arrive at our telescope at the same time.
To get anything useful, we'd need to have a very sharp focus, and then move the focus at the speed of light, so we'd collect photons that originated at the same time, but reflected at different times.
So sharpness of focus would determine temporal resolution. If we'd want to catch an apple falling, we'd need temporal resolution of maybe 1/10th of a second (and that would still be quite a blurr), so focus would have to be 1/10th of a light second... I don't know that much about optics, but achieving that at a distance of hundreds of light years would be quite a feat too... Will a telescope array help with achieving a sharp focus at a great distance?
More like the opposite. As far as particle physics and quantum mechanics are concerned, it looks very much like there are just a few different possible charges (for example). The multitude of different particles is a combination of very limited set of properties (electric charge being one of them).
In a designed universe, every particle could have been designed different. In an universe that has developed as dictated by rather simple laws, every particle also follows these laws, and in this case it means that no, electrons could not be different from each others.
Similarity of particles does not disprove a creator, of course. It does tell us that if the universe was "created", it was probably created by creating universal laws of physics, not by creating individual particles like electrons.
Too bad that "universe created by creating some universal laws of physics" is indistinguishable from "universe arising from a random quantum fluctuation with certain properties, we call the universal laws of physics" or some other non-creator origin theory...
I would not say it's a question if timescales, but a question of energy balance.
No matter the timescale, you can't use X amount of hydrogen to get more than X hydrogen. You need extra energy just to get your original amount of hydrogen, and even more extra energy to get more than you originally had. So it's not a source, it's a storage with energy loss, it has negative energy balance.
But you can use X amount of oil (and no other energy) to survey and pump up more oil, and you'll end up with more than X. So it's a source, it has positive energy balance.
Of course at some point oil will stop being an energy source, 'cos pumping and refining it will require more energy than is recovered. Mineral oil can still be used as a very efficient energy storage for a long time, but the extra energy to pump and refine it will have to come from something else (ie. either from sun or from nuclear energy).
That's also the only comfortable solution to peak oil, if we start doing it early enough: build enough non-fossil power plants and use their energy to convert energy-negative oil reserves into usable oil and gas, ready to be transported and used like conventional oil products.
NASA guessed the bag/tools as being worth USD$100,000.00...
I bet that cost factors in stuff like design. Making a new replacement bag and tools must cost quite a bit less, even factoring in the cost of fuel to send it to ISS. Well, unless they're made by a subcontractor, and the contract says NASA has to pay a fixed high price for a replacement.
Except they probably have extra sets already, so they don't even need to make a replacement. Then the real extra cost is only the cost of fuel. Hmm, plus the cost of bureaucracy... Ok, so maybe that $100,000.00 figure is correct after all ;-)
In corporate e-mails top-posting is the only sensible way to go. New recipients might be added at any time, and with e-mails there's no way for them to get the old messages. And editing a message to cut out anything irrelevant while keeping everything relevant is waste of time=money, and disk space is cheap today.
Also, to share files via e-mail in any other way except attachments lacks a standard, and no software support. To use FTP or something like that, you'll need to do everything manually (including stuff like creating user accounts for e-mail recipients). No way. This works somewhat when linking to files in shared network disks, but that's only practical with internal e-mails, ie when everybody has access to shared disks. And even then there's the problem of the e-mail being archived, while somebody might delete or change the linked file at any time.
It's not a user problem, it's protocol and software problem, a standards problem. But regular e-mail is so broken anyway (just look at all the spam) and yet no new protocol has been accepted, so I wouldn't hold my breath for something better just to make quoting and file attachments more efficient.
Oh, but it IS human nature; we are after all just glorified chimps, more or less,
I bet any chimp would disagree with that ;-)
Unless the astronaut imparted enough force into the object to either give it escape velocity or cause it to reenter the atmosphere, shouldn't she (in theory) just be able to wait the 90 or so minutes till the next orbit and grab it when the two orbits intersect?
I think the object will have a different orbital perioid. Or to put it the other way, if the object is moving at just 1 m/s relative to the astronaut, then ninety minutes later it'll be over 5 kilometers away. And I don't think being in orbit changes this at all. Just think about it from the astronauts point of view, there is no force that would suddenly make the lost object get closer, it'll keep getting farther and farther away until it's on the other side of the planet, which will take quite a while.
Nethack and the like would be boring without the sadistic part, without the constant threat of dying of unfair causes. It helps the game to stay somewhat challenging even after completing it many times. It makes every game intense and exciting.
Besides, many unfair deaths aren't really unfair deaths, but instead deaths that could have been avoided by playing better (preparing better, being more cautious, being less greedy, etc). This is especially true when you get further along in the game and have more to lose. Truly unfair deaths where you do everything right and then you just die anyway are quite rare.
Note: I'm not saying you're "wrong" to not play Nethack 'cos you think it's too sadistic. Then it's just not a game that's entertaining for you. I'm just saying that it would be worse if it wasn't like that, it would be just plain boring.
But the expelled matter doesn't magically fall back.
It's not magic, it's just turbulence. "Orbits" in a galaxy aren't ever going to be stable over cosmological time scales... and the ring outside the empty zone is still the densest part of the galaxy. It's going to spread out and flatten until the average density around the black hole starts increasing again, no?
Well, if the article is correct, then apparently not. As far as I understand, the growth would have to be very slow, or the radiation pressure would blow the rest of the matter away and again stop the growth.
Also, once the immediate vicinity of the black hole is empty, it's sphere of influence is really very small in galactic scale. Anything falling towards it would have to hit it quite exactly, or it'd just zip past it without getting sucked in, and then perhaps make another pass in a few million years, again probably missing it. The neighborhood of the black hole would be rather empty, everything either having fallen in or been blown away by the earlier radiation, so there wouldn't be much resistance either. And any occasional star getting ripped apart by the black hole would create a burst of radiation that would keep the vicinity of the black hole clear of gas and dust.
Something like a merger of galaxies might create brief periods of faster growth, giving the black hole new mass to swallow. But again the radiation pressure would blow most of the new matter away quickly, so compared to the total mass of the black hole, the relative growth would be very little.
Indeed, that's my point. One the black hole has cleared its surroundings to the point where it's no longer growing, then the radiation emitted from this source will drop until it starts growing again.
But the expelled matter doesn't magically fall back. The matter that didn't fall in was forced into a stable orbit around the galactic center by the radiation pressure. There'd be only random wandering stars that by chance get too close to the central black hole in their orbits. But even a galactic black hole is a tiny tiny dot in the center of a galaxy, so these unlucky stars would be few and far between.
So in practice the black hole stops growing in a galactic environment. It could grow if it got some mass, but it just can't get that mass from anywhere. A star per millenium (or whatever) doesn't do much for a black hole this big, not even in cosmological time scales.
Or that's how I understood it. I could be wrong.