If the UK was invaded by a foreign power, and the people fought back, we would be called 'the resistance', or 'freedom fighters' or what not - so why do Bliar and Bush and co. call the Iraqi people that fight back 'insurgents' ??
If US invaded UK (or the other way around), you could be sure that UK freedom fighters would be called insurgents too;-)
It seems extremely unlikely that the kinds of chemical reactions necessary for any kind of life could occur.
To me, it seems extremely unlikely that we could give any kind of reliable estimate on how unlikely that is...
OTOH, all we'd need is a version of Urey-Miller experiment that used (our best guess of) the chemicals and the environment of Titan. Then let it simmer for a time, and see if any promising complex chain forming molecules (such as our amino acids) appeared... I wonder if anybody has attempted such and experiment.
I didn't find a relevant link, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. There are dimmers for fluoresecnt lights, and they should work at least with some of these bulbs (depends on what the electronics in the bulb actually do in a particular bulb, I guess).
I seem to recall there are even energy saving bulbs that work with regular dimmer. I suppose they have a suitable fluorescent dimmer built-in, and then they convert the pulsed electricity from regular dimmer so that the bulb dims as expected.
that's my thought. a 1300 years ago it was so warm in England that english wine was better than french wine. I am not going to worry about Global warming until that happens again.
Local conditions are no indication for or against global warming. Consider the Gulf Stream for example... Global climate is linked to something as big as the Gulf Stream, that's for sure, and current speculation is that the link mihgt be inverse, colder global tempereature would mean colder arctic, which could mean stronger Gulf Stream, which could mean warmer England. And vise versa, too warm arctic might even cause Gulf Stream to stop altogether, freezing northern parts of Europe (what is warm for Arctic is still freezing).
Or then not... My point is, you can't tell if warmer, more wine-friendly England means global warming or global cooling, it could be either.
We may be responsible for lots of species going extinct, however, compared to all of the extinctions that have occurred (he did say throughout history right?), we have been responsible for very few.
You're mixing "extinction" and "extinction event". We're responsible for just *one* extinction event, this current one. But that's not "very few", since there haven't been that many extinction events total, I think just *three* major ones (plus the one we're in now) during last 300 million years. Being responsible for an event that occurs maybe once per 100 million years is not something I'd call "nothing"...
I suspect the peak of this extinction event will be reached when almost all of the rainforests are gone. And considering our current population growth, I dont' think we can save the rainforests. They'll be overrun and destroyed by humans within next 500 years. There's some hope, ie stopping the population growth by some other means than starving people (because starving people will turn rainforests into deserts), but somehow I'm not very hopeful we can pull it off...
Maybe we need to just buy a flare-riding ship, which carries a small black hole onboard that functions as a billion-ton heatsink.
No no, you're overlooking a significant detail. Portable size black holes are not cold, they're extremely hot due to Hawking radiation. So you wouldn't want to have one with you on Venus of all places. Pluto maybe, but not Venus...
However, a suitable amount of cryo-cold neutronium in a high-pressure container, now that just might do the trick... Negligibly small surface area means that heat absoption from the atmosphere is minimal, so all you need to do is calculate the amount of heat you need to have absorbed, and then take with you enough neutronium mabsorb that amount of heat.
a) for undergrads: assume the thing to be a tower (i.e. straight line, angle with ground 90 degree). Aquire a solution for the total force by integrating over dm.
Surely you are aware that a space elevator is not a tower? It's a satellite on geosynchronous orbit, which just happens to reach all the way down to Earth (or at least almost, close enough that you can build a tower to reach the lowest end of the satellite so you can grab it.
If you believe that it's a physical impossibility, then can you please tell me, what is maximum length of a vertically (perpendicular to Earth surface some 36000km below) oriented piece of cable, with centre of gravity at GEO?
If you can't be bothered to calculate, could you at least give me a top-of-your-head ballpark estimate from these:
1m? 100m? 1km? 100km 10000km? 2x36000km?
Climbing the cable is then a different matter, and there's no point in going into that before we establish that a space elevater shaped satellite on GEO is not physically impossible.
So we won't make same (stupid?) design or operation mistakes again in future. Scientific and technological progress means being able to make completely new and unheard of mistakes...:-)
No country in history has ever passed a law that states that their government can't kill people.
Plenty of countries have laws that don't allow the government to order killing any of their own people, nor any civillians at all. Only exception would be ordering to fight (ie kill) attacking foreign military. And plenty of people would consider it immoral to not defend their country if somebody wants to come and kill its people...
"My point is that right now there is clearly more to "life" than can be described by our understanding of the raw physics of the materials involved. I don't think it's wrong to call that mysterious--science can be used to investigate mysteries. I do agree with you that a mystical answer is not useful or valuable. But pointing out a gap in our understanding will necessarily involve imprecise language. That doesn't make it a mystical explanation though IMO."
The way I see it, there' really isn't much mysterious about basic life either. The molecular machinery of a cell may be awe-inspiring in how it works, and a multi-cellular body as well, but I don't think any new physics or chemistry is needed to explain how a living creature works. So I wouldn't call that "mysterious" myself.
However, self-conciousnes is something that in my opinion certainly is mysterious. There's even room for it being mystical from the scientific point of view. If we some day create self-concious computers, then the mystery may be solved, but until then, I find it hard to believe that self-conciousness (feeling the difference between my body and *me*, seeing my hands typing while contemplating these philosophical thoughts, etc) can be explained as just plain bio-electro-chemistry of the brain.
"Please describe, in a repeatable, objectively testable way, how to tell the difference between living and dead matter at the quantum level."
Most likely, none. But since this is absence of difference, it's pretty much impossible to *prove* it. Perhaps there is a quantum level (whatever that means) difference, we just can't measure it...
"For that matter please describe how to tell the difference between living and dead matter over very short periods of time."
Depending on your exact definition of "living" and "matter", they may be none. For example there's no difference in the matter, the atoms of a molecule (even e big one, like DNA or a protein), wether it is part of a life form or not.
On a cellular level, with millions of molecules, you could measure (of course that pretty much destroys the cell) all the different molecules in it, and from their ratios it would probably be easy to tell if the cell will keep on living (be able to maintain it's structure and metabolism) or if it is dead/dying (foreign molecules, broken proteins, broken DNA chains, broken membranes etc). "Dying" cell just means its structure is degrading faster than it is being rebuilt (until finally the cell superstructure breaks and the dead cell as a single object no longer exists).
"There's a lot about "life" that we don't understand scientifically yet."
Sure, but it need not (it could, but it need not) be anything "mystical". For a perspective, consider:
- How to tell a difference between a working and a broken car in a quantum level?
- How to tell the difference between working and broken vehicle matter over very short periods of time?
Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
I disagree. The amount of evil like that is really *very* small. USA is 300 million people nation, yet a thing like that makes national news, because it happens so very rarely.
As the only form of life that understands genetics, there is NO WAY the random mutations of evolution could ever catch up with us.
We *are* a product of "the random mutations of evolution".
Currently there clearly isn't room for another intelligent species (because we're in the process of killing all the candidates, like whales and other great apes). However, if we were to go extinct, there's no reason why evolution couldn't come up with another intelligent species eventually capable of understanging genetics etc. Of course there's no *guarantee* that another intelligent life form would arise on Earth if we went extinct, either.
SETI has that pesky 'I' there, meaning intelligence. It's looking for signs of radio communications, based on assumption that only intelligent beings might communicate with radio. Though if a non-intelligent life communicating with radio was found, I don't think anybody would be majorly disappointed;-).
TFA is talking about finding planets that have *any* life that can significantly change the atmosphere of a planet. Earth could have been discovered like this probably at least since we've had O2 (regular oxygen gas) and O3 (ozone) in our atmosphere, starting from about 2 billion years (*) ago. Contrast this time with the time we've used radio communications, less than 100 years.
No. It is the Nokia license that restricts you. The BSD license does not contain the restriction.
If it's BSD-licensed code + probably modifications under proprietary closed license, then tell me: Is that originally BSD licensed code running in that proprietary device more or less free than it would be if it had been written under GPL license originally, did the choice of license have any effect on how free the code in the proprietary device is?
Huh? Of course it will! It's just a question of when. Roman economy is currently irrelevant. Spanish economy is irrelevant. UK economy is irrelevant. US economy will be irrelevant. Let's hope it won't happen very soon though.
You see, most of that $10 trillion figure depend on most of world trade being in US$, and US foreign debt being $ as well. If that changes, and if it changes too fast, then there'll be trouble... And there will be change when Chinese and Indian economies grow bigger than US economy... And especially if European economy grows much bigger than US economy (but I doubt that very much, unless something extraordinary happens with Eastern Europe and Russia...)
> It might be wishful thinking on your part
Let me assure you that I'd be just as unhappy as you, if not more so, if it were to happen any time soon, 'cos it would be a Bad Thing for both of us, probably...
> No offense to you, but that's why we tend to make money and people like you don't.
For many Indian and especially Chinese companies, US market may soon (5-10 years) be almost irrelevant, especially if there is a big difference in IP laws between the countries. If you're likely to lose more on court battles than you're likely to make on sales, then there's no point in coming to the market in the first place, no matter how big it may be. And Japan will likely be more than happy to concentrate on Asian market as well, if US market becomes too expensive.
And if Asian countries want to get agressive in an economic war, they'll just concentrate on stiffling innovation and economy in the US by abusing the legal system...
Stronger gravity makes things fall faster. This means that the beings living there will need faster reflexes to be able to walk, since they have less time to react. 13 times Earths gravity means that the beings will simply sidestep the bullet and watch as it sails past them in virtual slow motion. Assuming that they don't simply stand there and let it pounce of them, since their tissues will also need a much higher tensile strength to resist their local gravity.
No I'd say stronger gravity just makes the maximum size of things smaller. The ecological niche of earth primates filled with squirrel-size creatures. Can't have big enough brain to develop intellingence, I bet.
So I guess we wouldn't have Super Saiyans, we'd have huge herds of mindless alien flesh-eating killer-squirrels ready to devour all life on Earth with their super-strength and super-toughness... Now, if only you could *train* these alien squirrels...;-)
...the end of Western democracy, that is. One small step at a time, it slips away. Sure, this particular step is only happening in the USA, but the rest of Western World is bound to follow... Extensions like this tend become permanent laws, and then more laws are built on them, so you no longer can just not renew them or a host of other laws become pointless as well.
His analogy is a little off. It's more like "Don't be too harsh on this rapist, you see that guy there, he would rape somebody too". I was only complaining about the analogy, it's rather more than "a little off". PETA clubbing baby seals would be more like Democrats wanting to remove the State governments and move all the States of U.S. directly under federal rule. Democrats doing weasely privacy infringing things is only slightly less (or even equally) unsurprising than the GOP doing it.
As far as your devil's advocate question that's like saying "would you call PETA inhumane if they sent a group to alaska to bash seals skulls in with clubs?". PETA wouldn't do it, so what does the question mean?
Are you seriously suggesting that any political party would not do something like this CD thing? Ha! A politician is a politician. The only question is, which party has stupid enough person at the wrong position to initiate something like this without thinking it through (or thinking it through and doing anyway...). In this case it happened to be the republicans. Lucky you if you're a democrat. But it could have been the other way around just as easily.
Though I'll admit that, looking from this side of the Atlantic, the republicans seem to have been doing more stupid things lately over there on your(?) side...
Bitching about/. moderation follows, feel free to moderate *this* off-topic, because this is;-)
"You read/. and your nick is NerdENerd. Why do you care if your nuts are ok?
At least I apparently don't, as I'm not concerned even though I'm typing this with a hot laptop on my lap and both WiFi and Bluetooth in use..."
How the hell is that *flamebait*? No matter how I twist it, I can't figure out how you can interpret that as a flamebait. Bad humour certainly, redundant maybe, maybe even trolling. But a flamebait? . . . Ah... Glad I could get that out of my system. Thanks for your time, sorry for any inconvenience.
Slashdot Mirror
If US invaded UK (or the other way around), you could be sure that UK freedom fighters would be called insurgents too
To me, it seems extremely unlikely that we could give any kind of reliable estimate on how unlikely that is...
OTOH, all we'd need is a version of Urey-Miller experiment that used (our best guess of) the chemicals and the environment of Titan. Then let it simmer for a time, and see if any promising complex chain forming molecules (such as our amino acids) appeared... I wonder if anybody has attempted such and experiment.
I didn't find a relevant link, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. There are dimmers for fluoresecnt lights, and they should work at least with some of these bulbs (depends on what the electronics in the bulb actually do in a particular bulb, I guess).
I seem to recall there are even energy saving bulbs that work with regular dimmer. I suppose they have a suitable fluorescent dimmer built-in, and then they convert the pulsed electricity from regular dimmer so that the bulb dims as expected.
Can anybody supply a reference link?
Local conditions are no indication for or against global warming. Consider the Gulf Stream for example... Global climate is linked to something as big as the Gulf Stream, that's for sure, and current speculation is that the link mihgt be inverse, colder global tempereature would mean colder arctic, which could mean stronger Gulf Stream, which could mean warmer England. And vise versa, too warm arctic might even cause Gulf Stream to stop altogether, freezing northern parts of Europe (what is warm for Arctic is still freezing).
Or then not... My point is, you can't tell if warmer, more wine-friendly England means global warming or global cooling, it could be either.
You're mixing "extinction" and "extinction event". We're responsible for just *one* extinction event, this current one. But that's not "very few", since there haven't been that many extinction events total, I think just *three* major ones (plus the one we're in now) during last 300 million years. Being responsible for an event that occurs maybe once per 100 million years is not something I'd call "nothing"...
I suspect the peak of this extinction event will be reached when almost all of the rainforests are gone. And considering our current population growth, I dont' think we can save the rainforests. They'll be overrun and destroyed by humans within next 500 years. There's some hope, ie stopping the population growth by some other means than starving people (because starving people will turn rainforests into deserts), but somehow I'm not very hopeful we can pull it off...
No no, you're overlooking a significant detail. Portable size black holes are not cold, they're extremely hot due to Hawking radiation. So you wouldn't want to have one with you on Venus of all places. Pluto maybe, but not Venus...
However, a suitable amount of cryo-cold neutronium in a high-pressure container, now that just might do the trick... Negligibly small surface area means that heat absoption from the atmosphere is minimal, so all you need to do is calculate the amount of heat you need to have absorbed, and then take with you enough neutronium mabsorb that amount of heat.
Surely you are aware that a space elevator is not a tower? It's a satellite on geosynchronous orbit, which just happens to reach all the way down to Earth (or at least almost, close enough that you can build a tower to reach the lowest end of the satellite so you can grab it.
If you believe that it's a physical impossibility, then can you please tell me, what is maximum length of a vertically (perpendicular to Earth surface some 36000km below) oriented piece of cable, with centre of gravity at GEO?
If you can't be bothered to calculate, could you at least give me a top-of-your-head ballpark estimate from these:
1m?
100m?
1km?
100km
10000km?
2x36000km?
Climbing the cable is then a different matter, and there's no point in going into that before we establish that a space elevater shaped satellite on GEO is not physically impossible.
So we won't make same (stupid?) design or operation mistakes again in future. Scientific and technological progress means being able to make completely new and unheard of mistakes... :-)
Plenty of countries have laws that don't allow the government to order killing any of their own people, nor any civillians at all. Only exception would be ordering to fight (ie kill) attacking foreign military. And plenty of people would consider it immoral to not defend their country if somebody wants to come and kill its people...
Same reaseon we "have to" skip/fast forward over commercials on TV.
The way I see it, there' really isn't much mysterious about basic life either. The molecular machinery of a cell may be awe-inspiring in how it works, and a multi-cellular body as well, but I don't think any new physics or chemistry is needed to explain how a living creature works. So I wouldn't call that "mysterious" myself.
However, self-conciousnes is something that in my opinion certainly is mysterious. There's even room for it being mystical from the scientific point of view. If we some day create self-concious computers, then the mystery may be solved, but until then, I find it hard to believe that self-conciousness (feeling the difference between my body and *me*, seeing my hands typing while contemplating these philosophical thoughts, etc) can be explained as just plain bio-electro-chemistry of the brain.
Most likely, none. But since this is absence of difference, it's pretty much impossible to *prove* it. Perhaps there is a quantum level (whatever that means) difference, we just can't measure it...
Depending on your exact definition of "living" and "matter", they may be none. For example there's no difference in the matter, the atoms of a molecule (even e big one, like DNA or a protein), wether it is part of a life form or not.
On a cellular level, with millions of molecules, you could measure (of course that pretty much destroys the cell) all the different molecules in it, and from their ratios it would probably be easy to tell if the cell will keep on living (be able to maintain it's structure and metabolism) or if it is dead/dying (foreign molecules, broken proteins, broken DNA chains, broken membranes etc). "Dying" cell just means its structure is degrading faster than it is being rebuilt (until finally the cell superstructure breaks and the dead cell as a single object no longer exists).
Sure, but it need not (it could, but it need not) be anything "mystical". For a perspective, consider:
- How to tell a difference between a working and a broken car in a quantum level?
- How to tell the difference between working and broken vehicle matter over very short periods of time?
Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
I disagree. The amount of evil like that is really *very* small. USA is 300 million people nation, yet a thing like that makes national news, because it happens so very rarely.
As the only form of life that understands genetics, there is NO WAY the random mutations of evolution could ever catch up with us.
We *are* a product of "the random mutations of evolution".
Currently there clearly isn't room for another intelligent species (because we're in the process of killing all the candidates, like whales and other great apes). However, if we were to go extinct, there's no reason why evolution couldn't come up with another intelligent species eventually capable of understanging genetics etc. Of course there's no *guarantee* that another intelligent life form would arise on Earth if we went extinct, either.
SETI has that pesky 'I' there, meaning intelligence. It's looking for signs of radio communications, based on assumption that only intelligent beings might communicate with radio. Though if a non-intelligent life communicating with radio was found, I don't think anybody would be majorly disappointed ;-).
u rrent/lectures/first_billion_years/first_billion_y ears.html
TFA is talking about finding planets that have *any* life that can significantly change the atmosphere of a planet. Earth could have been discovered like this probably at least since we've had O2 (regular oxygen gas) and O3 (ozone) in our atmosphere, starting from about 2 billion years (*) ago. Contrast this time with the time we've used radio communications, less than 100 years.
(*) reference:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/c
No. It is the Nokia license that restricts you. The BSD license does not contain the restriction.
If it's BSD-licensed code + probably modifications under proprietary closed license, then tell me:
Is that originally BSD licensed code running in that proprietary device more or less free than it would be if it had been written under GPL license originally, did the choice of license have any effect on how free the code in the proprietary device is?
> $10 trillion economy doesn't become irrelevant.
;-)
Huh? Of course it will! It's just a question of when. Roman economy is currently irrelevant. Spanish economy is irrelevant. UK economy is irrelevant. US economy will be irrelevant. Let's hope it won't happen very soon though.
You see, most of that $10 trillion figure depend on most of world trade being in US$, and US foreign debt being $ as well. If that changes, and if it changes too fast, then there'll be trouble... And there will be change when Chinese and Indian economies grow bigger than US economy... And especially if European economy grows much bigger than US economy (but I doubt that very much, unless something extraordinary happens with Eastern Europe and Russia...)
> It might be wishful thinking on your part
Let me assure you that I'd be just as unhappy as you, if not more so, if it were to happen any time soon, 'cos it would be a Bad Thing for both of us, probably...
> No offense to you, but that's why we tend to make money and people like you don't.
So you're a lawyer...?
if a company wants to tap into the US market
For many Indian and especially Chinese companies, US market may soon (5-10 years) be almost irrelevant, especially if there is a big difference in IP laws between the countries. If you're likely to lose more on court battles than you're likely to make on sales, then there's no point in coming to the market in the first place, no matter how big it may be. And Japan will likely be more than happy to concentrate on Asian market as well, if US market becomes too expensive.
And if Asian countries want to get agressive in an economic war, they'll just concentrate on stiffling innovation and economy in the US by abusing the legal system...
Stronger gravity makes things fall faster. This means that the beings living there will need faster reflexes to be able to walk, since they have less time to react. 13 times Earths gravity means that the beings will simply sidestep the bullet and watch as it sails past them in virtual slow motion. Assuming that they don't simply stand there and let it pounce of them, since their tissues will also need a much higher tensile strength to resist their local gravity.
;-)
No I'd say stronger gravity just makes the maximum size of things smaller. The ecological niche of earth primates filled with squirrel-size creatures. Can't have big enough brain to develop intellingence, I bet.
So I guess we wouldn't have Super Saiyans, we'd have huge herds of mindless alien flesh-eating killer-squirrels ready to devour all life on Earth with their super-strength and super-toughness... Now, if only you could *train* these alien squirrels...
...the end of Western democracy, that is. One small step at a time, it slips away. Sure, this particular step is only happening in the USA, but the rest of Western World is bound to follow... Extensions like this tend become permanent laws, and then more laws are built on them, so you no longer can just not renew them or a host of other laws become pointless as well.
And yet this was done by the republicans. You want to excuse them because the democrats "would have" done the same thing then go right ahead.
:-).
Well, I don't get to neither judge nor excuse them. It's not my country or state so I can't vote there.
But if you want to think that because it was republicans who did this, them democrats are somehow better, go ahead
His analogy is a little off. It's more like "Don't be too harsh on this rapist, you see that guy there, he would rape somebody too".
I was only complaining about the analogy, it's rather more than "a little off". PETA clubbing baby seals would be more like Democrats wanting to remove the State governments and move all the States of U.S. directly under federal rule. Democrats doing weasely privacy infringing things is only slightly less (or even equally) unsurprising than the GOP doing it.
As far as your devil's advocate question that's like saying "would you call PETA inhumane if they sent a group to alaska to bash seals skulls in with clubs?". PETA wouldn't do it, so what does the question mean?
Are you seriously suggesting that any political party would not do something like this CD thing? Ha! A politician is a politician. The only question is, which party has stupid enough person at the wrong position to initiate something like this without thinking it through (or thinking it through and doing anyway...). In this case it happened to be the republicans. Lucky you if you're a democrat. But it could have been the other way around just as easily.
Though I'll admit that, looking from this side of the Atlantic, the republicans seem to have been doing more stupid things lately over there on your(?) side...
Bitching about /. moderation follows, feel free to moderate *this* off-topic, because this is ;-)
/. and your nick is NerdENerd.
"You read
Why do you care if your nuts are ok?
At least I apparently don't, as I'm not concerned even though I'm typing this with a hot laptop on my lap and both WiFi and Bluetooth in use..."
How the hell is that *flamebait*? No matter how I twist it, I can't figure out how you can interpret that as a flamebait. Bad humour certainly, redundant maybe, maybe even trolling. But a flamebait?
.
.
.
Ah... Glad I could get that out of my system. Thanks for your time, sorry for any inconvenience.
You read /. and your nick is NerdENerd.
Why do you care if your nuts are ok?
At least I apparently don't, as I'm not concerned even though I'm typing this with a hot laptop on my lap and both WiFi and Bluetooth in use...