I don't think you realize the natural resources and industry which still exists in America, but leaving that aside I'd have to agree there would be huge shortages if there was to be a war of America vs. some other major world power.
The problem in America would be one of improvisation and how quickly the industrial capacity of America could conceivably return if both the people and the government wanted it to happen. A similar situation happened in America during WW II, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented. It would and did take time to happen, like it took in the 1940's to get American industry up to speed.
I personally think a major conflict like that would screw over many other countries far worse than America, although China would be sitting pretty because they do have the manufacturing capacity to conduct such a war.
I thought it was some law professor at an American university who helped to get marijuana legalized in America? While not legal on the federal level, there are many states which have certainly "decriminalized" the plant and several referenda which originated with the support of "law professors" helping to draft the wording of the proposed legislation. An article written by a law professor speculating the likelihood that such a measure might pass in an election or before a state legislature certainly would be of interest, even outside of America.
Besides, since the Chinese government doesn't exactly work on the system of group consensus (unlike America and most of Europe), it is very hard to identify what their government may really be thinking or planning in the future. I don't know for myself just what position this particular professor may have on the actual planning process for spaceflight, but it is stuff like this which should be watched and attention must be paid as it may indicate what future directions may happen.
I would compare this more to a Powerpoint presentation done by some NASA bureaucrat for some far-off mission concept which may or may not happen. It may happen, if funding happens, if top-level bureaucrats start to like the idea, and if the planets happen to align in the proper way to get an actual hearing before a congressional committee, or in the case of China before the Politburo of the Communist Party. Stuff like that happens in both America and Russia all of the time too. The Apollo program started this way, as did the Shenzhou program for China. That is how government operates.
Considering that China has yet to even perform an in-orbit rendezvous, much less do anything other than a simple EVA basically re-creating Ed White's trip into space in 1965, I'd say that China has a huge road ahead of them if they intend to even get to an asteroid much less do much with it once it gets up there.
My #1 concern about the Chinese space program is mainly their operational tempo. They simply aren't putting spacecraft up, and instead relying too heavily upon "technological breakthroughs" of other countries (aka stealing concepts rather than inventing it themselves). Engineering, particularly cutting edge engineering, requires dozens or hundreds of attempts and a whole bunch of failures. More significantly, the technicians who are building their spacecraft really don't know how to build them because they aren't building them. Actually flying something only once every 2-3 years does not really give you the experience necessary to stay in space. Even the Space Shuttle, as awful of a program and risk adverse that NASA became launched more often than that (except for the "return to flight" breaks after the loss of vehicles).
I'm impressed with what the Chinese have been able to accomplish over the past decade or so, and they at least have a toe hold on spaceflight where they legitimately can claim to be competing against America and Russia. Still, China isn't quite ready for the big leagues yet and is nearly 40 years behind Russia and America in terms of getting stuff to work in space. They can catch up, but it won't be easy and they may have to re-learn some of the lessons that America and Russia has already learned about.
I'm also not sure if the life expectancy of a flight director in China would be all that long if a failure happened, given their system of government. That sort of creeps into other performance issues and really makes them risk averse to a degree that puts NASA to shame, but also drives up the price of these vehicles. That SpaceX using California-based union labor can beat the slave labor of China speaks volumes about how expensive their vehicles really are and their manufacturing methods.
Little that you know of the Gen-Xers. The hipster movement was pretty much dead by the time I was a teen, and I am considered an "early Gen-Xer"... even called a baby boomer by some. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
I was just a toddler when Woodstock was happening.
If I had to define more cleanly who is a Gen Xer, it would be those who were born during the Vietnam War. Obama is out because he was born too early (and therefore a Baby Boomer). The Gen Xers are just barely getting into politics at the moment and are now junior senators and/or members of the U.S. House and also getting into state politics in a big way.
That clearly does not describe anybody you could remotely call a Gen-Xer. I'd also dare say that most of those posting on Slashdot are not Gen-Xers either but rather the subsequent generation (Gen-Y if you will).
I really don't think you understand evolution at all, or at least the principles of evolution.
Yes, the evolutionary pressures upon the current generation of children are not necessarily to survive against infectious diseases, being able to smash the skull of a potential opponent inside out, or to be able to successfully hunt for food by running after it all day long. Instead, the evolutionary pressures are to be able to operate a complex machine at relatively high velocities (60 mph/100 kmph) which has an overall mass on the order of about 500kg-2000kg where you must not only watch for similar machines like this but also be able to cope with natural forces (rain, snow, high wind) or some people being total jerks. That is but one of many kinds of evolutionary pressures put upon children today, and sadly there are many who fail to meet that test as well.
In that sense, by using your own argument here that because the environmental pressures are substantially different than several generations ago, that the rate of evolution is actually quite rapid at the moment.
One of the interesting things pointed out in this mini-series (three videos total as a part of Nova) is that mankind has adapted to an evolutionary environment of almost constant change in environmental conditions, where eastern Africa in particular has undergone so much and so frequent environmental changes that mankind simply needed to adapt to those constant changes. My argument is that we are undergoing those evolutionary changes again, particularly in a shift from a largely agrarian peasant society to a largely industrialized society. That is still happening in many parts of the world, and those evolutionary pressures resulting from that shift still are being placed on the children of today in sometimes a horrific fashion.
More to the point I was originally making, that evolution hasn't stopped and suggesting that it has is being simply ignorant. It is merely different than it was in the past and the "fitness" selection is substantially different too.
Unfortunately, it's not only those who refuse vaccination that end up at risk.
That isn't really true. Here is the gamble you make as a parent when you vaccinate your children:
There is a non-zero probability that your child might get seriously ill with a debilitating injury due to the vaccination or potentially may die. Yes, the probability is small and compared to catching the disease from a large population of people who are not immunized, it is a probability that is certainly worth that minor risk.
The problem comes when that non-zero probability is less than the chance your child will get sick and/or die from that disease from a largely vaccinated population? From a purely self-interested and logical perspective, if just about everybody is vaccinated from a disease and that disease is no longer prevalent in the population as a whole, the probability of a child dying from the vaccination is actually higher than if the child was exposed to the vaccination. In this perspective, those who refuse vaccinations really are looking after the well being of their own children and in effect depending on the rest of the society to be sheep and following what everybody else is doing.
If you are vaccinated against Small Pox or a number of diseases not typically common in many 1st world countries, there is either a chance of contracting the disease itself (usually restricted to "live" vaccines) or that you will have an adverse reaction to whatever components are found in the vaccine as well (such as if you have a strong allergic reaction to eggs used to process the vaccine or something like that). For example, I took a Typhoid Fever shot a while back because I was going to a tropical area, and I had a severe reaction to the vaccination that nearly put me into the hospital for recovery (I think my parents should have sent me there BTW, they just didn't seem to care). Not all vaccinations are good and there are certainly valid reasons not to get yourself vaccinated against every possible illness.
To really complicate the picture, there are some professions and individuals who are being vaccinated against some more exotic illnesses because of the calculus of trying to include biological warfare probabilities where the possibility exists to deliberately spread certain kinds of rare diseases in a population which has no longer been immunized against that illness. Small Pox is one of those diseases that in theory could come back simply because somebody is being a real jerk. It is harder to accomplish than some people think, but such attacks can cause panic and certainly cause economic turmoil. There is a reason why it is American policy to consider such attacks to be morally equivalent to a nuclear bomb strike with the same official reaction if it happens.
Specifically, those who demean and ridicule those who refuse vaccinations simply are showing almost as much ignorance as some of those who refuse vaccinations. I am proclaiming here that there are valid reasons to refuse to vaccinate your children, even though in my case I have (mostly) vaccinated my children against most common childhood illnesses. My rationale is that both I and my children are in contact with enough people that the probability at the moment of contracting these diseases if they weren't vaccinated is higher and the potential for their deaths, in my view and estimation, than if they weren't vaccinated. I don't claim to have 100% knowledge on this topic and I certainly don't think it is my job to make that sort of calculation for somebody else in regards to their own children. I certainly don't think it is the role of the government to force at gunpoint the vaccinations of children.
In fairness to the people of Utah, Congress didn't accept the #1 choice for the state name (Deseret) and the translation of the word "Utah" can mean "Mountain of God", which is something that most people of Utah really don't mind and was generally considered acceptable at the time the name was chosen. The name for Utah County (or Utah Valley) was selected much earlier and before the name of the state/territory was decided upon. So there was a delegation of elected representatives from Utah County in the Deseret territorial legislature.
This is just a minor bit of trivia that I guess in the long run doesn't really matter. It is amazing though to see intellectual property law being decided in the federal judicial district of Utah which may have national significance.
If a corporation is legally a person, when is it dead? This company is a zombie that has more lives than several dozen cats.
The whole case seems like an episode of Get a Life, where the main character dies in each episode only to come back to life in the next episode as if nothing happened. That pretty much defines SCO.
My question is more in terms of who has SCO stock certificates? Those are most certainly collector items now.
The only reason why the Supremes would hear this case is to not only nail the coffin together for SCO, but to hammer home to the entire computer industry to never pull a stunt like this again and to basically do something ugly to the lawyers who put this case together in the first place and possibly go after the major shareholders and financiers of this whole endeavor and tell Novell "anything you wish will be granted".
Since Novell isn't really asking for much here other than purely money and a few legal trinkets, I don't see it getting to that level. Regardless, this is still going to be a precedent setting case on a number of levels, and it did solidify the legitimacy of the GPL in a number of ways where the legality of the GPL is no longer really in question. I call that a win for the good guys.
I knew a couple of SCO developers in Utah County, Utah (yeah, the state is actually named after the county, to show how weird this universe can really get) where there was an honest attempt to make a legitimate business. There certainly were some pretty interesting products developed and they had a reasonable number of developers and engineers considering the markets they were pushing for.
And then came Microsoft and the people who got greedy within the company, where the rest as they say is history. It was when the developers were jumping ship early on that you knew the company was in trouble.
This was even after the "Santa Cruz Operation" buy-out. I'm just glad that I never got hired by them.
The problem I have with most educational materials about nuclear physics is that it is rote learning and regurgitation of facts and not really science or "hands-on" learning. Simulators can help to an extent, but a simulation isn't the same thing as the real thing.
Amateur computer software developers is extremely common, and even amateur hacking of computer equipment isn't all that uncommon. There are even what I call "amateur pharmacologists" even if sometimes I think they are significantly lacking in the scientific method. With just a few exceptions where usually the law enforcement community gets involved, you never heard about or see amateur nuclear researchers. Yes, I've heard of the "nuclear boy scout" too.
I'm not necessarily saying that we need to send samples to every teenage kid (or Al Qaeda wannabe) who desires to play with this stuff, but at the same time there is a problem here where in my opinion far too much is "classified" even on civilian designs, which in turn breeds ignorance and contempt for those who hold that knowledge.
In terms of what was happening at Fukushima, I believe there were some serious engineering flaws in the plant design... many of which I hope the industry will learn from. If there isn't a major engineering design review on the topic at a meeting of nuclear engineers in the near future, I would not only be shocked but disgusted at the entire profession. That is how engineering works, and a disaster of that scale should be avoided and the mistakes made at that plant should be etched into the memory of the engineers involved.... just as civil engineers (and just about all other engineers too) almost always are shown the "Galloping Gertie" bridge and basically told never to design something like that in their careers.
'ER' the people are the supreme law in the land and can change the constitution via the normal political process. This crazy notion that a bunch of 'land grabbers' from the 1700 who did not fight against slavery, we somehow the be all and end all of human thought, is just so grossly 'American Exceptionalism' and Tea Bagger nonsense (even when those that wrote it were all European and consciously excluded all native Americans from it through guilt or greed).
The issue with the constitution is that it has worked pretty well so far, and as you pointed out there is a procedure set up to make changes in that document. The problem here isn't the veneration of the document but simply following some kind of standard at all instead of having a court or government official bending to the current prevailing winds of political opinion or whoever happens to be making donations to their re-election campaign.
If a constitution has any meaning at all, it would be to establish primary ground rules that should not be tampered with except when an overwhelming consensus to change those rules can be met that involves more than even the ordinary legislative bodies which typically enacts ordinary legislation. What I and others are saying here is that standard was not met, hence this is bad law. Furthermore, the original enabling clause which permits copyright legislation in the first place is arguably a pretty good idea even if copyright code as passed by Congress leaves much to be desired.
If your argument is that copyright shouldn't exist at all, that is an argument you can certainly make. I just don't see the U.S. Constitution being amended to remove that authority from the U.S. Congress.
One of the huge advantages of the Moon, as opposed to Mars or almost anywhere else in the Solar System, is that it is only one light second away. That would allow somebody operating a robot on the Earth to react in nearly real-time for almost anything happening on the Moon.
I'm not a robots only type guy, but I think a combination of robots and people will be required on the Moon for almost any activity, particularly for any sort of industrial capacity. Robots can do the heavy lifting and more "mundane" grunt work where the serious problems which needs a sit of eyes on site can be provided by trained people who are up there too.
Regardless, the basic unit of energy is a watt, and to do much of anything including pure scientific research is going to require a whole bunch of them, and have the ability to generate that power around the clock. My response about mining the materials to build more reactors is more a response as to why some think it is foolish to bring them up in the first place. Nobody is going to need a multi-gigawatt generator to start some sort of lunar outpost on the scale of the Scott-Amundsen base that exists on the South Pole.... but they will need hundreds or thousands of watts of power just to take care of basic life support and exploration needs.
Almost every place on the Earth where we have looked which has water present in any form and some sort of energy gradient, we have found life.
The fact here is that we really know so little about the Moon that we are just beginning to do the basic surveys necessary to have any real understanding of its character. There certainly is plenty of water on the Moon, and I wouldn't rule out at least some sort of liquid water reservoirs under the surface of the Moon. It wouldn't have to be a whole lot, but perhaps just enough to sustain some sort of microbial life.
Apollo 12 did pick up some microbes from the Surveyor probe they landed next to, although it seems to have come from some sort of contamination that happened on the Earth. The question that hasn't been resolved is when that contamination took place, did it happen before Surveyor was launched from Cape Canaveral, was from the astronauts on the Moon, or did that contamination happen on the Earth? The larger question is how long can microbes survive in the surface conditions on the Moon? How little "shielding" to they need to survive?
There is no reason to believe that the Moon has remained "uncontaminated" from any possible source of life, where perhaps even as "recently" as the K-T event may have thrown at least some rocks from the Earth onto the surface of the Moon that quite possibly contained microbes and other forms of life. I'm not saying that it has happened, but I don't think you can definitively rule out the possibility either without at least somebody going up there and checking it out.
If such microbes were to be found, I'll admit it would be a major scientific find, but my question was as to if such a discovery would be found how would the environmentalists react and what kinds of crazy laws might be enacted to change the activities which happen on the Moon? Would "wildlife preserves" on the Moon ever make sense? Can you imagine people having to conduct environmental impact studies on the Moon? I don't think the idea is all that weird, given what we've found on the Earth in places thought to be just as hostile to life.
How do you think those centrifuges were built in the first place? I suppose we found an ancient Roman artifact handed down from the gods to build the first one?
Yes, building up an industrial base anywhere is a difficult proposition, but it can be done in tiny steps and we don't necessarily need these big machines to do all of our work. The issue at first is how to bootstrap development on the Moon or elsewhere, which this reactor design in the original article is explicitly trying to address.
If the fear is that hundreds or thousands of these reactors need to be continually sent to the Moon from the Earth, it might be a larger concern, but I seriously doubt that too many of them will be needed before enough infrastructure is in place for whoever might be on the Moon to build stuff up there themselves. Perhaps other energy sources can be found or perhaps fusion research might finally have a breakthrough in the next couple of decades. The issue isn't really that big of a deal here, and those worried about a couple of rockets carrying up a few pieces of potentially radioactive materials is simply not logical at all.
Besides, in the long run it is by far and away cheaper by every measure for people on the Moon to get materials locally. Indeed, I think it will be much more possible for materials to be coming from the Moon to the Earth eventually just because of the gravity well costs alone.
Sadly, AI research really hasn't advanced all that much since the "early days". There has been some minor incremental improvements in the basic concepts, but I'd argue that 90% of all current AI research had already been completed by 1970.
There have been some interesting applications of neural networks over the years and some other aspects of the field seem to be genuinely useful or certainly lucrative to those who have developed those systems, but we are centuries if not longer from any real "intelligence" showing up with these systems.
I guess computers can play a good game of chess, so is that the current standard of the state of the art?
I agree with you BTW. The point I was trying to make is that the design of the reactor should take advantage of materials which can be locally found in abundance.
I happen to love Thorium reactors BTW, and would love to see them become much more common.
If it was a public performance (which a presentation at a company gathering is a public performance at least with the definition of the copyright laws of the United States), it more than likely was a copyright violation.
No worry, many people violate copyright laws on a frequent basis, usually due to ignorance but often because it doesn't seem logical either. On that I'd have to agree as well.
Your rationalizations here might apply to "educational fair use", but there are some huge restrictions to that. If the "instructor" obtained and displayed the content without permission or knowledge of the company officers on the premises and then used the speech to illustrate principles in the curriculum being presented, the case for fair use is much easier to make. If the CEO or plant manager suggested that the instructor play the speech, it would be a copyright violation. Educational fair use is a very tricky area and usually most people get it wrong. Most especially teachers and copyright holders alike.
Fair use is a defense where the ability to profit from the act of copyright violation is not necessarily the only consideration to be made. As to if profits were made from the class or that it was a product of the company or not is irrelevant.
I'm sure that Walt Disney is enjoying every cent that is earned off of royalties from continued screenings of Steamboat Willy which has happened in the 21st Century, and is using that money as an incentive to make more films. Obviously Disney would never make another film unless they can get at least 100 years of screening royalties.
In partial deference to MLK's widow, she didn't have an insurance policy on her husband and after his death she was pretty much destitute. I don't think he even paid much into Social Security. The copyright on his speeches and what other publications he had was pretty much her sole source of financial support.
Why more than 40 years later we should still be helping his family out is another story, but at least originally there was a very legitimate objective here in terms of what the royalties would be used for. Ulysses S. Grant did a similar kind of act by publishing a book of his memoirs for the express purpose of providing a pension for his wife when he died.
Still, in both cases the respective women became quite wealthy off of those acts and the argument of an extended copyright still doesn't hold out here other than it should extend perhaps a little beyond the death of the original author. It isn't an argument for extending several decades past the date of original publication.
I would accept your argument, however in Eldred v. Ashcroft the U.S. Supreme Court basically said that congress could indefinitely extend copyright, particularly to conform with the laws in other countries and to meet treaty obligations. On the other hand, both Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer penned dissenting opinions that used this exact reasoning you mentioned here as reasons why CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) should be declared unconstitutional in terms of its retroactive application to previous works. Those dissenting opinions (both linked on the Wikipedia article) really are precious gems of legal thought. I just wish they had been the majority opinion.
Perhaps one day, when folks in that body actually believe in the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
This is where you read the effing article. The difference here is that they are going to be generating on the order of tens of kilowatts of power and possible more. This is not a simple RTG but rather a genuine nuclear fission reactor that may even last longer than the 80 years you are quoting.
They could use it to power a whole bunch of stuff, including heavy industrial equipment or other things needed for really poking about on the Lunar surface. Once you have a reliable source of quality energy, there is a whole lot of things you can do which tap into that energy source in a variety of ways. The ISS, in comparison, has about a 100 kW energy generation capacity with about 30-50 kW of usable power for the entire station (the rest is losses due to battery storage). There is quite a bit which is done with that energy on the ISS.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you realize the natural resources and industry which still exists in America, but leaving that aside I'd have to agree there would be huge shortages if there was to be a war of America vs. some other major world power.
The problem in America would be one of improvisation and how quickly the industrial capacity of America could conceivably return if both the people and the government wanted it to happen. A similar situation happened in America during WW II, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented. It would and did take time to happen, like it took in the 1940's to get American industry up to speed.
I personally think a major conflict like that would screw over many other countries far worse than America, although China would be sitting pretty because they do have the manufacturing capacity to conduct such a war.
I thought it was some law professor at an American university who helped to get marijuana legalized in America? While not legal on the federal level, there are many states which have certainly "decriminalized" the plant and several referenda which originated with the support of "law professors" helping to draft the wording of the proposed legislation. An article written by a law professor speculating the likelihood that such a measure might pass in an election or before a state legislature certainly would be of interest, even outside of America.
Besides, since the Chinese government doesn't exactly work on the system of group consensus (unlike America and most of Europe), it is very hard to identify what their government may really be thinking or planning in the future. I don't know for myself just what position this particular professor may have on the actual planning process for spaceflight, but it is stuff like this which should be watched and attention must be paid as it may indicate what future directions may happen.
I would compare this more to a Powerpoint presentation done by some NASA bureaucrat for some far-off mission concept which may or may not happen. It may happen, if funding happens, if top-level bureaucrats start to like the idea, and if the planets happen to align in the proper way to get an actual hearing before a congressional committee, or in the case of China before the Politburo of the Communist Party. Stuff like that happens in both America and Russia all of the time too. The Apollo program started this way, as did the Shenzhou program for China. That is how government operates.
Considering that China has yet to even perform an in-orbit rendezvous, much less do anything other than a simple EVA basically re-creating Ed White's trip into space in 1965, I'd say that China has a huge road ahead of them if they intend to even get to an asteroid much less do much with it once it gets up there.
My #1 concern about the Chinese space program is mainly their operational tempo. They simply aren't putting spacecraft up, and instead relying too heavily upon "technological breakthroughs" of other countries (aka stealing concepts rather than inventing it themselves). Engineering, particularly cutting edge engineering, requires dozens or hundreds of attempts and a whole bunch of failures. More significantly, the technicians who are building their spacecraft really don't know how to build them because they aren't building them. Actually flying something only once every 2-3 years does not really give you the experience necessary to stay in space. Even the Space Shuttle, as awful of a program and risk adverse that NASA became launched more often than that (except for the "return to flight" breaks after the loss of vehicles).
I'm impressed with what the Chinese have been able to accomplish over the past decade or so, and they at least have a toe hold on spaceflight where they legitimately can claim to be competing against America and Russia. Still, China isn't quite ready for the big leagues yet and is nearly 40 years behind Russia and America in terms of getting stuff to work in space. They can catch up, but it won't be easy and they may have to re-learn some of the lessons that America and Russia has already learned about.
I'm also not sure if the life expectancy of a flight director in China would be all that long if a failure happened, given their system of government. That sort of creeps into other performance issues and really makes them risk averse to a degree that puts NASA to shame, but also drives up the price of these vehicles. That SpaceX using California-based union labor can beat the slave labor of China speaks volumes about how expensive their vehicles really are and their manufacturing methods.
The hipsters come from gen-x I think.
Little that you know of the Gen-Xers. The hipster movement was pretty much dead by the time I was a teen, and I am considered an "early Gen-Xer"... even called a baby boomer by some. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
I was just a toddler when Woodstock was happening.
If I had to define more cleanly who is a Gen Xer, it would be those who were born during the Vietnam War. Obama is out because he was born too early (and therefore a Baby Boomer). The Gen Xers are just barely getting into politics at the moment and are now junior senators and/or members of the U.S. House and also getting into state politics in a big way.
If you really want to get into the Hipster sub-culture, it really started even earlier. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(1940s_subculture)
That clearly does not describe anybody you could remotely call a Gen-Xer. I'd also dare say that most of those posting on Slashdot are not Gen-Xers either but rather the subsequent generation (Gen-Y if you will).
I really don't think you understand evolution at all, or at least the principles of evolution.
Yes, the evolutionary pressures upon the current generation of children are not necessarily to survive against infectious diseases, being able to smash the skull of a potential opponent inside out, or to be able to successfully hunt for food by running after it all day long. Instead, the evolutionary pressures are to be able to operate a complex machine at relatively high velocities (60 mph/100 kmph) which has an overall mass on the order of about 500kg-2000kg where you must not only watch for similar machines like this but also be able to cope with natural forces (rain, snow, high wind) or some people being total jerks. That is but one of many kinds of evolutionary pressures put upon children today, and sadly there are many who fail to meet that test as well.
In that sense, by using your own argument here that because the environmental pressures are substantially different than several generations ago, that the rate of evolution is actually quite rapid at the moment.
A really interesting video on the topic has been produced by PBS and has been airing this past month on a local PBS station if you can find it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/becoming-human-part-1.html
One of the interesting things pointed out in this mini-series (three videos total as a part of Nova) is that mankind has adapted to an evolutionary environment of almost constant change in environmental conditions, where eastern Africa in particular has undergone so much and so frequent environmental changes that mankind simply needed to adapt to those constant changes. My argument is that we are undergoing those evolutionary changes again, particularly in a shift from a largely agrarian peasant society to a largely industrialized society. That is still happening in many parts of the world, and those evolutionary pressures resulting from that shift still are being placed on the children of today in sometimes a horrific fashion.
More to the point I was originally making, that evolution hasn't stopped and suggesting that it has is being simply ignorant. It is merely different than it was in the past and the "fitness" selection is substantially different too.
Unfortunately, it's not only those who refuse vaccination that end up at risk.
That isn't really true. Here is the gamble you make as a parent when you vaccinate your children:
There is a non-zero probability that your child might get seriously ill with a debilitating injury due to the vaccination or potentially may die. Yes, the probability is small and compared to catching the disease from a large population of people who are not immunized, it is a probability that is certainly worth that minor risk.
The problem comes when that non-zero probability is less than the chance your child will get sick and/or die from that disease from a largely vaccinated population? From a purely self-interested and logical perspective, if just about everybody is vaccinated from a disease and that disease is no longer prevalent in the population as a whole, the probability of a child dying from the vaccination is actually higher than if the child was exposed to the vaccination. In this perspective, those who refuse vaccinations really are looking after the well being of their own children and in effect depending on the rest of the society to be sheep and following what everybody else is doing.
If you are vaccinated against Small Pox or a number of diseases not typically common in many 1st world countries, there is either a chance of contracting the disease itself (usually restricted to "live" vaccines) or that you will have an adverse reaction to whatever components are found in the vaccine as well (such as if you have a strong allergic reaction to eggs used to process the vaccine or something like that). For example, I took a Typhoid Fever shot a while back because I was going to a tropical area, and I had a severe reaction to the vaccination that nearly put me into the hospital for recovery (I think my parents should have sent me there BTW, they just didn't seem to care). Not all vaccinations are good and there are certainly valid reasons not to get yourself vaccinated against every possible illness.
To really complicate the picture, there are some professions and individuals who are being vaccinated against some more exotic illnesses because of the calculus of trying to include biological warfare probabilities where the possibility exists to deliberately spread certain kinds of rare diseases in a population which has no longer been immunized against that illness. Small Pox is one of those diseases that in theory could come back simply because somebody is being a real jerk. It is harder to accomplish than some people think, but such attacks can cause panic and certainly cause economic turmoil. There is a reason why it is American policy to consider such attacks to be morally equivalent to a nuclear bomb strike with the same official reaction if it happens.
Specifically, those who demean and ridicule those who refuse vaccinations simply are showing almost as much ignorance as some of those who refuse vaccinations. I am proclaiming here that there are valid reasons to refuse to vaccinate your children, even though in my case I have (mostly) vaccinated my children against most common childhood illnesses. My rationale is that both I and my children are in contact with enough people that the probability at the moment of contracting these diseases if they weren't vaccinated is higher and the potential for their deaths, in my view and estimation, than if they weren't vaccinated. I don't claim to have 100% knowledge on this topic and I certainly don't think it is my job to make that sort of calculation for somebody else in regards to their own children. I certainly don't think it is the role of the government to force at gunpoint the vaccinations of children.
As a philosophical exercise, I think the definition of citizenship is undefined in that situation. Besides SCO, do you know of another zombie?
I was expecting that comment. BTW, I've also heard the term applied to the judicial variety as well.
In fairness to the people of Utah, Congress didn't accept the #1 choice for the state name (Deseret) and the translation of the word "Utah" can mean "Mountain of God", which is something that most people of Utah really don't mind and was generally considered acceptable at the time the name was chosen. The name for Utah County (or Utah Valley) was selected much earlier and before the name of the state/territory was decided upon. So there was a delegation of elected representatives from Utah County in the Deseret territorial legislature.
This is just a minor bit of trivia that I guess in the long run doesn't really matter. It is amazing though to see intellectual property law being decided in the federal judicial district of Utah which may have national significance.
I totally forgot about SCO vs. Autozone. Yeah, the zombie is going to continue to crawl out of the ground for some time to come.
Perhaps SCOTUS will simply merge all of the cases together and tell SCO to die once and for all. Somehow I doubt it.
If a corporation is legally a person, when is it dead? This company is a zombie that has more lives than several dozen cats.
The whole case seems like an episode of Get a Life, where the main character dies in each episode only to come back to life in the next episode as if nothing happened. That pretty much defines SCO.
My question is more in terms of who has SCO stock certificates? Those are most certainly collector items now.
The only reason why the Supremes would hear this case is to not only nail the coffin together for SCO, but to hammer home to the entire computer industry to never pull a stunt like this again and to basically do something ugly to the lawyers who put this case together in the first place and possibly go after the major shareholders and financiers of this whole endeavor and tell Novell "anything you wish will be granted".
Since Novell isn't really asking for much here other than purely money and a few legal trinkets, I don't see it getting to that level. Regardless, this is still going to be a precedent setting case on a number of levels, and it did solidify the legitimacy of the GPL in a number of ways where the legality of the GPL is no longer really in question. I call that a win for the good guys.
I knew a couple of SCO developers in Utah County, Utah (yeah, the state is actually named after the county, to show how weird this universe can really get) where there was an honest attempt to make a legitimate business. There certainly were some pretty interesting products developed and they had a reasonable number of developers and engineers considering the markets they were pushing for.
And then came Microsoft and the people who got greedy within the company, where the rest as they say is history. It was when the developers were jumping ship early on that you knew the company was in trouble.
This was even after the "Santa Cruz Operation" buy-out. I'm just glad that I never got hired by them.
The problem I have with most educational materials about nuclear physics is that it is rote learning and regurgitation of facts and not really science or "hands-on" learning. Simulators can help to an extent, but a simulation isn't the same thing as the real thing.
Amateur computer software developers is extremely common, and even amateur hacking of computer equipment isn't all that uncommon. There are even what I call "amateur pharmacologists" even if sometimes I think they are significantly lacking in the scientific method. With just a few exceptions where usually the law enforcement community gets involved, you never heard about or see amateur nuclear researchers. Yes, I've heard of the "nuclear boy scout" too.
I'm not necessarily saying that we need to send samples to every teenage kid (or Al Qaeda wannabe) who desires to play with this stuff, but at the same time there is a problem here where in my opinion far too much is "classified" even on civilian designs, which in turn breeds ignorance and contempt for those who hold that knowledge.
In terms of what was happening at Fukushima, I believe there were some serious engineering flaws in the plant design... many of which I hope the industry will learn from. If there isn't a major engineering design review on the topic at a meeting of nuclear engineers in the near future, I would not only be shocked but disgusted at the entire profession. That is how engineering works, and a disaster of that scale should be avoided and the mistakes made at that plant should be etched into the memory of the engineers involved.... just as civil engineers (and just about all other engineers too) almost always are shown the "Galloping Gertie" bridge and basically told never to design something like that in their careers.
'ER' the people are the supreme law in the land and can change the constitution via the normal political process. This crazy notion that a bunch of 'land grabbers' from the 1700 who did not fight against slavery, we somehow the be all and end all of human thought, is just so grossly 'American Exceptionalism' and Tea Bagger nonsense (even when those that wrote it were all European and consciously excluded all native Americans from it through guilt or greed).
The issue with the constitution is that it has worked pretty well so far, and as you pointed out there is a procedure set up to make changes in that document. The problem here isn't the veneration of the document but simply following some kind of standard at all instead of having a court or government official bending to the current prevailing winds of political opinion or whoever happens to be making donations to their re-election campaign.
If a constitution has any meaning at all, it would be to establish primary ground rules that should not be tampered with except when an overwhelming consensus to change those rules can be met that involves more than even the ordinary legislative bodies which typically enacts ordinary legislation. What I and others are saying here is that standard was not met, hence this is bad law. Furthermore, the original enabling clause which permits copyright legislation in the first place is arguably a pretty good idea even if copyright code as passed by Congress leaves much to be desired.
If your argument is that copyright shouldn't exist at all, that is an argument you can certainly make. I just don't see the U.S. Constitution being amended to remove that authority from the U.S. Congress.
One of the huge advantages of the Moon, as opposed to Mars or almost anywhere else in the Solar System, is that it is only one light second away. That would allow somebody operating a robot on the Earth to react in nearly real-time for almost anything happening on the Moon.
I'm not a robots only type guy, but I think a combination of robots and people will be required on the Moon for almost any activity, particularly for any sort of industrial capacity. Robots can do the heavy lifting and more "mundane" grunt work where the serious problems which needs a sit of eyes on site can be provided by trained people who are up there too.
Regardless, the basic unit of energy is a watt, and to do much of anything including pure scientific research is going to require a whole bunch of them, and have the ability to generate that power around the clock. My response about mining the materials to build more reactors is more a response as to why some think it is foolish to bring them up in the first place. Nobody is going to need a multi-gigawatt generator to start some sort of lunar outpost on the scale of the Scott-Amundsen base that exists on the South Pole.... but they will need hundreds or thousands of watts of power just to take care of basic life support and exploration needs.
Almost every place on the Earth where we have looked which has water present in any form and some sort of energy gradient, we have found life.
The fact here is that we really know so little about the Moon that we are just beginning to do the basic surveys necessary to have any real understanding of its character. There certainly is plenty of water on the Moon, and I wouldn't rule out at least some sort of liquid water reservoirs under the surface of the Moon. It wouldn't have to be a whole lot, but perhaps just enough to sustain some sort of microbial life.
Apollo 12 did pick up some microbes from the Surveyor probe they landed next to, although it seems to have come from some sort of contamination that happened on the Earth. The question that hasn't been resolved is when that contamination took place, did it happen before Surveyor was launched from Cape Canaveral, was from the astronauts on the Moon, or did that contamination happen on the Earth? The larger question is how long can microbes survive in the surface conditions on the Moon? How little "shielding" to they need to survive?
There is no reason to believe that the Moon has remained "uncontaminated" from any possible source of life, where perhaps even as "recently" as the K-T event may have thrown at least some rocks from the Earth onto the surface of the Moon that quite possibly contained microbes and other forms of life. I'm not saying that it has happened, but I don't think you can definitively rule out the possibility either without at least somebody going up there and checking it out.
If such microbes were to be found, I'll admit it would be a major scientific find, but my question was as to if such a discovery would be found how would the environmentalists react and what kinds of crazy laws might be enacted to change the activities which happen on the Moon? Would "wildlife preserves" on the Moon ever make sense? Can you imagine people having to conduct environmental impact studies on the Moon? I don't think the idea is all that weird, given what we've found on the Earth in places thought to be just as hostile to life.
How do you think those centrifuges were built in the first place? I suppose we found an ancient Roman artifact handed down from the gods to build the first one?
Yes, building up an industrial base anywhere is a difficult proposition, but it can be done in tiny steps and we don't necessarily need these big machines to do all of our work. The issue at first is how to bootstrap development on the Moon or elsewhere, which this reactor design in the original article is explicitly trying to address.
If the fear is that hundreds or thousands of these reactors need to be continually sent to the Moon from the Earth, it might be a larger concern, but I seriously doubt that too many of them will be needed before enough infrastructure is in place for whoever might be on the Moon to build stuff up there themselves. Perhaps other energy sources can be found or perhaps fusion research might finally have a breakthrough in the next couple of decades. The issue isn't really that big of a deal here, and those worried about a couple of rockets carrying up a few pieces of potentially radioactive materials is simply not logical at all.
Besides, in the long run it is by far and away cheaper by every measure for people on the Moon to get materials locally. Indeed, I think it will be much more possible for materials to be coming from the Moon to the Earth eventually just because of the gravity well costs alone.
Sadly, AI research really hasn't advanced all that much since the "early days". There has been some minor incremental improvements in the basic concepts, but I'd argue that 90% of all current AI research had already been completed by 1970.
There have been some interesting applications of neural networks over the years and some other aspects of the field seem to be genuinely useful or certainly lucrative to those who have developed those systems, but we are centuries if not longer from any real "intelligence" showing up with these systems.
I guess computers can play a good game of chess, so is that the current standard of the state of the art?
I agree with you BTW. The point I was trying to make is that the design of the reactor should take advantage of materials which can be locally found in abundance.
I happen to love Thorium reactors BTW, and would love to see them become much more common.
If it was a public performance (which a presentation at a company gathering is a public performance at least with the definition of the copyright laws of the United States), it more than likely was a copyright violation.
No worry, many people violate copyright laws on a frequent basis, usually due to ignorance but often because it doesn't seem logical either. On that I'd have to agree as well.
Your rationalizations here might apply to "educational fair use", but there are some huge restrictions to that. If the "instructor" obtained and displayed the content without permission or knowledge of the company officers on the premises and then used the speech to illustrate principles in the curriculum being presented, the case for fair use is much easier to make. If the CEO or plant manager suggested that the instructor play the speech, it would be a copyright violation. Educational fair use is a very tricky area and usually most people get it wrong. Most especially teachers and copyright holders alike.
Fair use is a defense where the ability to profit from the act of copyright violation is not necessarily the only consideration to be made. As to if profits were made from the class or that it was a product of the company or not is irrelevant.
I'm sure that Walt Disney is enjoying every cent that is earned off of royalties from continued screenings of Steamboat Willy which has happened in the 21st Century, and is using that money as an incentive to make more films. Obviously Disney would never make another film unless they can get at least 100 years of screening royalties.
In partial deference to MLK's widow, she didn't have an insurance policy on her husband and after his death she was pretty much destitute. I don't think he even paid much into Social Security. The copyright on his speeches and what other publications he had was pretty much her sole source of financial support.
Why more than 40 years later we should still be helping his family out is another story, but at least originally there was a very legitimate objective here in terms of what the royalties would be used for. Ulysses S. Grant did a similar kind of act by publishing a book of his memoirs for the express purpose of providing a pension for his wife when he died.
Still, in both cases the respective women became quite wealthy off of those acts and the argument of an extended copyright still doesn't hold out here other than it should extend perhaps a little beyond the death of the original author. It isn't an argument for extending several decades past the date of original publication.
I would accept your argument, however in Eldred v. Ashcroft the U.S. Supreme Court basically said that congress could indefinitely extend copyright, particularly to conform with the laws in other countries and to meet treaty obligations. On the other hand, both Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer penned dissenting opinions that used this exact reasoning you mentioned here as reasons why CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) should be declared unconstitutional in terms of its retroactive application to previous works. Those dissenting opinions (both linked on the Wikipedia article) really are precious gems of legal thought. I just wish they had been the majority opinion.
Perhaps one day, when folks in that body actually believe in the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
This is where you read the effing article. The difference here is that they are going to be generating on the order of tens of kilowatts of power and possible more. This is not a simple RTG but rather a genuine nuclear fission reactor that may even last longer than the 80 years you are quoting.
They could use it to power a whole bunch of stuff, including heavy industrial equipment or other things needed for really poking about on the Lunar surface. Once you have a reliable source of quality energy, there is a whole lot of things you can do which tap into that energy source in a variety of ways. The ISS, in comparison, has about a 100 kW energy generation capacity with about 30-50 kW of usable power for the entire station (the rest is losses due to battery storage). There is quite a bit which is done with that energy on the ISS.