I could ask how does the ability to fly in general benefit mankind? Answer that, and you have a similar answer for spaceflight.
BTW, commercial spaceflight isn't a theory or something in the far off distant future. It is happening right now and in fact you wouldn't be reading these words at the moment if spaceflight never happened. Think about that and then tell me why you aren't trolling at the moment. Yes, I realize that IP packets typically don't go into space, but computer technology wouldn't be anywhere near what it is right now if it wasn't for trying to get into space.
By far and away the people of the Earth are living healthier, longer, and more fulfilling lives because of spaceflight and in particular commercial spaceflight (as opposed to government sponsored spaceflight) than if it never existed. I can give examples but it isn't worth my time.
I don't see the Earth having a wandering axis as causing problems for life.... other than it would have required life to adapt to that environment. Life would have been different, and perhaps the question is if sentient life could have evolved in such an environment, but there certainly wouldn't be a problem for places that might be at the equator at one point in time and a few centuries later would be at a pole... or what being at a polar region would even imply.
You are presuming that the bookies here are going to have a loss if the aliens show up.
Most places like this set the odds based upon the ratio of what others are placing for bets. There are certainly a great many willing to take this as a sucker's bet and likely put a whole bunch of money down even if the pay--back is just a few percentage points more on the return. That increases the odds because more people are signing up and expecting that the aliens aren't going to be coming.
Let me be more clear here with a good example: Let's say a group of people put together $1000 saying that the aliens are going to show up. Another group puts together $100,000 that the aliens aren't going to come. That gives you the 100:1 betting ratio. The bookie (the "gaming company") isn't really putting anything into this other than holding the money and charging a small fee... say 1% of that money... from everybody placing a bet. So the gaming company keeps roughly $1000 for holding the money and the "winner" gets the combined pot of whatever is left proportionally for what they put into the pot.
Only a stupid bookie gets caught up into his own game, even if it is a "sure bet". Perhaps some of them will put up their own money, but not often. They make the money from the betting process itself not from winning or losing a bet. If the aliens show up, it won't be the gaming company that will be pissed off. Those who thought they made a sucker's bet that turned out wrong.... those will be the guys who will be pissed.
BTW, if a whole bunch of tin-foil hat nerds show up and throw a million bucks into the game, the 100:1 ratio won't be maintained. In that case, the ration will be 1:10 where those betting the aliens won't be coming will be getting $10 buck for every buck they put in. The gaming company collects a larger fee and it becomes something that would be attractive to start placing bets that the aliens won't be coming. In other words, the gaming company is going to be posting record profits even if the aliens come. The betting odds are only suggesting what other suckers are thinking of the situation.
I suppose you are a part of the Apollo landing hoax crowd that also denies that spacecraft even went to places like Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn. There are spacecraft currently enroute to the rest of the dwarf planets that haven't had spacecraft go near them.
The pics are there. Getting to Mars is merely engineering and money, not trying to figure out how to get it accomplished in the first place.
BTW, I said interplanetary travel is pretty routine. I'll admit that interstellar travel hasn't happened yet, but I'm just trying to point out that perhaps it could happen.
I believe that over the next couple of centuries we are going to have a whole bunch of experience at colonizing new worlds and learning how to move stuff around in space. On top of that, we as a species are going to be very much aware of what is needed to maintain habitability.
BTW, I don't think it would take a totalitarian government to spread mankind around in this way. Do you realize the time span here? I'm suggesting that once you get people "out there" in between the stars that they are not going to be content to stay put in one place but will continue to spread out and more significantly they will also reproduce, make more spaceships and spread out just like all life does when it encounters an empty niche. I'm basing this upon ethnographic studies done for how mankind spread throughout the Americas doing nothing more than simply being a hunter-gatherer nomads that had some babies and those with wanderlust moved on to build a new tribal group in another location after a generation or two.
This isn't luck, it is simply adapting to the environment and being able to cope with what you find. Life grows and thrives. BTW, yes it would require a whole lot of procreation. That seems to be a rather constant topic on Slashdot in some form or another where many people are even obsessed with the concept.
As far as how to feed astronauts are going to be able to eat and live their lives as they travel between stars..... my point was the basic presumption that there was some reasonable means of interstellar travel where people could at least travel between nearby stars. There are plenty of stars within 50 light-years of the Earth including more than a couple that are strong candidates for "Earth-like" planets or at least places where people could in theory make a home with some technology. The trick is going to be settling the first few worlds, but do you really think it is going to take us another billion years before a creature from the Earth is going to travel to another star system?
The age of the solar system is about 5 billion years and the universe is guesstimated as about 15-20 billion years old (at least on the order of magnitude). 100 years out of 20 billion is nothing. A million years is practically nothing. What kind of "technology" would you have encountered a million years ago on the Earth, and how much of a shock do you think you might have if you showed up on the Earth a million years from now?
The oldest buildings on the Earth are about 10-15 thousand years old (the Pyramids of Giza.... tough things to destroy even with a nuke and deliberately trying).
We have too short of a time frame to compare in our lifetimes to really think of what technology an alien might have.
Somalia sounds to me like a very good place to land, and it might do a bit of good for the people in that part of the world. Perhaps the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula?
I would have to agree that Washington DC or New York would be an awful place for an alien to land, as they would likely be shot out of the sky well before they even got close. Especially if it was a "first contact" situation. Moscow might not be all that much better or Beijing for that matter. All of these cities have air force pilots with a trigger finger that wouldn't hesitate to shoot down something that wasn't responding to air traffic control.
This isn't the realm of science but rather philosophers. There are physicists who have dabbled in the realm of cosmology (originally a branch of theology but now something more concrete in the physical sciences) that have in turn speculated on alien races and the likelihood that we would encounter one of them. At best, the Drake Equation is about the only really "hard" scientific statement about the likelihood of aliens, and even that is mostly pure conjecture and not even a hypothesis.
If there are aliens "out there", they are already here, or we will be those aliens that are conquering the universe instead. I've heard it speculated that we could completely fill up the Milky Way galaxy in about 200,000-300,000 years with nothing but a Bussard ram-jet or nuclear rockets as a species. What a galaxy filled with people would be doing is only a raw guess, but this is a time span that is so small compared with the age of the universe that it shows a similar alien race building spacecraft and flying between stars should have been here a long time ago, presuming that they have even attempted interstellar travel.
I love the reference to Ford Prefect here. Other suggestions include humpback whales, dolphins, hermit crabs, or cows. Perhaps this explains the cattle mutilations talked about in UFO circles.
I'm going more conspiratorial here. The UN wants to take over the management and control of the whole of the universe outside of the atmosphere of the Earth. This is merely their first step toward asserting full sovereignty over the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and anything else of use. You want to talk about a huge bureaucracy that is going to hamper the ability of mankind to be free, this will be it.
BTW, I agree that the appointment is pure BS here. There is nothing for this guy to do and will likely never be anything for him to do.
Kennedy assassinated? That was just a cover-up so that he could be an ambassador to the aliens, who was in turn succeeded by Elvis Presley and proceeded by Amelia Earhart. This new guy being appointed by the UN is just the latest in a whole series of ambassadors to the aliens going back for more than a century.......... or so I've heard from Art Bell's Coast to Coast. Now that is a reliable source of information as good as I've ever found.
I've heard it speculated that perhaps if our civilization had decided to concentrate on ceramics instead of metallurgy that our civilization would be quite different today. Almost everything that we use metals for at the moment in theory can be made with ceramics. Unfortunately with just a few exceptions our knowledge of ceramics is rather primitive compared to metallurgy in part because we abandoned that path a long time ago... except for "works of art" and other minor things.
In many ways, I wish Civ had multiple developmental paths for their civilization instead of a narrative storyline on the tech tree, including crazy off-shoots for things like airships, rolling roads, and Tesla's broadcast power. There definitely are some things you can point to that we haven't developed as a "real civilization" because we went a different route.
Interstellar travel is in theory possible with a nuclear reactor (fission or fusion both work) powering a rocket engine. The rest is mainly engineering and perhaps building the vehicles at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. It doesn't take a new kind of physics for a person to at least within a lifetime be able to travel to another star.
This said, it wouldn't necessarily be all that fast and it wouldn't be a "routine" trip.... perhaps ever. I also think that such a spacecraft would be insanely expensive to build, but perhaps could be done for the same cost as is being poured into the Constellation program. But "capable" of at least basic interstellar travel is possible. Interplanetary travel is indeed possible and in fact has been done, more than once even with people.
All this said, a civilization that has "routine" interstellar travel and has citizens on multiple planets conducting interstellar trade would indeed be making almost anything we have look like toys.... presuming that we even encountered them at a point where they aren't trying to colonize the Earth first.
Of course why would an alien species even have breasts? That is an advanced evolutionary development found only in mammals and the developed breasts found on humans aren't even found on most primates (except when the mothers are lactating).
The "A" on the other hand is more ordinary and can be found in at least in many vertebrates. Of course even that is an advanced and highly evolved form of life even though it has been quite successful in terms of adapting to the climate changes on the Earth including more than a couple evolutionary crashes. Mammals barely survived the last meteor strike and wouldn't have made it through a couple of the huge hits that wiped out almost all multi-cellular life.
James Cameron insisted on breasts with the aliens on Avatar simply because he felt that audiences who have grown up with Star Wars and Star Trek wouldn't recognize who the "girls" were if those weren't seen. If you can explain an evolutionary path that would develop a human looking breast on an alien and explain why it didn't simply turn into an udder instead, I'll bite.
So I suppose Cheyenne Mountain really has a stargate and some other one is in the middle of Siberia where the IOA has finally decided to "go public" and at least appoint a red shirt extra that is going to head off in an official capacity to negotiate the peace treaty terms with the Goa'uld System Lords. If the war in Afghanistan is merely to mask the huge expenses for fighting an interstellar war conducted by NATO members, perhaps this world is finally beginning to make sense.
Seriously, of all of the hairbrained and stupid things that the UN has ever done in all of the years I've been alive, this has got to be one of the most insane bureaucracies to do nothing that I have ever seen. If or when mankind starts to wander around in the greater part of this galaxy, and presuming that some other sentient life form with advanced weapon technology happens to also be "out there" that could be a genuine threat to the Earth is found, and presuming that those "aliens" happen to be at roughly similar levels of develop as we will be when that encounter happens, perhaps an office like this will be needed.
If the aliens we discover happen to be "human-like" but are at a stone age level of technology, it will be trivial to deal with them and certainly they will be no threat. If on the other hand they are hugely more advanced and somehow have hyper drive technology but we are puttzing around the Galaxy in Bussard ram-jets.... we'll simply get wiped out except for the benevolence of this supposed alien race. Either way, an ambassador is not going to be needed. BTW, encountering an alien race with either kind of situation I mention here would still be considered "close" in terms of evolutionary development from a larger universal time perspective. We would be lucky to encounter multi-cellular life forms of any kind or a non-corporeal life form where the technological differences would be absolutely moot. I bet most "habitable worlds" with life are mostly a variation of bacterial sludge and algae.
That doesn't make for exciting science fiction, but having an astronaut spend a 50 year trip between stars to investigate a planet with water oceans only to discover a bunch of slime covering rocks and getting sick from some critter on that world is about the most drama I expect mankind to ever find with aliens in the next couple of millennia... if only we would be so lucky to even find such life forms in the first place.
Time is going to be on our side regardless and we will likely have months or even years to appoint such a representative if an ambassador of this nature is ever encountered. It sounds like some idiot has been watching too many Science Fiction movies and can't distinguish reality from fiction. This is an absolutely stupid thing for any planner and it is by far and away more important to send an ambassador to Sealand or one of the other micronations on the behalf of the UN rather than preparing for something like this.
The problem wouldn't be so bad if it was a specific labor movement political party that was pushing strong for worker's rights, but due to the nature of American politics concentrating power into generally only two political parties tying yourself to a political party tends to carry a whole bunch of extra baggage. Historical precedence goes back to the 18th Century on this point and 3rd parties almost never are successful in elections with only minor exceptions that are generally unsustained in terms of getting more than one or two seats in a legislative body, where at most those legislators/congressmen serve only one or two terms as "independents" or 3rd party representatives.
In this case, the labor movement is being tied to issues like gun control, gay rights, legalized abortion, and a whole bunch of other issues that often those participating in unions don't really agree with. The association also gets people who would normally be supporting labor unions to hesitate or even reject the union explicitly because of some of these political philosophies.
The question is why some Americans aren't too happy about labor unions even if they are skilled laborers with awful working conditions and oppressive supervisors. There is much more to the story in terms of why the unions aren't trusted and why membership in the labor unions has been steadily declining. About the only place where union membership is increasing is for government employees... where unionized government workers tend to tick off the rest of the voters when they go on strike or force taxes to go up.
The reason, of course, is pressure. If you know how people voted, you can pressure them to vote the way you want. That's the whole reason we use secret ballots in political elections is so that can't happen. However the unions are concerned if it happened, people could vote to disband the union and they'd not be able to pressure them out of it.
If it was just as simple as "Don't join if you don't wanna," it wouldn't be nearly such a big deal. However it isn't.
Pressure. Yeah. A brick through the windows or an "anonymous" phone call that says your kid will be coming home in a coffin if they go to school tomorrow because you pissed off the labor union in some fashion. That is if you are lucky and they're just being stupid.
The "pressure" that labor unions exert is usually far and away more than just rhetoric. I've seen the National Guard get called out simply to maintain order when a strike happens because the police didn't have the "tools" to keep the union under control.
One of the problems with American labor unions is that they are simultaneously a political organization as well as a representative of the employees. This wouldn't be so bad if the union followed the political philosophies of its members, but that isn't always the case and often there is a labor leader who is "telling" the members how they should vote.
"Vote early, vote often" has been practiced by a number of organizations, but labor unions are right in the middle of it, not to mention how they are especially so tied economically and politically to the Democratic Party in America. Often labor leaders become "automatic delegates" to select politicians representing mainly themselves and their union above and beyond the citizens in the political jurisdictions where they are at. The current congress in session right now has strengthened those ties even more. Many times the labor leaders themselves are also involved with the distribution of the political "pork" coming from federal and state contracts (it gives their members work) where the labor leaders are collaborating with the employer but against the "competition".... particularly "non-union" employers.
This is just scratching the surface and I should point out that there have been many abuses done in the name of organized labor that has ticked off many in America. It isn't just insanity but some of the practices of the major industrial unions that has caused some of the backlash against the unions.
All this said, I do believe that most employers with labor unions have "earned" those unions by virtue of their labor practices and treating their employees like trash. Indirectly having labor unions do help out by pulling out the worst of the employers in a region to raise wages so other companies in the area can compete even if they are being ethical towards their employees. I was fired from a job once merely because I suggested that if the management didn't start dealing with their employees, that a labor union might form. That was blatantly illegal, but at the same time I was glad I got out of there.
If that is all labor unions did in America, perhaps it would be useful.... or at least stick with employer/labor relations.
One of the major complaints is if you happen to be in that 40% minority that wants the labor union to go take a hike, but none the less the labor union dues are still being taken out of your paycheck and are being used to finance the election campaigns of politicians that you absolutely don't agree with. Furthermore, the labor "leaders" are in turn padding their expense accounts and becoming personally wealthy on the backs of the union members in a fashion that sometimes would make even a CEO blush.
Yes, you can find some exceptions of a frugal labor leader who is genuinely trying to make a difference, but usually the labor union exists for its own sake and not for its members.
It is one of the tools found in Hollywood OS, isn't it? This is the same operating system that has tools to take a 50x50 pixel J-peg image of a parking lot and enlarge the photo to the point you can read not just the license plates but the serial numbers on the plate renewal stickers. It also has these cool animated graphics for e-mail, has advanced AI, and can hack into any computer undetected even if it isn't connected to any physical network by instead hacking through the power lines to extract information... except for those evil government computers that are on your tail the whole time you are doing the hacking, but of course you have a tracking bar for those government computers that can keep track of how close they may have been to discovering your hack attempt where you are able to stop your attempt just moment before they discover who you really are.
So yeah, I'm sure there must be some tool that will be able to determine if a data stream is encrypted.... unless there is a reason in the plot for the software to conveniently fail so the protagonist will be frustrated and be able to swear while on camera and increase the dramatic tension.
That is a lucid and reasonable argument that you can make in court for a defense in terms of why you think the recording would then be in the public domain instead of being a copyrighted work. Unfortunately that requires a ruling from a judge to confirm that legal hypothesis.
From the perspective of an ISP or other "common carrier", it is by far and away safer from a legal perspective to respond to a DMCA take-down notice by removing the content than going over this subtle difference. Furthermore, I think the assertion that they thought the speech was copyrighted is a valid defense that the DMCA take-down notice was legitimate (not an illegal take-down notice) even if later it can be proven that the speech was in the public domain. That is a point of dispute only so far as potential damages in a civil lawsuit where the person speaking would fail to receive an award for damages on the basis of copyright infringement.
I was just trying to point out that it could be considered copyrighted material and from that perspective what BuckyBalls did here, while certainly slimy and from an ethical perspective something stupid to do, is perfectly legal to demand a DMCA take-down notice.
I'm no lawyer, but if a voicemail sender retains copyright on their message, I have no idea how a site like Audioo (which shares embarrassing voicemails with the world) hasn't been sued into oblivion yet.
Yeah, it sounds like you are no lawyer nor have really studied copyright law. As for why this particular company hasn't been "sued into oblivion", it is a matter of time and legal precedence. The copyright is still retained by the "performer".
You can retain the recording for legal purposes, just as it is legal to record a radio program... for personal use. That is called personal fair use (even though the RIAA and ASCAP would have you think differently). You just don't have permission to reproduce that recording and send it everywhere without their explicit permission.
BTW, there are a whole bunch of websites around that do things that are shady or violate the law. How long was Napster on as a website before it was effectively shut down for copyright infringement and "sued into oblivion"? Just because somebody is being bold doesn't mean that it is legal or correct. I'm sure you can find all manner of activity on the internet that has people doing stuff that is blatantly illegal. I would say that the main reason this website is still up and running is in part because they are small time and nobody wants to give them any more attention than they deserve. Just wait until they step on the toes of a U.S. Senator and see how long the site lasts.
There is a huge difference between what is stated officially and what is practice, especially as many of those in NASA and NASA's prime contractors sort of like having a monopoly over spaceflight in general. You can't tell me that somebody wanting to put SpaceX out of business won't put in some requirement that will be very difficult to meet... explicitly to kill commercial crew options.
You also can't say that NASA has never sent commercial spaceflight passengers into orbit, because in fact they have. They even sent two U.S. Senators into orbit for reasons that were rather dubious... mostly very expensive political junkets. The history of the Space Shuttle in relation to commercial operators is one of constant underbidding and subsidy by NASA of commercial operations including killing off would-be competitors from getting into the marketplace.
If you are telling me that NASA has turned over a new leaf and is trying to play nice for a change, go ahead. Unfortunately historical precedence is such that I hold such promises to be as good as a Confederate dollar. Useful to a collector but otherwise of no real backing.
Simply by existing, the Ares I/Orion rocket combination is certainly designed to be a direct competitor to the Falcon 9/Dragon and the Taurus II/Cygnus vehicles. Add on the Delta IV/CST-100 to that mix to show yet another "competitor". That is precisely the way it was presented during congressional testimony and in fact several members of congress have remarked that it is imperative that the U.S. government have its own in-house vehicles that can perform these missions. No, that doesn't make sense to me either, but it is the attitude that is prevalent in Congress at the moment.
Define what competing in the commercial crew arena actually means, and perhaps I might agree... but it sounds like the definition is essentially whatever it is that NASA isn't doing right now. That this attitude is likely changing at NASA is true, and there have been some efforts to promote commercial spaceflight activity lately, but not everybody is pulling that in the same direction. There still are many folks within NASA and within the U.S. Congress that want NASA to be the exclusive provider of all spaceflight needs of America. I don't want those pro "NASA only" supporters to be in charge of writing the rules that govern commercial spaceflight standards as they clearly have a conflict of interest.
The reason why military bases tend to be in "Red states" has little to do with pork barrel politics (although that does have an impact) but rather where the real estate is at.
If you are going to blow up a nuclear bomb, which would be better: Nevada or Connecticut? Heck, the folks in Utah didn't complain (too loudly and only well after the fact) when the wind from the bombs carried the debris in their direction. If nukes had been tested in northern Pennsylvania, there is no doubt that the "down winder" issue would be something much more prominent on the national level. Having military bases in your state isn't always the cash cow that it may seem, and there certainly are costs associated with the base that must be lived with afterward. Where I live a brush fire from some artillery practice (originally reported as a machine gun test) burned down about 10k acres of land and took out three homes, threatening to become a major urban conflagration with 1700 families that were evacuated from the fire front. And you are complaining that you want these bases in your back yard?
OK, if the ISP wants to retain their neutrality and not get dragged into a copyright dispute as a co-defendant in a copyright lawsuit, they have to respond. Yes, they can do nothing and ignore all DMCA complaints, but then again they'll also have to be hiring a huge team of lawyers that does nothing but run around dealing with frivolous lawsuits. It is much easier to simply comply and take the content away. Not just easier but incredibly easier and much less costly.
If somebody sues the ISP (or in this case YouTube) for copyright violation after they've responded to the DMCA complaint by removing the content, YouTube ends up owning the plaintiff and can offer up a charge of barratry to even put the opposing counsel into jail. That sounds like an awful nice stick to give up merely by being lazy.
If you are deliberately ignoring a complaint and want to defend the copyright in a certain situation, that is another story altogether. Instead, post the DMCA and stick it to the man.
Slashdot Mirror
I could ask how does the ability to fly in general benefit mankind? Answer that, and you have a similar answer for spaceflight.
BTW, commercial spaceflight isn't a theory or something in the far off distant future. It is happening right now and in fact you wouldn't be reading these words at the moment if spaceflight never happened. Think about that and then tell me why you aren't trolling at the moment. Yes, I realize that IP packets typically don't go into space, but computer technology wouldn't be anywhere near what it is right now if it wasn't for trying to get into space.
By far and away the people of the Earth are living healthier, longer, and more fulfilling lives because of spaceflight and in particular commercial spaceflight (as opposed to government sponsored spaceflight) than if it never existed. I can give examples but it isn't worth my time.
I don't see the Earth having a wandering axis as causing problems for life.... other than it would have required life to adapt to that environment. Life would have been different, and perhaps the question is if sentient life could have evolved in such an environment, but there certainly wouldn't be a problem for places that might be at the equator at one point in time and a few centuries later would be at a pole... or what being at a polar region would even imply.
You are presuming that the bookies here are going to have a loss if the aliens show up.
Most places like this set the odds based upon the ratio of what others are placing for bets. There are certainly a great many willing to take this as a sucker's bet and likely put a whole bunch of money down even if the pay--back is just a few percentage points more on the return. That increases the odds because more people are signing up and expecting that the aliens aren't going to be coming.
Let me be more clear here with a good example: Let's say a group of people put together $1000 saying that the aliens are going to show up. Another group puts together $100,000 that the aliens aren't going to come. That gives you the 100:1 betting ratio. The bookie (the "gaming company") isn't really putting anything into this other than holding the money and charging a small fee... say 1% of that money... from everybody placing a bet. So the gaming company keeps roughly $1000 for holding the money and the "winner" gets the combined pot of whatever is left proportionally for what they put into the pot.
Only a stupid bookie gets caught up into his own game, even if it is a "sure bet". Perhaps some of them will put up their own money, but not often. They make the money from the betting process itself not from winning or losing a bet. If the aliens show up, it won't be the gaming company that will be pissed off. Those who thought they made a sucker's bet that turned out wrong.... those will be the guys who will be pissed.
BTW, if a whole bunch of tin-foil hat nerds show up and throw a million bucks into the game, the 100:1 ratio won't be maintained. In that case, the ration will be 1:10 where those betting the aliens won't be coming will be getting $10 buck for every buck they put in. The gaming company collects a larger fee and it becomes something that would be attractive to start placing bets that the aliens won't be coming. In other words, the gaming company is going to be posting record profits even if the aliens come. The betting odds are only suggesting what other suckers are thinking of the situation.
Yeah, I suppose this photo has been photoshopped and was something made by a Hollywood studio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_over_Apollo_11_Lunar_Module.jpg
I suppose you are a part of the Apollo landing hoax crowd that also denies that spacecraft even went to places like Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn. There are spacecraft currently enroute to the rest of the dwarf planets that haven't had spacecraft go near them.
The pics are there. Getting to Mars is merely engineering and money, not trying to figure out how to get it accomplished in the first place.
BTW, I said interplanetary travel is pretty routine. I'll admit that interstellar travel hasn't happened yet, but I'm just trying to point out that perhaps it could happen.
I believe that over the next couple of centuries we are going to have a whole bunch of experience at colonizing new worlds and learning how to move stuff around in space. On top of that, we as a species are going to be very much aware of what is needed to maintain habitability.
BTW, I don't think it would take a totalitarian government to spread mankind around in this way. Do you realize the time span here? I'm suggesting that once you get people "out there" in between the stars that they are not going to be content to stay put in one place but will continue to spread out and more significantly they will also reproduce, make more spaceships and spread out just like all life does when it encounters an empty niche. I'm basing this upon ethnographic studies done for how mankind spread throughout the Americas doing nothing more than simply being a hunter-gatherer nomads that had some babies and those with wanderlust moved on to build a new tribal group in another location after a generation or two.
This isn't luck, it is simply adapting to the environment and being able to cope with what you find. Life grows and thrives. BTW, yes it would require a whole lot of procreation. That seems to be a rather constant topic on Slashdot in some form or another where many people are even obsessed with the concept.
As far as how to feed astronauts are going to be able to eat and live their lives as they travel between stars..... my point was the basic presumption that there was some reasonable means of interstellar travel where people could at least travel between nearby stars. There are plenty of stars within 50 light-years of the Earth including more than a couple that are strong candidates for "Earth-like" planets or at least places where people could in theory make a home with some technology. The trick is going to be settling the first few worlds, but do you really think it is going to take us another billion years before a creature from the Earth is going to travel to another star system?
The age of the solar system is about 5 billion years and the universe is guesstimated as about 15-20 billion years old (at least on the order of magnitude). 100 years out of 20 billion is nothing. A million years is practically nothing. What kind of "technology" would you have encountered a million years ago on the Earth, and how much of a shock do you think you might have if you showed up on the Earth a million years from now?
The oldest buildings on the Earth are about 10-15 thousand years old (the Pyramids of Giza.... tough things to destroy even with a nuke and deliberately trying).
We have too short of a time frame to compare in our lifetimes to really think of what technology an alien might have.
Somalia sounds to me like a very good place to land, and it might do a bit of good for the people in that part of the world. Perhaps the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula?
I would have to agree that Washington DC or New York would be an awful place for an alien to land, as they would likely be shot out of the sky well before they even got close. Especially if it was a "first contact" situation. Moscow might not be all that much better or Beijing for that matter. All of these cities have air force pilots with a trigger finger that wouldn't hesitate to shoot down something that wasn't responding to air traffic control.
This isn't the realm of science but rather philosophers. There are physicists who have dabbled in the realm of cosmology (originally a branch of theology but now something more concrete in the physical sciences) that have in turn speculated on alien races and the likelihood that we would encounter one of them. At best, the Drake Equation is about the only really "hard" scientific statement about the likelihood of aliens, and even that is mostly pure conjecture and not even a hypothesis.
If there are aliens "out there", they are already here, or we will be those aliens that are conquering the universe instead. I've heard it speculated that we could completely fill up the Milky Way galaxy in about 200,000-300,000 years with nothing but a Bussard ram-jet or nuclear rockets as a species. What a galaxy filled with people would be doing is only a raw guess, but this is a time span that is so small compared with the age of the universe that it shows a similar alien race building spacecraft and flying between stars should have been here a long time ago, presuming that they have even attempted interstellar travel.
I love the reference to Ford Prefect here. Other suggestions include humpback whales, dolphins, hermit crabs, or cows. Perhaps this explains the cattle mutilations talked about in UFO circles.
I'm going more conspiratorial here. The UN wants to take over the management and control of the whole of the universe outside of the atmosphere of the Earth. This is merely their first step toward asserting full sovereignty over the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and anything else of use. You want to talk about a huge bureaucracy that is going to hamper the ability of mankind to be free, this will be it.
BTW, I agree that the appointment is pure BS here. There is nothing for this guy to do and will likely never be anything for him to do.
Kennedy assassinated? That was just a cover-up so that he could be an ambassador to the aliens, who was in turn succeeded by Elvis Presley and proceeded by Amelia Earhart. This new guy being appointed by the UN is just the latest in a whole series of ambassadors to the aliens going back for more than a century...... .... or so I've heard from Art Bell's Coast to Coast. Now that is a reliable source of information as good as I've ever found.
I've heard it speculated that perhaps if our civilization had decided to concentrate on ceramics instead of metallurgy that our civilization would be quite different today. Almost everything that we use metals for at the moment in theory can be made with ceramics. Unfortunately with just a few exceptions our knowledge of ceramics is rather primitive compared to metallurgy in part because we abandoned that path a long time ago... except for "works of art" and other minor things.
In many ways, I wish Civ had multiple developmental paths for their civilization instead of a narrative storyline on the tech tree, including crazy off-shoots for things like airships, rolling roads, and Tesla's broadcast power. There definitely are some things you can point to that we haven't developed as a "real civilization" because we went a different route.
Interstellar travel is in theory possible with a nuclear reactor (fission or fusion both work) powering a rocket engine. The rest is mainly engineering and perhaps building the vehicles at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. It doesn't take a new kind of physics for a person to at least within a lifetime be able to travel to another star.
This said, it wouldn't necessarily be all that fast and it wouldn't be a "routine" trip.... perhaps ever. I also think that such a spacecraft would be insanely expensive to build, but perhaps could be done for the same cost as is being poured into the Constellation program. But "capable" of at least basic interstellar travel is possible. Interplanetary travel is indeed possible and in fact has been done, more than once even with people.
All this said, a civilization that has "routine" interstellar travel and has citizens on multiple planets conducting interstellar trade would indeed be making almost anything we have look like toys.... presuming that we even encountered them at a point where they aren't trying to colonize the Earth first.
Of course why would an alien species even have breasts? That is an advanced evolutionary development found only in mammals and the developed breasts found on humans aren't even found on most primates (except when the mothers are lactating).
The "A" on the other hand is more ordinary and can be found in at least in many vertebrates. Of course even that is an advanced and highly evolved form of life even though it has been quite successful in terms of adapting to the climate changes on the Earth including more than a couple evolutionary crashes. Mammals barely survived the last meteor strike and wouldn't have made it through a couple of the huge hits that wiped out almost all multi-cellular life.
James Cameron insisted on breasts with the aliens on Avatar simply because he felt that audiences who have grown up with Star Wars and Star Trek wouldn't recognize who the "girls" were if those weren't seen. If you can explain an evolutionary path that would develop a human looking breast on an alien and explain why it didn't simply turn into an udder instead, I'll bite.
So I suppose Cheyenne Mountain really has a stargate and some other one is in the middle of Siberia where the IOA has finally decided to "go public" and at least appoint a red shirt extra that is going to head off in an official capacity to negotiate the peace treaty terms with the Goa'uld System Lords. If the war in Afghanistan is merely to mask the huge expenses for fighting an interstellar war conducted by NATO members, perhaps this world is finally beginning to make sense.
Seriously, of all of the hairbrained and stupid things that the UN has ever done in all of the years I've been alive, this has got to be one of the most insane bureaucracies to do nothing that I have ever seen. If or when mankind starts to wander around in the greater part of this galaxy, and presuming that some other sentient life form with advanced weapon technology happens to also be "out there" that could be a genuine threat to the Earth is found, and presuming that those "aliens" happen to be at roughly similar levels of develop as we will be when that encounter happens, perhaps an office like this will be needed.
If the aliens we discover happen to be "human-like" but are at a stone age level of technology, it will be trivial to deal with them and certainly they will be no threat. If on the other hand they are hugely more advanced and somehow have hyper drive technology but we are puttzing around the Galaxy in Bussard ram-jets.... we'll simply get wiped out except for the benevolence of this supposed alien race. Either way, an ambassador is not going to be needed. BTW, encountering an alien race with either kind of situation I mention here would still be considered "close" in terms of evolutionary development from a larger universal time perspective. We would be lucky to encounter multi-cellular life forms of any kind or a non-corporeal life form where the technological differences would be absolutely moot. I bet most "habitable worlds" with life are mostly a variation of bacterial sludge and algae.
That doesn't make for exciting science fiction, but having an astronaut spend a 50 year trip between stars to investigate a planet with water oceans only to discover a bunch of slime covering rocks and getting sick from some critter on that world is about the most drama I expect mankind to ever find with aliens in the next couple of millennia... if only we would be so lucky to even find such life forms in the first place.
Time is going to be on our side regardless and we will likely have months or even years to appoint such a representative if an ambassador of this nature is ever encountered. It sounds like some idiot has been watching too many Science Fiction movies and can't distinguish reality from fiction. This is an absolutely stupid thing for any planner and it is by far and away more important to send an ambassador to Sealand or one of the other micronations on the behalf of the UN rather than preparing for something like this.
The problem wouldn't be so bad if it was a specific labor movement political party that was pushing strong for worker's rights, but due to the nature of American politics concentrating power into generally only two political parties tying yourself to a political party tends to carry a whole bunch of extra baggage. Historical precedence goes back to the 18th Century on this point and 3rd parties almost never are successful in elections with only minor exceptions that are generally unsustained in terms of getting more than one or two seats in a legislative body, where at most those legislators/congressmen serve only one or two terms as "independents" or 3rd party representatives.
In this case, the labor movement is being tied to issues like gun control, gay rights, legalized abortion, and a whole bunch of other issues that often those participating in unions don't really agree with. The association also gets people who would normally be supporting labor unions to hesitate or even reject the union explicitly because of some of these political philosophies.
The question is why some Americans aren't too happy about labor unions even if they are skilled laborers with awful working conditions and oppressive supervisors. There is much more to the story in terms of why the unions aren't trusted and why membership in the labor unions has been steadily declining. About the only place where union membership is increasing is for government employees... where unionized government workers tend to tick off the rest of the voters when they go on strike or force taxes to go up.
The reason, of course, is pressure. If you know how people voted, you can pressure them to vote the way you want. That's the whole reason we use secret ballots in political elections is so that can't happen. However the unions are concerned if it happened, people could vote to disband the union and they'd not be able to pressure them out of it.
If it was just as simple as "Don't join if you don't wanna," it wouldn't be nearly such a big deal. However it isn't.
Pressure. Yeah. A brick through the windows or an "anonymous" phone call that says your kid will be coming home in a coffin if they go to school tomorrow because you pissed off the labor union in some fashion. That is if you are lucky and they're just being stupid.
The "pressure" that labor unions exert is usually far and away more than just rhetoric. I've seen the National Guard get called out simply to maintain order when a strike happens because the police didn't have the "tools" to keep the union under control.
One of the problems with American labor unions is that they are simultaneously a political organization as well as a representative of the employees. This wouldn't be so bad if the union followed the political philosophies of its members, but that isn't always the case and often there is a labor leader who is "telling" the members how they should vote.
"Vote early, vote often" has been practiced by a number of organizations, but labor unions are right in the middle of it, not to mention how they are especially so tied economically and politically to the Democratic Party in America. Often labor leaders become "automatic delegates" to select politicians representing mainly themselves and their union above and beyond the citizens in the political jurisdictions where they are at. The current congress in session right now has strengthened those ties even more. Many times the labor leaders themselves are also involved with the distribution of the political "pork" coming from federal and state contracts (it gives their members work) where the labor leaders are collaborating with the employer but against the "competition".... particularly "non-union" employers.
This is just scratching the surface and I should point out that there have been many abuses done in the name of organized labor that has ticked off many in America. It isn't just insanity but some of the practices of the major industrial unions that has caused some of the backlash against the unions.
All this said, I do believe that most employers with labor unions have "earned" those unions by virtue of their labor practices and treating their employees like trash. Indirectly having labor unions do help out by pulling out the worst of the employers in a region to raise wages so other companies in the area can compete even if they are being ethical towards their employees. I was fired from a job once merely because I suggested that if the management didn't start dealing with their employees, that a labor union might form. That was blatantly illegal, but at the same time I was glad I got out of there.
If that is all labor unions did in America, perhaps it would be useful.... or at least stick with employer/labor relations.
One of the major complaints is if you happen to be in that 40% minority that wants the labor union to go take a hike, but none the less the labor union dues are still being taken out of your paycheck and are being used to finance the election campaigns of politicians that you absolutely don't agree with. Furthermore, the labor "leaders" are in turn padding their expense accounts and becoming personally wealthy on the backs of the union members in a fashion that sometimes would make even a CEO blush.
Yes, you can find some exceptions of a frugal labor leader who is genuinely trying to make a difference, but usually the labor union exists for its own sake and not for its members.
It is one of the tools found in Hollywood OS, isn't it? This is the same operating system that has tools to take a 50x50 pixel J-peg image of a parking lot and enlarge the photo to the point you can read not just the license plates but the serial numbers on the plate renewal stickers. It also has these cool animated graphics for e-mail, has advanced AI, and can hack into any computer undetected even if it isn't connected to any physical network by instead hacking through the power lines to extract information... except for those evil government computers that are on your tail the whole time you are doing the hacking, but of course you have a tracking bar for those government computers that can keep track of how close they may have been to discovering your hack attempt where you are able to stop your attempt just moment before they discover who you really are.
So yeah, I'm sure there must be some tool that will be able to determine if a data stream is encrypted.... unless there is a reason in the plot for the software to conveniently fail so the protagonist will be frustrated and be able to swear while on camera and increase the dramatic tension.
That is a lucid and reasonable argument that you can make in court for a defense in terms of why you think the recording would then be in the public domain instead of being a copyrighted work. Unfortunately that requires a ruling from a judge to confirm that legal hypothesis.
From the perspective of an ISP or other "common carrier", it is by far and away safer from a legal perspective to respond to a DMCA take-down notice by removing the content than going over this subtle difference. Furthermore, I think the assertion that they thought the speech was copyrighted is a valid defense that the DMCA take-down notice was legitimate (not an illegal take-down notice) even if later it can be proven that the speech was in the public domain. That is a point of dispute only so far as potential damages in a civil lawsuit where the person speaking would fail to receive an award for damages on the basis of copyright infringement.
I was just trying to point out that it could be considered copyrighted material and from that perspective what BuckyBalls did here, while certainly slimy and from an ethical perspective something stupid to do, is perfectly legal to demand a DMCA take-down notice.
I'm no lawyer, but if a voicemail sender retains copyright on their message, I have no idea how a site like Audioo (which shares embarrassing voicemails with the world) hasn't been sued into oblivion yet.
Yeah, it sounds like you are no lawyer nor have really studied copyright law. As for why this particular company hasn't been "sued into oblivion", it is a matter of time and legal precedence. The copyright is still retained by the "performer".
You can retain the recording for legal purposes, just as it is legal to record a radio program... for personal use. That is called personal fair use (even though the RIAA and ASCAP would have you think differently). You just don't have permission to reproduce that recording and send it everywhere without their explicit permission.
BTW, there are a whole bunch of websites around that do things that are shady or violate the law. How long was Napster on as a website before it was effectively shut down for copyright infringement and "sued into oblivion"? Just because somebody is being bold doesn't mean that it is legal or correct. I'm sure you can find all manner of activity on the internet that has people doing stuff that is blatantly illegal. I would say that the main reason this website is still up and running is in part because they are small time and nobody wants to give them any more attention than they deserve. Just wait until they step on the toes of a U.S. Senator and see how long the site lasts.
There is a huge difference between what is stated officially and what is practice, especially as many of those in NASA and NASA's prime contractors sort of like having a monopoly over spaceflight in general. You can't tell me that somebody wanting to put SpaceX out of business won't put in some requirement that will be very difficult to meet... explicitly to kill commercial crew options.
You also can't say that NASA has never sent commercial spaceflight passengers into orbit, because in fact they have. They even sent two U.S. Senators into orbit for reasons that were rather dubious... mostly very expensive political junkets. The history of the Space Shuttle in relation to commercial operators is one of constant underbidding and subsidy by NASA of commercial operations including killing off would-be competitors from getting into the marketplace.
If you are telling me that NASA has turned over a new leaf and is trying to play nice for a change, go ahead. Unfortunately historical precedence is such that I hold such promises to be as good as a Confederate dollar. Useful to a collector but otherwise of no real backing.
Simply by existing, the Ares I/Orion rocket combination is certainly designed to be a direct competitor to the Falcon 9/Dragon and the Taurus II/Cygnus vehicles. Add on the Delta IV/CST-100 to that mix to show yet another "competitor". That is precisely the way it was presented during congressional testimony and in fact several members of congress have remarked that it is imperative that the U.S. government have its own in-house vehicles that can perform these missions. No, that doesn't make sense to me either, but it is the attitude that is prevalent in Congress at the moment.
Define what competing in the commercial crew arena actually means, and perhaps I might agree... but it sounds like the definition is essentially whatever it is that NASA isn't doing right now. That this attitude is likely changing at NASA is true, and there have been some efforts to promote commercial spaceflight activity lately, but not everybody is pulling that in the same direction. There still are many folks within NASA and within the U.S. Congress that want NASA to be the exclusive provider of all spaceflight needs of America. I don't want those pro "NASA only" supporters to be in charge of writing the rules that govern commercial spaceflight standards as they clearly have a conflict of interest.
The reason why military bases tend to be in "Red states" has little to do with pork barrel politics (although that does have an impact) but rather where the real estate is at.
If you are going to blow up a nuclear bomb, which would be better: Nevada or Connecticut? Heck, the folks in Utah didn't complain (too loudly and only well after the fact) when the wind from the bombs carried the debris in their direction. If nukes had been tested in northern Pennsylvania, there is no doubt that the "down winder" issue would be something much more prominent on the national level. Having military bases in your state isn't always the cash cow that it may seem, and there certainly are costs associated with the base that must be lived with afterward. Where I live a brush fire from some artillery practice (originally reported as a machine gun test) burned down about 10k acres of land and took out three homes, threatening to become a major urban conflagration with 1700 families that were evacuated from the fire front. And you are complaining that you want these bases in your back yard?
OK, if the ISP wants to retain their neutrality and not get dragged into a copyright dispute as a co-defendant in a copyright lawsuit, they have to respond. Yes, they can do nothing and ignore all DMCA complaints, but then again they'll also have to be hiring a huge team of lawyers that does nothing but run around dealing with frivolous lawsuits. It is much easier to simply comply and take the content away. Not just easier but incredibly easier and much less costly.
If somebody sues the ISP (or in this case YouTube) for copyright violation after they've responded to the DMCA complaint by removing the content, YouTube ends up owning the plaintiff and can offer up a charge of barratry to even put the opposing counsel into jail. That sounds like an awful nice stick to give up merely by being lazy.
If you are deliberately ignoring a complaint and want to defend the copyright in a certain situation, that is another story altogether. Instead, post the DMCA and stick it to the man.