Walmart also has lawyers & lobbyists protecting them.
Give it time. There will be lobbyists who advocate for Bitcoin eventually, and there certainly are constituencies involved.
Unfortunately at the moment, most of the people who use Bitcoins are either irrelevant (die-hard libertarians and anarchists) or don't bother even casting their ballot in the first place (many computer nerds and younger people eligible to vote). As a result, the constituents are really pretty much ignored.
Regardless, Bitcoins are trading more than almost any other alternative currency system that has been set up in America (or elsewhere for that matter) in more than a hundred years.... MMORPGs being the one possible exception. World of Warcraft gold vs. Eve ISK vs. Bitcoins is a more relevant comparison at the moment, where Bitcoins do compare quite favorably. Bitcoins certainly does better than other alternative currencies like Ithica Hours (another semi-successful alternative currency).
As much as it seems like the major content producers (aka "Hollywood") have an upper hand in terms of copyright term lengths and making new and creative "applications" of intellectual content, I think the time is soon at hand where that trend will be reversed in some substantial manner.
I'm not saying it will go back to 17 years like it was in 1790, but it will be reduced and more content will be made publicly available. I also envision that things like the GPL and other open source licenses will be very common with these kinds of 3D model products.
Black powder isn't even all that hard to manufacture. I suppose Congress could outlaw anybody with an outhouse on "national security reasons", as that might be considered "dangerous" as a source of potential Nitrates. Similarly anybody who decides to stockpile wood as that can be turned into charcoal could be considered dangerous as well.
I've made my own black powder in the past simply to see if it could be made at all, and I used to buy Salt Peter in bulk quantities from my neighborhood pharmacist (something currently much harder to obtain than when I was a kid). I looked up the recipe from an encyclopedia and did a little further experimentation just to see how the proportions of the various ingredients made it burn. All I see legislation like this actually accomplishing is just adding more steps to the process of making a bomb, but it wouldn't stop a determined person from causing harm if they really wanted to do something nasty.
Copyright doesn't protect an idea, only its expression. You can legally write a story about a killer robot from the future who wants to kill a man not yet born with a human from the future protecting her, you just can't copy the movie script, which is why the movie studios do in fact usually win.
If you want to protect the idea, it needs to be patented. Then again, the barrier to obtaining a patent is much higher due to its expense (a copyright is technically automatic, and copyright registration is only $25-$50 at most as opposed to thousands of dollars for an ordinary patent) and the fact that it must be proven to be original.
The day the USPTO starts to grant patents for movie pitches is likely when the USPTO will be nuked by the MPAA, but perhaps it might be expanded in that direction as well since software patents and business method patents have been granted.
True, but fair use does not require any use not make money for the person claiming fair use; for example you can use a clip in a critique of the that is published in a for profit magazine.
While for-profit ventures can have fair-use content in their products, the fact that money is made off of the product (or that it is used by a non-profit entity like the Free Software Foundation) can be a contributing factor for determining if the infringement is in fact fair use or a copyright violation.
Keep in mind that fair-use is a legal defense against a claim of copyright infringement. You are still technically infringing on copyright even with fair-use content, just that such infringement is "legal" in those countries which recognize fair-use or related concepts like fair-dealing. In America, fair-use is considered the aspect of copyright law which recognizes the 1st amendment issues that modify a grant of copyright, and has subsequently been codified with specific fair-use exceptions. In other words, there are some forms of expression that simply must permit at least some minor copyright infringement simply to be able to express yourself and ideas in society... and a full restriction on copyrighted content would prohibit many forms of speech or expression that shouldn't be restricted.
and one of the first rules in that whole thing is if you don't have people their, you definitely have no rights to sell it, period. (Even if you do have people there, you still have lots of limits on what you can do.)
To be exact, the treaty says you don't own it at all even if you live there.
If you are talking about the Outer Space Treaty, all it says is that it can't be claimed by a sovereign entity (actually, just the signature countries of the treaty) for national appropriation or territorial claim. Real estate can be claimed by private individuals though.... or at least that is real murky if anybody can actually claim extra-terrestrial real estate. Then again, ownership at the point of a gun is likely going to be recognized regardless of whatever some stupid treaty may or may not claim.
This is no different than people who sell parcels of land on the Moon or Mars, or name stars with a "Star Registry registered with the U.S. Copyright Office" (aka they put the book together and "registered" a "copyright" on the list of names with the Library of Congress... something that costs about $50 and doesn't mean a damn thing other than you can't publish those names elsewhere without permission).
I should note there are geographical naming boards like the IAU who work with terrestrial landmarks as well. For the most part, you really can't "name" random mountain peaks or even one inch squares in your back yard without quite a bit of legal hassle and in most cases going through either a legislative body of some sort (like the U.S. Congress, a state legislature, or even a municipal council) or somebody appointed by those legislative bodies to act in their behalf to administer such geographical names.
For the USA, the current agency to decide the name of geographic features is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. This agency also coordinates its activities with other similar agencies operated by other members of the United Nations, and it should be pointed out that money being paid is not a consideration for if the name sticks or not. There are even then some restrictions, such as you can't give names to things in wilderness areas, and generally names must be of good taste as well (as determined by the board).
Before you are critical of them, note who they are working with and who is running the company. There certainly is a plethora of PhDs among the people running that company with science and engineering degrees... so I don't know if that counts as real scientists (with published papers) or not.
Some of those peer reviewed papers do discuss various elements in the Solar System, the feasibility to extract those elements, and some real business models for getting that to happen. As for if you accept those conclusions or not, that is up to you.
It isn't far fetched to conceive in fiction of some sort of spacecraft that existed anciently, but seriously..... are you saying that there was a civilization that existed anciently that was capable of spaceflight thousands of years ago?
There would be evidence in geological records as well as considerable archeological evidence that these civilizations existed... and that simply doesn't happen. You also have the time spans wrong as there are written records that go back 10,000 years and if you use the term loosely you can go at least back 20,000 years on some written records that used pictograms or at least drawings that can be considered "art". If there was a sentient species of dinosaurs that used tools and could travel into space, we would certainly be finding piles of metal and other strong evidence that such civilizations existed.
Yes, in theory such a civilization may have existed over the billions of years that the Earth has been around, but fanciful stories that have been reinterpreted in a modern context by people who are embellishing those stories so much that they might as well be modern fiction really don't count.
My concern about this type of battery is the fact that it requires so much energy to "recycle".
Don't forget about the carbon electrodes which are consumed in the smelting process, producing carbon dioxide gas.
Which can in turn be piped into a greenhouse to produce literally tons of solid carbon. Really, I don't see that as even remotely a problem as it is just one more thing that can be recycled.
Water is going to need to be a recycled resource. The point of the parent post is that obtaining that water is going to be a difficult task akin to extracting gold from low-grade ore on the Earth right now, and I'd have to agree with him. You are used to sticking a bucket above your house and gathering water, or tossing a hose into a passing stream where water is literally rushing to your house or at least nearby. That simply doesn't happen on the Moon at all. You are more likely to get water in a bucket sitting on your roof by living in the Sahara than anything you might find on the Moon where water is much less plentiful.
I should point out that the ISS gets most of its water from the Earth in the form of regular shipments in the resupply capsules. While the ISS is certainly developing recycling processes that will be valuable for a place like the Moon, they are hardly self-sufficient. That water needs to come from somewhere, and bringing it from the Earth at $100k per liter (about the price to put a kilogram of stuff on the Moon from the Earth) is not a cost-effective way to supply a lunar colony.
No one is a bigger proponent of manned spaceflight than me but let me be brutally honest here: There will be no manned bases on the moon... ever. Oh, we'll go and study every interesting spot on the moon. We'll spend upwards of a month or more in certain areas of enormous interest. But humanity will not build a moonbase for permanent occupation. The technology and logistics are not insurmountable but the degree of difficulty will run smack into 'Why?'.
In terms of a huge government scientific research station similar to Amundsen-Scott Research Base in Antarctica being placed on the Moon with the current fiscal climate and the need for constant resupply from the Earth to sustain every possible need like it was some sort of submarine permanently stationed at a particular longitude/latitude? Yeah, I would have to agree with you that kind of activity will never happen on the Moon or for that matter anywhere else in the Solar System other than the current fiscal black hole that is called the International Space Station.
That isn't how human civilization has been able to spread around the world though. Can you imagine if everything people used in Virginia was still being supplied by ships coming from England? There might be a colony of a few hundred British living and working in the Jamestown area, but it would still be something operated by the Royal Navy and not a state of eight million people.
The key to making things work in space and advancing the frontier of humanity is to "live off the land" and obtain the resources needed to stay there from the resources which are found there. How that is done will be a complex task, and even something "simple" like trying to establish an independent biosphere that can sustain itself is something I'm not sure is possible.
Regardless, I'd like to see people at least given the chance to find out. There are enough people who would be willing to either voluntarily contribute money or even put themselves and their lives on the line to find out that I think it is important that those who think this is a foolish endeavor to at least step aside and let those who want to find out to do just that. I'm not sure colonization of the Solar System is something which should be financed at gunpoint by those who are opposed to the idea (aka paid for by taxpayers), and there are a number of reasons why I think making government projects in space is a total waste of money in many cases. Regardless, there is a role that even government agencies can play in either encouraging or developing these resources and moving humanity beyond the Earth.
The largest advantage that the Moon offers is its proximity to the Earth. If something goes wrong on the Moon, resupply can happen in the time frame of weeks rather than months or years. Communication back to the Earth can be done in about a second or so, rather than minutes or hours. You can hold down a conversation with somebody on the Moon and the 2nd party on the Earth... something that is much harder to do on Mars. As such, if there is going to be something to humanity moving off of the Earth, the Moon is likely going to be one of if not the first place where such expansion of humanity will happen.
I am aware of Robert Zurbin and his philosophies over skipping the Moon and going to Mars first. He even makes some valid points to the idea that are very much worthy of merit. For myself, I think Mars and the Moon are about equal in difficulty in terms of trying to get a colony established, with strengths and weaknesses to both worlds and challenges were technology developed for building human settlements on one of those worlds can be adapted for use on the other world as well. They aren't identical though, so there will be some unique challenges as well. It also is far from inevitable that human settlement will happen on either world for that matter, even though in the long term (10k years or more) I think it will eventually happen even if it isn't in my lifetime.
Yes, the Romans had writing. For some time it was a popular game and exercise to go over the writings of ancient Rome and Greece to see if there might be some sort of technology or concept that hasn't been implemented in "modern society" (whatever that was). There certainly were things like aqueducts and even very sophisticated machines like the Antikythera device that spoke of incredible engineering and design skills that existed in the past but were lost.
I agree with the original parent post by AC that sometimes technologies can be forgotten either through neglect or failure to pass that information onto the next generation. Nuclear engineering is one of those fields I'm currently very concerned about in terms of hard won knowledge is not being passed onto the next generation, and there are some other similar kinds of things like that where it does appear we are in a civilization in decline. None the less, I really doubt there are exotic technologies like how to build spacecraft, teleporting machines, or ancient "stargates" to other worlds that have yet to be found. Really doubt as in I think there is a higher likelihood that the flying spaghetti monster is real.
I suppose you can claim that the 1960's Apollo Project effort was ancient knowledge that has to be rediscovered (another example of technology being forgotten), as the ability to go to the Moon has been lost in America and the rest of the world. None the less, that isn't anything close to 100 thousand year old technology that needs to be rediscovered in an archeological dig. It is digging through warehouses of government records though, so I suppose it might as well be the same thing.
it is possible that several thousand metric tons of gold could be found in some asteroids or extra-terrestrial sources that would also significantly change the value of gold here on the Earth.
I've seen this said before.
Is there anyone here (perhaps an astronomer, astrophysicist or geologist) with an understanding of the distribution of elements in the solar system who can say how probable that is?
They have some pretty serious backers and have some big name mining companies who are working with them in terms of trying to turn it into a business. They've even put into their business plan that their mining efforts are going to be driving down the price of "Platinum group metals", which includes gold and silver from their viewpoint (even if it isn't in the same periodic table group).
There are other groups looking to do the same thing as well, so I would say this is no longer abstract thinking but a group of people who seriously think that large amounts of extra-terrestrial minerals are going to be found. The main resource they are targeting right now is ordinary water, as it can be used as rocket fuel in a number of ways and is easily processed with current extraction techniques. Still, they are thinking that by the next century this may be a very real possibility that tons of gold and silver will be coming to the Earth from off-planet.
The question is, what about the situation even had the potential for such an incredible explosion?
That'd be the fact that the massive fire was in a factory where they make explosive stuff.
The factory didn't make explosives, it only made fertilizers. It is stuff that like many chemicals can in some situations be explosive, no doubt.
If you think this was bad, you should see some grain silo explosions. That is just a bunch of dust in a tube where unfortunately a bad spark can cause the whole silo to explode in a fashion just like was seen on the video in the link in the original story post. That isn't even something remotely connected to explosives but just ordinary grain that otherwise you would make into your next peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
Under ordinary circumstances, even a fire wouldn't be a problem for a plant like this. In fact, the fire supposedly was put out by the local fire department only to flare up again and quickly get out of hand. There should have been some safety features in that plant to help suppress the fire and there definitely could have been some different procedures put into place to prevent this explosion, but this was a situation far from normal.
Fertilizer plants are dangerous places. I am surprised that in such a sparsely populated part of Texas the plant wasn't further away from houses.
Knowing that the facility produced a product that could be explosive (especially after the Oklahoma City bombing by Tim McVeigh), they could have and indeed should have taken some engineering steps to protect not just workers but also the surrounding town.
I happen to live somewhat near the ATK facility which used to make the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle and also makes the fuel used in other solid rocket missiles used by the military. It is intentionally put out in the middle of nowhere with all kinds of safety berms and evacuation routes for the workers just in case something goes wrong. There isn't a residential house anywhere within a dozen miles of the main manufacturing building, and the only other non-company structure is a visitor's center for the location of the Trans-continental Railroad (aka the "Golden Spike Monument").
Instead, this looks like some Mom & Pop company that started on some bootstring budget and couldn't afford to put in those kind of safety features into their plant design. Making fertilizer isn't exactly a high profit business anyway, so the design of the building may have been for practical reasons as well. Still, I hope that a good engineering review of this plant will happen and help with town planners and fire safety codes for buildings of this nature in the future. Safety rules are usually created when people die, and this particular plant looks like it will be a good way to learn some lessons about what not to do. Perhaps these deaths will not be in vain.
You make it sound like any fertilizer will work in any situation as a "one size fits all" position. That isn't how you grow plants, which needs a much more balanced approach and several different kinds of chemicals. It doesn't matter if they are produced in a factory or grown from manure in your back yard.... it is the same thing. Nitrates are one of those key ingredients that plants need in order to grow, and depending on soil conditions and the species of plant you are growing it may need those kind of fertilizers.
In fact, in earlier times people would literally sell their cess pool contents (not really septic tanks, but the same general construction) to Nitrate manufacturers for the purpose of extracting the Nitrogen compounds to be used in explosives. Cheaper ways of getting that accomplished can be had today, but in theory you could use the stuff that is flowing out of your toilet if you cared.
Woudln't work. A feature of bitcoin is to be anonymous. That's why the primary use today is for money laundering and hiding transactions.
Anonymity with Bitcoins is overrated, and sort of a false promise. While there are some anonymizing features of Bitcoins that are attractive, I wouldn't count on that protecting you from being investigated by a forensic review of the Bitcoin block chain or other tools that could be employed to search you out and find out what transactions you are using. Each Bitcoin can be traced to the work unit it originated at, and the transactions can also be traced to purchases. Public address keys are a particular vulnerability... both to the recipient as well as the sender.
The anonymous feature only makes it difficult to track Bitcoins, not make it impossible. It is also not a primary design of Bitcoin to remain anonymous but more of a side effect of the cryptocurrency process itself.
What happens in 100 years is very theoretical. What happens this year and next with my money isn't. This was exactly my point. People need to understand the extreme short term risk involved, and not underplay that even if we like the concept.
What happens in 100 years or at leave 50 years is far from theoretical. Many people are putting money away in retirement accounts depending on the stability of the U.S. Dollar and that their investments will be there in that rough time frame (of 50-100 years). If you are economically living only in the extreme short term (aka weeks of economic activity instead of even years) you will likely be dead if there is an economic collapse.
I wouldn't recommend that you "invest" in Bitcoins, as it was never really intended to be an investment medium anyway. It is a way to facilitate trade between people and to do so electronically without the need of a central clearing house. That may be valuable (and to many people it is) and in many ways the lack of a central bank to mess with the money supply sounds very appealing.
There is of course "minting" of new Bitcoins, but it is done at a steady and predictable rate as opposed to national central banks like the Federal Reserve, where Ben Bernanke can arbitrarily (with the backing of the other governors and nobody else) create trillions or even quadrillions of new dollars at the touch of a few keys in his office and spend them however they care. You trust that the people running these central banks actually give a damn about the citizens of the country they represent, but that doesn't always seem to be the case and most certainly doesn't seem to be what is happening in Cyprus or America for that matter.
"The algorithm for increasing (or decreasing.... it does happen) difficulty is based upon the frequency of work units being process, where processing more work units in a given period of time will send the difficulty factor up. "
Haha. No it's not. It's based on the total number of bitcoins mined.
I would suggest that you look into the Bitcoin protocols again, at least if you have some understanding of software development. The difficulty of mining Bitcoins can in theory drop significantly if a great many people abandon the mining operations.
There is another algorithm which is independent of the workunit frequency that determines how many bitcoins are earned with each work unit. IMHO the value adjustment algorithm is not needed and something which is a fatal flaw in the design of the currency, but many other people have disagreed with me in the past on that too. At least in theory there will reach a point where people creating new work units will no longer be earning any bitcoins but rather only be receiving transaction fees. That will likely be a more significant way to earn Bitcoins anyway, but the work units are still the key to understanding how Bitcoins function.
You used the word "difficulty" here, which in the context of Bitcoins is the hash difficulty. That is indeed based upon work unit frequency. If a bunch of work units are created in a short period of time (you devote a billion processors to generate a couple dozen work units in an hour or so), the difficulty factor will increase substantially and in a very short period of time. This isn't just protection from malicious attacks, but to adjust when more CPU activity is being devoted to creating work units. The limit of this algorithm is that you need to create a perfect SHA-2 hash, which in theory would require all of the computing resources that mankind will ever conceivably develop and use those resources over the lifetime of the universe. Good luck with that effort. If everybody currently trying to create a work unit gives up and only an Apple II computer in some lame closet is the only computer working on work units, the difficulty will drop substantially to where it may even be possible to make hashes with pencil and paper to create new work units.
Perhaps you could hack the hashing algorithm through a really devoted mathematical attack. That is a known vulnerability. BTW, if you can do that, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Security Agency really wants to talk to you.... not to put you into prison but to offer you a very nice contract and make you an instant millionaire for life where you never need to work another day of your life if you don't want to. It is also in theory possible that some major advances in computing where something like Shor's Algorithm might hack the hash algorithm being used in Bitcoin. True me when I say that if it happens there will be hundreds of stories about it on Slashdot and other geek media sites with a Manhattan Project style effort to come up with an alternative, and not just because of Bitcoins either.
Since you are all hung up on that difficulty word, there is one possible attack that could function as a real denial of service attack: Some government could have that billion processor server farm spike the difficulty with a bunch of new work units in a flood attack, and then pull those processors off-line after a period of time. The net result would be that the spike in work unit difficulty would be so high that others would only rarely start creating new work units, thus trades in Bitcoins would be effectively halted in the network. This is a known problem and not easy to fix, and likely won't ever be fixed in Bitcoins.
That is sort of the problem with Bitcoins as well, and why it seems so weird to those introduced to it. The computation used to create a bitcoin is what ensures its scarcity.
The problem with Bitcoins is that you need to have a computer network in order to get it to work effectively. If you get rid of that network and the CPU cycles, it becomes worthless. It does have the ability to "send" value across continents and to remote places through that network, something which either requires a central bank or armed guards (and bribes of customs agents) to do otherwise.
As for why you need to be concerned about how many kilowatt-hours are used to generate a bitcoin, that is in effect its value if you wish to obtain a new bitcoin by "mining" the coins. You can't simply create new bitcoins unless you devote that much power or at least find a way to generate that may CPU cycles. It is that which gives it value at the moment, and what is motivating people to use it. I'm not saying it is perfect, but that is what is backing Bitcoins.
I should note: Nobody is forcing you to use this currency, and you can certainly use other forms of currency if you trust them more. That isn't true for legal tender currencies where you are forced at gunpoint to accept payments or pay taxes in that currency. Are you sure you prefer to have that gun pointing at your head with something like a U.S. Dollar?
Brazil managed to get out of 1000% annual inflation (I think they ultimately hit 1200%) before they finally got out of that death spiral. Brazil also got out of that inflationary train wreck without a world war or political coup (if anything, Brazil went from a military dictatorship to a representative democracy at the same time).
Having lived in Brazil during the 1980's, I do remember some really odd things in the stores and some interesting observations. You had to buy stuff with your paychecks almost immediately, as you very much noticed the loss of buying power over time. Store keepers had a nightmare trying to keep their prices updated, which changed from day to day. Most importantly, the concept of comparison shopping totally went out the window for me as I couldn't go shopping in one store and try to compare the price of that item in a competitor's store as inflation would completely destroy any sort of comparison between the two institutions. You pretty much always made impulse purchases every time.
I negotiated a rental agreement at the time, and inflation was built into the contract. In fact, most salaries were negotiated either in U.S. dollars (considerably more stable than the plethora of Brazilian currencies that happened at the time) or in multiples of the minimum wage (indexed to the Brazilian equivalent of the CPI). You can do investments and people did at the time, but you are correct that hyperinflation did pretty much kill that economy. About the last thing you wanted to do was to get a government contract, as that was usually paid in a fixed amount of the official currency.
There is nothing which stops fractional reserve lending of Bitcoins, other than the fact that the Bitcoin network itself would reject somebody injecting Bitcoins that can't be traced to some original work unit of a Bitcoin miner.
The real differences is with websites like the ForEx sites dealing with Bitcoins which would have the ability to internally "loan" Bitcoins for some purpose and then call them back at a different date. They would be much more limited than traditional banks though, especially if somebody insisted upon a transaction within the Bitcoin network itself rather than through a 3rd party account.
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart also has lawyers & lobbyists protecting them.
Give it time. There will be lobbyists who advocate for Bitcoin eventually, and there certainly are constituencies involved.
Unfortunately at the moment, most of the people who use Bitcoins are either irrelevant (die-hard libertarians and anarchists) or don't bother even casting their ballot in the first place (many computer nerds and younger people eligible to vote). As a result, the constituents are really pretty much ignored.
Regardless, Bitcoins are trading more than almost any other alternative currency system that has been set up in America (or elsewhere for that matter) in more than a hundred years.... MMORPGs being the one possible exception. World of Warcraft gold vs. Eve ISK vs. Bitcoins is a more relevant comparison at the moment, where Bitcoins do compare quite favorably. Bitcoins certainly does better than other alternative currencies like Ithica Hours (another semi-successful alternative currency).
As much as it seems like the major content producers (aka "Hollywood") have an upper hand in terms of copyright term lengths and making new and creative "applications" of intellectual content, I think the time is soon at hand where that trend will be reversed in some substantial manner.
I'm not saying it will go back to 17 years like it was in 1790, but it will be reduced and more content will be made publicly available. I also envision that things like the GPL and other open source licenses will be very common with these kinds of 3D model products.
You can also print things with cake frosting and other materials. Good point though about the metal.
Black powder isn't even all that hard to manufacture. I suppose Congress could outlaw anybody with an outhouse on "national security reasons", as that might be considered "dangerous" as a source of potential Nitrates. Similarly anybody who decides to stockpile wood as that can be turned into charcoal could be considered dangerous as well.
I've made my own black powder in the past simply to see if it could be made at all, and I used to buy Salt Peter in bulk quantities from my neighborhood pharmacist (something currently much harder to obtain than when I was a kid). I looked up the recipe from an encyclopedia and did a little further experimentation just to see how the proportions of the various ingredients made it burn. All I see legislation like this actually accomplishing is just adding more steps to the process of making a bomb, but it wouldn't stop a determined person from causing harm if they really wanted to do something nasty.
Copyright doesn't protect an idea, only its expression. You can legally write a story about a killer robot from the future who wants to kill a man not yet born with a human from the future protecting her, you just can't copy the movie script, which is why the movie studios do in fact usually win.
If you want to protect the idea, it needs to be patented. Then again, the barrier to obtaining a patent is much higher due to its expense (a copyright is technically automatic, and copyright registration is only $25-$50 at most as opposed to thousands of dollars for an ordinary patent) and the fact that it must be proven to be original.
The day the USPTO starts to grant patents for movie pitches is likely when the USPTO will be nuked by the MPAA, but perhaps it might be expanded in that direction as well since software patents and business method patents have been granted.
True, but fair use does not require any use not make money for the person claiming fair use; for example you can use a clip in a critique of the that is published in a for profit magazine.
While for-profit ventures can have fair-use content in their products, the fact that money is made off of the product (or that it is used by a non-profit entity like the Free Software Foundation) can be a contributing factor for determining if the infringement is in fact fair use or a copyright violation.
Keep in mind that fair-use is a legal defense against a claim of copyright infringement. You are still technically infringing on copyright even with fair-use content, just that such infringement is "legal" in those countries which recognize fair-use or related concepts like fair-dealing. In America, fair-use is considered the aspect of copyright law which recognizes the 1st amendment issues that modify a grant of copyright, and has subsequently been codified with specific fair-use exceptions. In other words, there are some forms of expression that simply must permit at least some minor copyright infringement simply to be able to express yourself and ideas in society... and a full restriction on copyrighted content would prohibit many forms of speech or expression that shouldn't be restricted.
and one of the first rules in that whole thing is if you don't have people their, you definitely have no rights to sell it, period. (Even if you do have people there, you still have lots of limits on what you can do.)
To be exact, the treaty says you don't own it at all even if you live there.
If you are talking about the Outer Space Treaty, all it says is that it can't be claimed by a sovereign entity (actually, just the signature countries of the treaty) for national appropriation or territorial claim. Real estate can be claimed by private individuals though.... or at least that is real murky if anybody can actually claim extra-terrestrial real estate. Then again, ownership at the point of a gun is likely going to be recognized regardless of whatever some stupid treaty may or may not claim.
This is no different than people who sell parcels of land on the Moon or Mars, or name stars with a "Star Registry registered with the U.S. Copyright Office" (aka they put the book together and "registered" a "copyright" on the list of names with the Library of Congress... something that costs about $50 and doesn't mean a damn thing other than you can't publish those names elsewhere without permission).
I should note there are geographical naming boards like the IAU who work with terrestrial landmarks as well. For the most part, you really can't "name" random mountain peaks or even one inch squares in your back yard without quite a bit of legal hassle and in most cases going through either a legislative body of some sort (like the U.S. Congress, a state legislature, or even a municipal council) or somebody appointed by those legislative bodies to act in their behalf to administer such geographical names.
For the USA, the current agency to decide the name of geographic features is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. This agency also coordinates its activities with other similar agencies operated by other members of the United Nations, and it should be pointed out that money being paid is not a consideration for if the name sticks or not. There are even then some restrictions, such as you can't give names to things in wilderness areas, and generally names must be of good taste as well (as determined by the board).
Before you are critical of them, note who they are working with and who is running the company. There certainly is a plethora of PhDs among the people running that company with science and engineering degrees... so I don't know if that counts as real scientists (with published papers) or not.
Some of those peer reviewed papers do discuss various elements in the Solar System, the feasibility to extract those elements, and some real business models for getting that to happen. As for if you accept those conclusions or not, that is up to you.
It isn't far fetched to conceive in fiction of some sort of spacecraft that existed anciently, but seriously..... are you saying that there was a civilization that existed anciently that was capable of spaceflight thousands of years ago?
There would be evidence in geological records as well as considerable archeological evidence that these civilizations existed... and that simply doesn't happen. You also have the time spans wrong as there are written records that go back 10,000 years and if you use the term loosely you can go at least back 20,000 years on some written records that used pictograms or at least drawings that can be considered "art". If there was a sentient species of dinosaurs that used tools and could travel into space, we would certainly be finding piles of metal and other strong evidence that such civilizations existed.
Yes, in theory such a civilization may have existed over the billions of years that the Earth has been around, but fanciful stories that have been reinterpreted in a modern context by people who are embellishing those stories so much that they might as well be modern fiction really don't count.
My concern about this type of battery is the fact that it requires so much energy to "recycle".
Don't forget about the carbon electrodes which are consumed in the smelting process, producing carbon dioxide gas.
Which can in turn be piped into a greenhouse to produce literally tons of solid carbon. Really, I don't see that as even remotely a problem as it is just one more thing that can be recycled.
Water is going to need to be a recycled resource. The point of the parent post is that obtaining that water is going to be a difficult task akin to extracting gold from low-grade ore on the Earth right now, and I'd have to agree with him. You are used to sticking a bucket above your house and gathering water, or tossing a hose into a passing stream where water is literally rushing to your house or at least nearby. That simply doesn't happen on the Moon at all. You are more likely to get water in a bucket sitting on your roof by living in the Sahara than anything you might find on the Moon where water is much less plentiful.
I should point out that the ISS gets most of its water from the Earth in the form of regular shipments in the resupply capsules. While the ISS is certainly developing recycling processes that will be valuable for a place like the Moon, they are hardly self-sufficient. That water needs to come from somewhere, and bringing it from the Earth at $100k per liter (about the price to put a kilogram of stuff on the Moon from the Earth) is not a cost-effective way to supply a lunar colony.
No one is a bigger proponent of manned spaceflight than me but let me be brutally honest here: There will be no manned bases on the moon ... ever. Oh, we'll go and study every interesting spot on the moon. We'll spend upwards of a month or more in certain areas of enormous interest. But humanity will not build a moonbase for permanent occupation. The technology and logistics are not insurmountable but the degree of difficulty will run smack into 'Why?'.
In terms of a huge government scientific research station similar to Amundsen-Scott Research Base in Antarctica being placed on the Moon with the current fiscal climate and the need for constant resupply from the Earth to sustain every possible need like it was some sort of submarine permanently stationed at a particular longitude/latitude? Yeah, I would have to agree with you that kind of activity will never happen on the Moon or for that matter anywhere else in the Solar System other than the current fiscal black hole that is called the International Space Station.
That isn't how human civilization has been able to spread around the world though. Can you imagine if everything people used in Virginia was still being supplied by ships coming from England? There might be a colony of a few hundred British living and working in the Jamestown area, but it would still be something operated by the Royal Navy and not a state of eight million people.
The key to making things work in space and advancing the frontier of humanity is to "live off the land" and obtain the resources needed to stay there from the resources which are found there. How that is done will be a complex task, and even something "simple" like trying to establish an independent biosphere that can sustain itself is something I'm not sure is possible.
Regardless, I'd like to see people at least given the chance to find out. There are enough people who would be willing to either voluntarily contribute money or even put themselves and their lives on the line to find out that I think it is important that those who think this is a foolish endeavor to at least step aside and let those who want to find out to do just that. I'm not sure colonization of the Solar System is something which should be financed at gunpoint by those who are opposed to the idea (aka paid for by taxpayers), and there are a number of reasons why I think making government projects in space is a total waste of money in many cases. Regardless, there is a role that even government agencies can play in either encouraging or developing these resources and moving humanity beyond the Earth.
The largest advantage that the Moon offers is its proximity to the Earth. If something goes wrong on the Moon, resupply can happen in the time frame of weeks rather than months or years. Communication back to the Earth can be done in about a second or so, rather than minutes or hours. You can hold down a conversation with somebody on the Moon and the 2nd party on the Earth... something that is much harder to do on Mars. As such, if there is going to be something to humanity moving off of the Earth, the Moon is likely going to be one of if not the first place where such expansion of humanity will happen.
I am aware of Robert Zurbin and his philosophies over skipping the Moon and going to Mars first. He even makes some valid points to the idea that are very much worthy of merit. For myself, I think Mars and the Moon are about equal in difficulty in terms of trying to get a colony established, with strengths and weaknesses to both worlds and challenges were technology developed for building human settlements on one of those worlds can be adapted for use on the other world as well. They aren't identical though, so there will be some unique challenges as well. It also is far from inevitable that human settlement will happen on either world for that matter, even though in the long term (10k years or more) I think it will eventually happen even if it isn't in my lifetime.
Yes, the Romans had writing. For some time it was a popular game and exercise to go over the writings of ancient Rome and Greece to see if there might be some sort of technology or concept that hasn't been implemented in "modern society" (whatever that was). There certainly were things like aqueducts and even very sophisticated machines like the Antikythera device that spoke of incredible engineering and design skills that existed in the past but were lost.
I agree with the original parent post by AC that sometimes technologies can be forgotten either through neglect or failure to pass that information onto the next generation. Nuclear engineering is one of those fields I'm currently very concerned about in terms of hard won knowledge is not being passed onto the next generation, and there are some other similar kinds of things like that where it does appear we are in a civilization in decline. None the less, I really doubt there are exotic technologies like how to build spacecraft, teleporting machines, or ancient "stargates" to other worlds that have yet to be found. Really doubt as in I think there is a higher likelihood that the flying spaghetti monster is real.
I suppose you can claim that the 1960's Apollo Project effort was ancient knowledge that has to be rediscovered (another example of technology being forgotten), as the ability to go to the Moon has been lost in America and the rest of the world. None the less, that isn't anything close to 100 thousand year old technology that needs to be rediscovered in an archeological dig. It is digging through warehouses of government records though, so I suppose it might as well be the same thing.
I've seen this said before.
Is there anyone here (perhaps an astronomer, astrophysicist or geologist) with an understanding of the distribution of elements in the solar system who can say how probable that is?
You might want to look up these guys:
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
They have some pretty serious backers and have some big name mining companies who are working with them in terms of trying to turn it into a business. They've even put into their business plan that their mining efforts are going to be driving down the price of "Platinum group metals", which includes gold and silver from their viewpoint (even if it isn't in the same periodic table group).
There are other groups looking to do the same thing as well, so I would say this is no longer abstract thinking but a group of people who seriously think that large amounts of extra-terrestrial minerals are going to be found. The main resource they are targeting right now is ordinary water, as it can be used as rocket fuel in a number of ways and is easily processed with current extraction techniques. Still, they are thinking that by the next century this may be a very real possibility that tons of gold and silver will be coming to the Earth from off-planet.
The question is, what about the situation even had the potential for such an incredible explosion?
That'd be the fact that the massive fire was in a factory where they make explosive stuff.
The factory didn't make explosives, it only made fertilizers. It is stuff that like many chemicals can in some situations be explosive, no doubt.
If you think this was bad, you should see some grain silo explosions. That is just a bunch of dust in a tube where unfortunately a bad spark can cause the whole silo to explode in a fashion just like was seen on the video in the link in the original story post. That isn't even something remotely connected to explosives but just ordinary grain that otherwise you would make into your next peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
Under ordinary circumstances, even a fire wouldn't be a problem for a plant like this. In fact, the fire supposedly was put out by the local fire department only to flare up again and quickly get out of hand. There should have been some safety features in that plant to help suppress the fire and there definitely could have been some different procedures put into place to prevent this explosion, but this was a situation far from normal.
Fertilizer plants are dangerous places. I am surprised that in such a sparsely populated part of Texas the plant wasn't further away from houses.
Knowing that the facility produced a product that could be explosive (especially after the Oklahoma City bombing by Tim McVeigh), they could have and indeed should have taken some engineering steps to protect not just workers but also the surrounding town.
I happen to live somewhat near the ATK facility which used to make the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle and also makes the fuel used in other solid rocket missiles used by the military. It is intentionally put out in the middle of nowhere with all kinds of safety berms and evacuation routes for the workers just in case something goes wrong. There isn't a residential house anywhere within a dozen miles of the main manufacturing building, and the only other non-company structure is a visitor's center for the location of the Trans-continental Railroad (aka the "Golden Spike Monument").
Instead, this looks like some Mom & Pop company that started on some bootstring budget and couldn't afford to put in those kind of safety features into their plant design. Making fertilizer isn't exactly a high profit business anyway, so the design of the building may have been for practical reasons as well. Still, I hope that a good engineering review of this plant will happen and help with town planners and fire safety codes for buildings of this nature in the future. Safety rules are usually created when people die, and this particular plant looks like it will be a good way to learn some lessons about what not to do. Perhaps these deaths will not be in vain.
Three explosions on TV in three days.
We're still building up to the big one...
North Korea nuking Tokyo or Anchorage? Perhaps. It does seem nuts though.
You make it sound like any fertilizer will work in any situation as a "one size fits all" position. That isn't how you grow plants, which needs a much more balanced approach and several different kinds of chemicals. It doesn't matter if they are produced in a factory or grown from manure in your back yard.... it is the same thing. Nitrates are one of those key ingredients that plants need in order to grow, and depending on soil conditions and the species of plant you are growing it may need those kind of fertilizers.
In fact, in earlier times people would literally sell their cess pool contents (not really septic tanks, but the same general construction) to Nitrate manufacturers for the purpose of extracting the Nitrogen compounds to be used in explosives. Cheaper ways of getting that accomplished can be had today, but in theory you could use the stuff that is flowing out of your toilet if you cared.
Woudln't work. A feature of bitcoin is to be anonymous. That's why the primary use today is for money laundering and hiding transactions.
Anonymity with Bitcoins is overrated, and sort of a false promise. While there are some anonymizing features of Bitcoins that are attractive, I wouldn't count on that protecting you from being investigated by a forensic review of the Bitcoin block chain or other tools that could be employed to search you out and find out what transactions you are using. Each Bitcoin can be traced to the work unit it originated at, and the transactions can also be traced to purchases. Public address keys are a particular vulnerability... both to the recipient as well as the sender.
The anonymous feature only makes it difficult to track Bitcoins, not make it impossible. It is also not a primary design of Bitcoin to remain anonymous but more of a side effect of the cryptocurrency process itself.
What happens in 100 years is very theoretical. What happens this year and next with my money isn't. This was exactly my point. People need to understand the extreme short term risk involved, and not underplay that even if we like the concept.
What happens in 100 years or at leave 50 years is far from theoretical. Many people are putting money away in retirement accounts depending on the stability of the U.S. Dollar and that their investments will be there in that rough time frame (of 50-100 years). If you are economically living only in the extreme short term (aka weeks of economic activity instead of even years) you will likely be dead if there is an economic collapse.
I wouldn't recommend that you "invest" in Bitcoins, as it was never really intended to be an investment medium anyway. It is a way to facilitate trade between people and to do so electronically without the need of a central clearing house. That may be valuable (and to many people it is) and in many ways the lack of a central bank to mess with the money supply sounds very appealing.
There is of course "minting" of new Bitcoins, but it is done at a steady and predictable rate as opposed to national central banks like the Federal Reserve, where Ben Bernanke can arbitrarily (with the backing of the other governors and nobody else) create trillions or even quadrillions of new dollars at the touch of a few keys in his office and spend them however they care. You trust that the people running these central banks actually give a damn about the citizens of the country they represent, but that doesn't always seem to be the case and most certainly doesn't seem to be what is happening in Cyprus or America for that matter.
"The algorithm for increasing (or decreasing.... it does happen) difficulty is based upon the frequency of work units being process, where processing more work units in a given period of time will send the difficulty factor up. "
Haha. No it's not. It's based on the total number of bitcoins mined.
I would suggest that you look into the Bitcoin protocols again, at least if you have some understanding of software development. The difficulty of mining Bitcoins can in theory drop significantly if a great many people abandon the mining operations.
There is another algorithm which is independent of the workunit frequency that determines how many bitcoins are earned with each work unit. IMHO the value adjustment algorithm is not needed and something which is a fatal flaw in the design of the currency, but many other people have disagreed with me in the past on that too. At least in theory there will reach a point where people creating new work units will no longer be earning any bitcoins but rather only be receiving transaction fees. That will likely be a more significant way to earn Bitcoins anyway, but the work units are still the key to understanding how Bitcoins function.
You used the word "difficulty" here, which in the context of Bitcoins is the hash difficulty. That is indeed based upon work unit frequency. If a bunch of work units are created in a short period of time (you devote a billion processors to generate a couple dozen work units in an hour or so), the difficulty factor will increase substantially and in a very short period of time. This isn't just protection from malicious attacks, but to adjust when more CPU activity is being devoted to creating work units. The limit of this algorithm is that you need to create a perfect SHA-2 hash, which in theory would require all of the computing resources that mankind will ever conceivably develop and use those resources over the lifetime of the universe. Good luck with that effort. If everybody currently trying to create a work unit gives up and only an Apple II computer in some lame closet is the only computer working on work units, the difficulty will drop substantially to where it may even be possible to make hashes with pencil and paper to create new work units.
Perhaps you could hack the hashing algorithm through a really devoted mathematical attack. That is a known vulnerability. BTW, if you can do that, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Security Agency really wants to talk to you.... not to put you into prison but to offer you a very nice contract and make you an instant millionaire for life where you never need to work another day of your life if you don't want to. It is also in theory possible that some major advances in computing where something like Shor's Algorithm might hack the hash algorithm being used in Bitcoin. True me when I say that if it happens there will be hundreds of stories about it on Slashdot and other geek media sites with a Manhattan Project style effort to come up with an alternative, and not just because of Bitcoins either.
Since you are all hung up on that difficulty word, there is one possible attack that could function as a real denial of service attack: Some government could have that billion processor server farm spike the difficulty with a bunch of new work units in a flood attack, and then pull those processors off-line after a period of time. The net result would be that the spike in work unit difficulty would be so high that others would only rarely start creating new work units, thus trades in Bitcoins would be effectively halted in the network. This is a known problem and not easy to fix, and likely won't ever be fixed in Bitcoins.
That is sort of the problem with Bitcoins as well, and why it seems so weird to those introduced to it. The computation used to create a bitcoin is what ensures its scarcity.
The problem with Bitcoins is that you need to have a computer network in order to get it to work effectively. If you get rid of that network and the CPU cycles, it becomes worthless. It does have the ability to "send" value across continents and to remote places through that network, something which either requires a central bank or armed guards (and bribes of customs agents) to do otherwise.
As for why you need to be concerned about how many kilowatt-hours are used to generate a bitcoin, that is in effect its value if you wish to obtain a new bitcoin by "mining" the coins. You can't simply create new bitcoins unless you devote that much power or at least find a way to generate that may CPU cycles. It is that which gives it value at the moment, and what is motivating people to use it. I'm not saying it is perfect, but that is what is backing Bitcoins.
I should note: Nobody is forcing you to use this currency, and you can certainly use other forms of currency if you trust them more. That isn't true for legal tender currencies where you are forced at gunpoint to accept payments or pay taxes in that currency. Are you sure you prefer to have that gun pointing at your head with something like a U.S. Dollar?
Brazil managed to get out of 1000% annual inflation (I think they ultimately hit 1200%) before they finally got out of that death spiral. Brazil also got out of that inflationary train wreck without a world war or political coup (if anything, Brazil went from a military dictatorship to a representative democracy at the same time).
Having lived in Brazil during the 1980's, I do remember some really odd things in the stores and some interesting observations. You had to buy stuff with your paychecks almost immediately, as you very much noticed the loss of buying power over time. Store keepers had a nightmare trying to keep their prices updated, which changed from day to day. Most importantly, the concept of comparison shopping totally went out the window for me as I couldn't go shopping in one store and try to compare the price of that item in a competitor's store as inflation would completely destroy any sort of comparison between the two institutions. You pretty much always made impulse purchases every time.
I negotiated a rental agreement at the time, and inflation was built into the contract. In fact, most salaries were negotiated either in U.S. dollars (considerably more stable than the plethora of Brazilian currencies that happened at the time) or in multiples of the minimum wage (indexed to the Brazilian equivalent of the CPI). You can do investments and people did at the time, but you are correct that hyperinflation did pretty much kill that economy. About the last thing you wanted to do was to get a government contract, as that was usually paid in a fixed amount of the official currency.
There is nothing which stops fractional reserve lending of Bitcoins, other than the fact that the Bitcoin network itself would reject somebody injecting Bitcoins that can't be traced to some original work unit of a Bitcoin miner.
The real differences is with websites like the ForEx sites dealing with Bitcoins which would have the ability to internally "loan" Bitcoins for some purpose and then call them back at a different date. They would be much more limited than traditional banks though, especially if somebody insisted upon a transaction within the Bitcoin network itself rather than through a 3rd party account.