One Wikipedia article that you absolutely must read if you want to do any sort of "serious" Science Fiction involving travel in the solar system is to read up on Delta-v for travel in the Solar System. These articles are essential:
Make sure you read up on very real "spaceship" (as opposed to spacecraft) that is being proposed by NASA engineers: The NAUTLUS-X
Travel in space is all about energy, and you need it in heaping piles that are incredibly efficient in how that energy is used, as well as fuel sources that are incredibly dense in terms of potential energy storage for such a journey. All of this is in terms of how you get there, and to be perfectly honest there are still a whole bunch of unknowns. More importantly, there is very little if any sort of biological research that has gone into the long-term effects of partial-gravity environments, considering that the Apollo missions were mostly like weekend camping trips rather than any sort of serious attempt to stay somewhere for a substantial period of time.
One thing that I find especially sad is that there has been absolutely no research at all to find out the physiological impacts of zero-g environments, much less partial gravity environments, upon the gestational development of a placental mammal. You hear all sort of conjecture flying about from supposedly intelligent scientists on the matter and talk of sterilization of the first participants to long-term stays elsewhere in the Solar System, but I think all of that is a bunch of hogwash as the proper answer is simple "we don't know". There might not be problems, but there might be issues too, or potential ways to mitigate the issues that come from having sex in space and producing children. Note here I'm talking even studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs, or any other kind of creature has never been studied in terms of what happens when they produce kids. Mice have gone on board the ISS, but they are intentionally kept separate and explicitly not permitted to have sex. I think this is something criminal in terms of keeping that sort of knowledge from being developed, and is to me one of the things that should have been studied years ago, particularly in light of potential plans for travel to other planets. Make a wild guess as to what happens, and know comfortably that nothing has been studied so the ideas of a 3rd grader is just as good as a PhD in terms of this particular issue.
There are terrestrial studies (stuff done entirely on the Earth) of population groups and the minimum number of people you may need for a viable self-sustaining population. Even there, however, don't get hung up on the piddling details of what it takes to make a sustainable colony as no colony is going to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity, unless your story has an apocalyptic flavor and the isolation from the rest of humanity is part of the story itself.
Some overlooked issues include worrying about base machines that make machines. In spite of some very interesting progress along the way, I don't see 3D printers becoming the ultimate source of tool making on Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, and good standbys of things like a lathe, grinder, and other machine shop tools are going to be critical items to take on any sort of extra-terrestrial trip. I envision that one of the very first tasks for
A similar situation happens for textual copyright, where a book can be "revised" with merely adding an index, footnotes, or even "corrections" from an errata sheet or resetting the text of the document. The "revised" document can then be copyrighted. That perhaps only the index or footnotes are subject to copyright doesn't even have to be disclosed, but copyright is still effectively claimed.
I've seen copyright claims on books where the only thing I could see that was original was the copyright notice itself. Sort of like what is happening here with these videos.
Successful musical copyright infringement cases have been made off of the commercial use of as little as two measures of music from another song. Submitting to the Library of Congress a list of all possible variations of notes and note patterns for three to four measure "songs" might just be an excellent way to become a genuine copyright troll in the same manner that patent trolls do their work, and it would be far easier to "prove" prior publication. With life+70 years as the current copyright regime, it might even be a fun game to play.
Keep in mind that copyright registration is only $50, and on top of that you can even send in multiple songs as a "compilation". Really, this sounds like a very reasonable business plan to me.
I would never do it for personal ethical reasons, but who cares about ethics when you stand before a judge?
google how to start an LLC. takes about $500 and $250 / yr
Depending on the state, what kind of business you might be performing, and other factors as well. Still, it isn't that expensive or complicated to start a "company" if you really want limited liability in a commercial activity.
The problem is that you have to be the person whose content has been removed due to a false claim in order to "have standing" in the situation. If you instead start posting all sort of content which you are willing to stand up for on the claims of it being in the public domain, then you will have standing in that situation.
Unfortunately that takes time and considerable effort, not to mention willing to spend a fairly decent amount of money toward the litigation that inevitably will come from that action. You can counter-sue for court costs and related costs of the litigation, but you have to win first. Even if your cause is just, there is always the potential you will lose your shirt together with anything you may own (house, car, etc.) so it isn't something to try lightly.
You also have to ask yourself: Are there better causes with which to spend my time and effort fighting? I can think of a great many other things I would rather do than to fight an obscure provision of copyright law that can be undone tomorrow even if I win through simple legislation and some generous contributions to a local congressman or member of parliament.
When was the last time there were cameras pointed on the most recent scientific satellite sent into space?
I though so. That is sort of the point where once spaceflight becomes routine, nobody will care. The complaint is that suddenly there will be people trying to shut down spaceflight when a death occurs. Sure, just like when a commercial aircraft crashes with deaths due to a design flaw, there will be an investigation and perhaps even the vehicle model will have its "air worthiness certificate" pulled, but it doesn't stop commercial aviation. The same system and mentality should be in place for spaceflight as well.
Of course that implies there are multiple ways available for getting into space. At the moment there is only one: Using a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft. Even that has some problems where even that method of going into space could be in danger.
What you are missing with this diatribe is that the Commercial Space Launch Act already provides the indemnities via law for somebody who is going into space, and is something that has been addressed repeatedly at many congressional hearings in regards to private individuals going into space on commercial carriers.
Basically, anybody who wants to put their money down on any sort of spaceflight experience should already know before they sign a contract to travel on one of these vehicles that they are experimental and have not been certified by the FAA for general usage like is the case with most commercial air transport services.
Yes, some people might die in space. Then again, a great many people die each year in automotive traffic as well as get killed by commuter rail services or even urban "light rail" transit systems. Does that stop those transportation devices from ever being used after those deaths? Why is spaceflight any different?
Elon Musk has also stated categorically that he will not be flying on the Dragon at any point in the near future... at least not until he is prepared to go into retirement from SpaceX and some of his other endeavors. His concern is if there is a mishap of some sort.... the company would go down with him. Yes, there might be somebody to take his spot in theory, but he is the main money man behind the company and is certainly setting the agenda for what SpaceX is doing.
As for what the destination of the first crewed version of the Dragon might be, I'd give it 50/50 odds that it would go to a Bigelow habitat instead of the ISS. I wish SpaceX would take things a little more carefully rather than trying to do the "all up" testing they seem to be striving for, but then again I'm not having to pay the $100 M+ of actual costs to build + fly the rocket.
I rather like the testing style of Armadillo Aerospace, but then again they are starting with much smaller rockets and have only recently been able to get to 100k feet. John Carmack also doesn't have Elon's budget either.
What keeps government bureaucrats from doing that same thing is some laws with real teeth to keep it from happening. Those who try that kind of stunt can find themselves losing retirement benefits, spending time in prison, and certainly out of a job with just cause in such a way that they would be unemployable in any similar kind of job position.
The reason the RNC or any other political organization can get away with doing that kind of act (including the DNC or even the Constitution Party) is that the same laws don't apply to "private organizations", which instead have internal policies and contracts that do pretty much the same thing if the organization has any real merit. The problem with political organizations is that setting any kind of policy is going to be.... a political process that usually has strings attached and other sorts of problems including a desire within those organizations to deliberately lose many records.
Yes, it happens in the government service, but the people at the top usually pay more attention and there have been at least a few people in some positions to establish policies that keep such sort of "accidental" erasure or deletion from happening. Some of those laws were written in response to the Watergate Scandal, but there have been other laws written as well, some of them nearly 200 years old in some form or another in terms of preserving records.
While there may be some agencies that will try that "highly classified" BS story, there are inspectors and people who have security clearance which can go in and verify that even the classified documents are archived in a responsible manner. Some of those inspectors answer only to members of congress (usually something like the CBO or perhaps accountants/inspectors tied to specific committees) and are fully cleared to view any classified material as their need to know is usually within the scope of their official duties with oversight.
So yes, there are "3rd parties" that can contradict whenever somebody says "sure... we did". And if they claim compliance and it hasn't happened, those folks will find their ass nailed to the wall or possibly find themselves in prison for making a false statements like that when it isn't true.
Keep in mind here that the need to store classified materials may be made in various means, including complete secondary networks (physical layer separation on the OSI model, not mere VPN separation) or even computers "off grid" that only use SneakerNet when data needs to be shared between computers with couriers... and a stack of protocols for sharing that information that would make your head spin.
You would hope so. Most of the programmers that often use these libraries don't pay attention to these details, and there have been some abysmal records on the actual implementation of these kind of libraries in real compilers as opposed to specifications and supposed standards.
For those who are real computer scientists as opposed to coders, it matters and it is useful to know what the actual algorithm that is being done to generate the results. The LCG is often used as the benchmark of comparison to other algorithms, because it is very fast and uses a minimum of operations (integer multiplication followed by addition and modulus can be treated as defacto by simply using an unsigned integer and ignoring overflow) while most other algorithms are by far and away much more complex. If you are interested in optimizing a game and really don't care about the "randomization" other than as a cute trick to make a critter go one way then another, LCG really is the way to go and certainly was the standard algorithm for almost all 8-bit and 16 bit systems that I've ever seen (where the source code is usually closer at hand for the compilers or even interpreters). Where most of the implementations get it really bad is choosing horrible values for the multiplier so you get very small periods (some as small as about five or six numbers with a bad seed), while good values can give you at least MAXINT possible values and periods between new numbers. Most of the "improved algorithms" you are citing here attempt to improve upon that by creating more than MAXINT periods and attempt to avoid linear relationships between pairs of numbers.
If games are using something other than an LCG, I hope they do consider the computational penalties they are making when selecting that other algorithm. Depending on the game, it may very well be one of the most frequently used library functions in that game.
Most of the other algorithms usually are bench marked against the LCG in terms of comparing "randomness" and other factors, but they are all compromises in one way or another. That is also my point, that you need to know what it is that you are using. There certainly is a role to be played by depending upon statistical uncertainty in nature to be used as a means to generate random numbers, which is why this particular technique of using a laser to generate those numbers is so promising. There may be some "structure" in the random nature of the results, so the concern is valid that there might not be any "quick fix" to the problem either. Finding genuine "random numbers" may be an illusive goal. If you are trying to do research into quantum effects (aka simulating a Q-bit or doing quantum mechanical simulations), it is by far and away much more important to stay away from most of the other random number generators and certainly anything that uses the concept of an algorithm approach with a numeric seed or seeds.
Even the process of finding a good seed to start a series is usually simply a variant of applying get_time() (or some other similar function) and somehow applying that directly into the algorithm to start the period. That works fine for single player games, but it might be a problem if everybody in a whole network is starting at the same time, and therefore on the very same period and point in that period for all calculations being used. Again, most programmers that I've met and dealt with simply treat the standard library as a black box and don't care about these implementation details, thinking that the numbers are as random as the laser generation device. Poor choices of random number generators has shown up in scientific research where better algorithms or even numbers generated by nature should have been used, but were instead ignored or not even addressed in the results on the assumption that the compiler writers got it right and they don't need to "reinvent the wheel".
While there are other random number generators, by far and away the most common "random number generator" is the Linear congruential generator.... the typical one that is used for most video games due to the fact that it can be configured using only integer-based arithmetic operations (no need for floating point overhead). That makes the generator extremely fast, but unfortunately predictable. Sadly, lousy constants are usually picked with many operating system vendors or compiler writers which make this rather poor generator even worse.
The problem is that the very non-random nature of the generator can show up when you are using it for very precise calculations or for something that doesn't take into the fact that the LCG algorithm really is just a simply line slope formula applied in an unusual context and with some constraints. There is certainly a need for better algorithms to generate numbers that avoid these problems, and if you can get these numbers from nature it makes the issue even better.
Still, I agree with the grandparent post that the physical phenomena being used is going to be influencing the results of the number generator in some fashion.... it will just be more disguised. In the past census data was used to generate "random number tables", which also has drawbacks of its own.
I installed the software and went into the local administration, with a few clicks (it isn't quite as intuitive as I'd like it to be) I was able to set up the web crawling functions to bring in my favorite site. There are several limits that can be put onto that crawl, but the main point is that you can add sites to the search, and they show up when other peers are performing queries.
It will be interesting to see how this software performs. It seems about as good as Lycos was back in the early 1990's, so I can't complain.
You realize this isn't going directly to the heart of the city right..This will connect most likely at the end of the BART line in San Fran and North LA above the city. No where near the fault lines. And why haven't we had these problems with Amtrack or freight trains..
That sort of destroys the point of even building a high speed rail link. At least LAX and SFO are pretty close to the urban centers of the respective cities.
As for Amtrack and the freight trains, those go right into the urban centers even closer than the airports. CalTran has a stop that is right next to the stadium that the Giants play at and is in walking distance to Fisherman's Wharf (sort of... a bit of a walk but not too bad). Amtrack goes into the heart of Oakland just on the other side of the bay. Then again that Amtrack line was put in over a century ago when the population of the Bay Area was significantly less and mostly farmland.
This "bullet train" won't even go into either LA or San Francisco. It will reach the extended suburbs of both cities, depending on how you term that, but at the moment I haven't seen the plans for this to actually make it into the city centers without a whole monster pile more money being shoved in the direction of this train plan.
As the saying goes, the devil in in the details, and it is in those details that this particular plan seems to fall apart.
The land had temporary inhabitants which were hunter-gatherers that didn't have notions of fixed property rights. There were "territories" that were somewhat fluid from year to year or even according to the seasons, but it wasn't the same thing as land with marked boundaries (with a fence, road, or river marking the difference from one parcel to the next) or something "domesticated" for agricultural purposes.
I'm not saying that it was correct in terms of simply going out and claiming huge tracts of land for yourself at the expense of anybody who might be living on it, but there is much more to the issue than simply the big evil white guy going out and deliberately trying to defraud the natives as a con game. It really was more of a clash of cultures, and within that mix the need of an expanding continental empire sometimes needed to accomplish things that at best was indifferent to the plight of those caught in the middle of the expanding infrastructure that was being built.
"The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build"
In no small part due to the use of Chinese laborers that were banned from panning for gold- and the lack of consideration before the removal of Indians from the territories nearby.
I will assent that more than 27 miles per yer is more than doable though...
By the time the crews got experienced with the Trans-Continental Railroad, they were laying down about 20 miles of track per day. Yes, that was over flat ground that was unoccupied, but it does make you think how a similar kind of project could be organized. For several billion dollars, you would think you ought to be able to match that kind of performance... certainly more than a few miles per month.
There were no environment studies, real opposition, etc?
Actually, the Trans-Continental Railroad did have environmental studies (they used different terms in the 1870's) and there was real opposition to the concept.... both from federal money being spent towards the endeavor as well as some groups of people who opposed even the notion of a railroad as anything other than a pipe dream. The environmental concerns were certainly different in the late 19th Century, but it was still an issue.
The one thing that made the cost tolerable was the granting of land to the railroad companies who built the lines. One "township" of land (a 6 sq. mil by 6 sq. mile block) was given to the railroads on alternating sides of the route, on the premise that the railroad companies could in turn sell the land as a means to partially recover costs and to guarantee a source of revenue. Indeed far more land was given away and sold through railroad companies than was ever actually obtained through other federal land grant programs like the Homestead Act. It is also one of the reasons why the railroad companies emerged by the end of the 19th Century as the primary source of capital for America.
The building of that railroad also was full of all sorts of graft and corruption, including various games being done to decide where "mountains" began (tracks through mountain ranges paid more per mile than over flat ground), not to mention how the initial investors into the railroad companies literally blew all of their money on lobbying efforts in Washington DC before the first track was even laid down on the ground.
Not widely recognized either, it was one of the last major acts of the Abraham Lincoln administration, and nearly the last piece of legislation signed by him as well. The politics that went into the Trans-Continental Railroad would easily be recognized today, and really is no different than this railroad to nowhere in California. All that has really changed is the names of the people involved, and oddly even that hasn't changed as much as you would think it should. It even had the entire congressional delegation from California working on this one project in one way or another, and the governor of California even making a trip to Washington in order to secure the funding for that railroad.
One other key point mostly touched upon earlier, but I think well worth mentioning again in a more specific context:
In spite of some substantial real estate availability in the area roughly surrounding, it is illegal to the point of having the military of several nations come and pick you up if you decide to set up a commercial enterprise or for that matter do much of anything even close to Amundsen-Scott or even McMurdo. If you happen to be lucky and find a huge deposit of platinum-group metals or for that matter even a substantial petroleum reserve that is literally oozing up out of the ground and sticking to your feet, you are prohibited from even trying to exploit those resources or for that matter even trying to investigate that those reserves might even be there.
The problem also exists in space, but the problem there is the basic lack of any ability to file a land claim on extra-terrestrial real-estate. That is an issue that eventually needs to be dealt with, and it is also something that doesn't cost billions of dollars to try and fix either. Perhaps that is why nobody really cares about even dealing with the issue.
The political situation in Antarctica, unlike the Moon or Mars, is such that the stand-off in terms of territorial recognition of any part of Antarctica is highly unlikely, especially when it comes to private land claims.
The concept of "the rule of law" as opposed to "might makes right" is a tricky and precious thing when it actually happens. Especially the concept of "common law" where all citizens are held (supposedly, I'll admit that is not always true) to the same standards of conduct so what you do if you harm somebody under the law will be prosecuted equally regardless of if you are wealthy or poor, the color of your skin, or what "position" in society you may hold (either elective office or some elite family of some sort).
Yes, I know in practice such concepts are usually not really followed, and often the judiciary or even any branch of government (legislative or executive for that matter), and sadly throughout human history a system of tyranny and oppression is the normal expectation rather than any sort of real justice or equal treatment under the law. Indeed one of the founding documents of the United States of America spells this out quite clearly in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which states:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."
In other words, any attempt at reform of a government often ends up backfiring and making the situation worse along the way. It is for that reason where even an imperfect system should be celebrated for at least making some progress along the way of righting what is wrong and making sure that quite possibly ordinary people will be able to get their perceived and actual injustices fixed and corrected.
As for a "4th branch of government", it really doesn't exist except for "we the people" in a democratic society. The largest problem with that is when ordinary people are apathetic towards any power or authority they may wield and in essence acquiesce all authority to tyrants rather than taking charge of the governance process in society on their own terms. That is the ultimate check on tyranny, if ordinary people will but take that step to keep the government in check. If you give up, the battle is lost.
BTW, I never suggested that a 4th branch needed to be created, but pointed out that the judiciary can always be kept under control through the constitutional process of amending the document via legislative committees. In the state where I live (and indeed most other states in America too), the state constitution can only be changed in a general election through a referendum or plebiscite. Major changes in foundation documents indeed should be spread out to as many people as possible before such changes become law, and I think that is a good thing. My question was more towards why anybody would think judicial review and "setting aside" of laws passed by the legislative branch was a bad thing.
Flour is also a fantastic explosive, which is why you see the "XXXX" on some packages of the stuff when you buy it at a grocery store. Grain silos full of the stuff really makes a nice bang when a spark or flame gets near it.
I am simply beside myself even trying to comprehend whatever it is you are saying here. What keeps guardsmen from pulling the trigger on a bunch of kids in an elementary school yard is that their commander-in-chief is subject to elections and an incident like that would either get him/her fired from his job or see the entire chain of command relieved of their duties and possibly (very likely if deaths were involved) prosecuted for 1st degree murder. If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening at UC Davis with the pepper spraying incident, where the school chancellor is barely holding on to her job at the moment and may be replaced real soon for a similar kind of incident. The guy with the gun doesn't always win, even if that guy is holding a badge at the time.
As for "solving the problem outside the judiciary", I think you need a crash course in constitutional law. The courts are not the only people who decide what is and what isn't the law, and the judiciary is not the only part of the government.
You can be that "statesman" and stand up for principles, but then those careers quite often simply are cut short... thus those members of congress (or other legislative bodies) no longer are in a position to do much of anything and the jerks who know how to kiss up to every lobbyist group in the world instead get put into office. As a result of this "filtering process", nobody with a backbone ever is able to stay in office for too long and you get politicians like can be seen in Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (BTW, the whole movie can be seen on YouTube and a couple other places if you've never seen it.)
The movie is sort of corny and certainly is dated with its portrayal of Washington politics, but I don't think it misses the mark too much either. The more I get involved in the political process, the more I see people like the governor and the "senior senator" as portrayed in this film. I certainly think a modern-day "Mr. Smith" would face similar kinds of problems in today's congress.
For myself, I don't see the harm is using the physical facilities of an elementary school as a shooting range or for that matter even teaching elementary school-aged children about the proper use and handling of firearms, so I fail to see your point here in the first place. It can be done safely and nobody has to be hurt, although safety procedures do need to be established (are established BTW) and strictly observed when such activity is taking place. Indeed I've seen very effective firing ranges being created with reasonable procedures taking place which involved the use of elementary school aged children. The decision as to if that should happen should be up to the parents and/or residents near that school, usually in the form of local school board elections and policy decisions made by that local school board, and is also one of the reasons why school districts ought to be small in order to keep this kind of decision making as local as possible.
BTW, in terms of "recognition" of a law, I agree it is quite weak. It would have been very useful to have in the U.S. Constitution something explicit in terms of defining the exact scope as to what the constitutional authority of the judiciary to limit legislation in the court system ought to be, but that unfortunately isn't the case in the U.S. Constitution. That scope, however, is spelled out in some state constitutions and the national constitutions of other countries, often with mixed results. Or you have governments like the United Kingdom which has no single formal document spelling out the scope of its government with the legislative branch (particularly the "lower house") having at the moment almost total authority to do whatever it wants to accomplish. Tradition and precedence are the main things that keep the UK from spiraling out of control, and even that can be argued to some fashion as not working very well, although it does work mostly to the satisfaction of its citizens.
The problem in U.S. federal courts is when they take Marbury v. Madison and extend that constitutional review principle far beyond the scope of that decision and do more than simply "ignore" statutory law, but instead invent new law out of whole cloth (aka "legislating from the bench") or have even gone so far as to impose taxes not specified in any tax code or to perform tasks like drawing redistricting maps which really are the exclusive domain of the legislative branch of government. I understand the frustration that some judges have when legislators are deliberately vague on some piece of statutory legislation or when there is something that should be done to "address grievances against the government", but the scope of authority of the judiciary can and ought to be extremely limited.
The wiki article does have a criticism section that addresses some of the legitimate concerns about this decision, and even points to potential legal and/or constitutional issues that even Chief Justice John Marshall had where technically even he exceeded his constitutional scope of authority and perhaps even should have recused himself from the decision before it was made. This is also one U.S. Supreme Court decision that I think is very highly unlikely to be overturned in the future, and any attempt to even address the issue by another branch of government is likely to get the general concept and philosophy of judicial review instead enshrined in the constitution through an amendment instead. If you disagree, I'd be curious why you might have a contrary opinion.
The problem is that almost any agency you want to cut has some strong constituents and with that some fairly substantial amounts of money involved which can be used for political campaigns. If you cut a whole agency in particular or do "disproportional" cuts compared to other agencies, that implies those federal workers plus contractors plus communities where those agencies have major facilities are going to be complaining. That is easily several million dollars in campaign contributions that can easily be used to finance an opponent in select districts (especially where those key facilities are located at).
As a result, nothing gets cut because everybody in Congress is paranoid about eliminating anything, for fear of losing their position if they vote for these major cuts that are almost universally acknowledged as being needed. You can say you are in favor of a balanced budget, but when you have to deal with specific details about what actually needs to be cut it becomes a completely different story. It is easy to be in favor of cutting an agency that isn't in your district, but eventually even those congressmen have to cave in just to make sure that their favorite federal agency isn't cut.
Slashdot Mirror
One Wikipedia article that you absolutely must read if you want to do any sort of "serious" Science Fiction involving travel in the solar system is to read up on Delta-v for travel in the Solar System. These articles are essential:
Make sure you read up on very real "spaceship" (as opposed to spacecraft) that is being proposed by NASA engineers: The NAUTLUS-X
Travel in space is all about energy, and you need it in heaping piles that are incredibly efficient in how that energy is used, as well as fuel sources that are incredibly dense in terms of potential energy storage for such a journey. All of this is in terms of how you get there, and to be perfectly honest there are still a whole bunch of unknowns. More importantly, there is very little if any sort of biological research that has gone into the long-term effects of partial-gravity environments, considering that the Apollo missions were mostly like weekend camping trips rather than any sort of serious attempt to stay somewhere for a substantial period of time.
One thing that I find especially sad is that there has been absolutely no research at all to find out the physiological impacts of zero-g environments, much less partial gravity environments, upon the gestational development of a placental mammal. You hear all sort of conjecture flying about from supposedly intelligent scientists on the matter and talk of sterilization of the first participants to long-term stays elsewhere in the Solar System, but I think all of that is a bunch of hogwash as the proper answer is simple "we don't know". There might not be problems, but there might be issues too, or potential ways to mitigate the issues that come from having sex in space and producing children. Note here I'm talking even studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs, or any other kind of creature has never been studied in terms of what happens when they produce kids. Mice have gone on board the ISS, but they are intentionally kept separate and explicitly not permitted to have sex. I think this is something criminal in terms of keeping that sort of knowledge from being developed, and is to me one of the things that should have been studied years ago, particularly in light of potential plans for travel to other planets. Make a wild guess as to what happens, and know comfortably that nothing has been studied so the ideas of a 3rd grader is just as good as a PhD in terms of this particular issue.
There are terrestrial studies (stuff done entirely on the Earth) of population groups and the minimum number of people you may need for a viable self-sustaining population. Even there, however, don't get hung up on the piddling details of what it takes to make a sustainable colony as no colony is going to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity, unless your story has an apocalyptic flavor and the isolation from the rest of humanity is part of the story itself.
Some overlooked issues include worrying about base machines that make machines. In spite of some very interesting progress along the way, I don't see 3D printers becoming the ultimate source of tool making on Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, and good standbys of things like a lathe, grinder, and other machine shop tools are going to be critical items to take on any sort of extra-terrestrial trip. I envision that one of the very first tasks for
A similar situation happens for textual copyright, where a book can be "revised" with merely adding an index, footnotes, or even "corrections" from an errata sheet or resetting the text of the document. The "revised" document can then be copyrighted. That perhaps only the index or footnotes are subject to copyright doesn't even have to be disclosed, but copyright is still effectively claimed.
I've seen copyright claims on books where the only thing I could see that was original was the copyright notice itself. Sort of like what is happening here with these videos.
Successful musical copyright infringement cases have been made off of the commercial use of as little as two measures of music from another song. Submitting to the Library of Congress a list of all possible variations of notes and note patterns for three to four measure "songs" might just be an excellent way to become a genuine copyright troll in the same manner that patent trolls do their work, and it would be far easier to "prove" prior publication. With life+70 years as the current copyright regime, it might even be a fun game to play.
Keep in mind that copyright registration is only $50, and on top of that you can even send in multiple songs as a "compilation". Really, this sounds like a very reasonable business plan to me.
I would never do it for personal ethical reasons, but who cares about ethics when you stand before a judge?
google how to start an LLC. takes about $500 and $250 / yr
Depending on the state, what kind of business you might be performing, and other factors as well. Still, it isn't that expensive or complicated to start a "company" if you really want limited liability in a commercial activity.
The problem is that you have to be the person whose content has been removed due to a false claim in order to "have standing" in the situation. If you instead start posting all sort of content which you are willing to stand up for on the claims of it being in the public domain, then you will have standing in that situation.
Unfortunately that takes time and considerable effort, not to mention willing to spend a fairly decent amount of money toward the litigation that inevitably will come from that action. You can counter-sue for court costs and related costs of the litigation, but you have to win first. Even if your cause is just, there is always the potential you will lose your shirt together with anything you may own (house, car, etc.) so it isn't something to try lightly.
You also have to ask yourself: Are there better causes with which to spend my time and effort fighting? I can think of a great many other things I would rather do than to fight an obscure provision of copyright law that can be undone tomorrow even if I win through simple legislation and some generous contributions to a local congressman or member of parliament.
When was the last time there were cameras pointed on the most recent scientific satellite sent into space?
I though so. That is sort of the point where once spaceflight becomes routine, nobody will care. The complaint is that suddenly there will be people trying to shut down spaceflight when a death occurs. Sure, just like when a commercial aircraft crashes with deaths due to a design flaw, there will be an investigation and perhaps even the vehicle model will have its "air worthiness certificate" pulled, but it doesn't stop commercial aviation. The same system and mentality should be in place for spaceflight as well.
Of course that implies there are multiple ways available for getting into space. At the moment there is only one: Using a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft. Even that has some problems where even that method of going into space could be in danger.
What you are missing with this diatribe is that the Commercial Space Launch Act already provides the indemnities via law for somebody who is going into space, and is something that has been addressed repeatedly at many congressional hearings in regards to private individuals going into space on commercial carriers.
Basically, anybody who wants to put their money down on any sort of spaceflight experience should already know before they sign a contract to travel on one of these vehicles that they are experimental and have not been certified by the FAA for general usage like is the case with most commercial air transport services.
Yes, some people might die in space. Then again, a great many people die each year in automotive traffic as well as get killed by commuter rail services or even urban "light rail" transit systems. Does that stop those transportation devices from ever being used after those deaths? Why is spaceflight any different?
Elon Musk has also stated categorically that he will not be flying on the Dragon at any point in the near future... at least not until he is prepared to go into retirement from SpaceX and some of his other endeavors. His concern is if there is a mishap of some sort.... the company would go down with him. Yes, there might be somebody to take his spot in theory, but he is the main money man behind the company and is certainly setting the agenda for what SpaceX is doing.
As for what the destination of the first crewed version of the Dragon might be, I'd give it 50/50 odds that it would go to a Bigelow habitat instead of the ISS. I wish SpaceX would take things a little more carefully rather than trying to do the "all up" testing they seem to be striving for, but then again I'm not having to pay the $100 M+ of actual costs to build + fly the rocket.
I rather like the testing style of Armadillo Aerospace, but then again they are starting with much smaller rockets and have only recently been able to get to 100k feet. John Carmack also doesn't have Elon's budget either.
What keeps government bureaucrats from doing that same thing is some laws with real teeth to keep it from happening. Those who try that kind of stunt can find themselves losing retirement benefits, spending time in prison, and certainly out of a job with just cause in such a way that they would be unemployable in any similar kind of job position.
The reason the RNC or any other political organization can get away with doing that kind of act (including the DNC or even the Constitution Party) is that the same laws don't apply to "private organizations", which instead have internal policies and contracts that do pretty much the same thing if the organization has any real merit. The problem with political organizations is that setting any kind of policy is going to be.... a political process that usually has strings attached and other sorts of problems including a desire within those organizations to deliberately lose many records.
Yes, it happens in the government service, but the people at the top usually pay more attention and there have been at least a few people in some positions to establish policies that keep such sort of "accidental" erasure or deletion from happening. Some of those laws were written in response to the Watergate Scandal, but there have been other laws written as well, some of them nearly 200 years old in some form or another in terms of preserving records.
While there may be some agencies that will try that "highly classified" BS story, there are inspectors and people who have security clearance which can go in and verify that even the classified documents are archived in a responsible manner. Some of those inspectors answer only to members of congress (usually something like the CBO or perhaps accountants/inspectors tied to specific committees) and are fully cleared to view any classified material as their need to know is usually within the scope of their official duties with oversight.
So yes, there are "3rd parties" that can contradict whenever somebody says "sure... we did". And if they claim compliance and it hasn't happened, those folks will find their ass nailed to the wall or possibly find themselves in prison for making a false statements like that when it isn't true.
Keep in mind here that the need to store classified materials may be made in various means, including complete secondary networks (physical layer separation on the OSI model, not mere VPN separation) or even computers "off grid" that only use SneakerNet when data needs to be shared between computers with couriers... and a stack of protocols for sharing that information that would make your head spin.
You would hope so. Most of the programmers that often use these libraries don't pay attention to these details, and there have been some abysmal records on the actual implementation of these kind of libraries in real compilers as opposed to specifications and supposed standards.
For those who are real computer scientists as opposed to coders, it matters and it is useful to know what the actual algorithm that is being done to generate the results. The LCG is often used as the benchmark of comparison to other algorithms, because it is very fast and uses a minimum of operations (integer multiplication followed by addition and modulus can be treated as defacto by simply using an unsigned integer and ignoring overflow) while most other algorithms are by far and away much more complex. If you are interested in optimizing a game and really don't care about the "randomization" other than as a cute trick to make a critter go one way then another, LCG really is the way to go and certainly was the standard algorithm for almost all 8-bit and 16 bit systems that I've ever seen (where the source code is usually closer at hand for the compilers or even interpreters). Where most of the implementations get it really bad is choosing horrible values for the multiplier so you get very small periods (some as small as about five or six numbers with a bad seed), while good values can give you at least MAXINT possible values and periods between new numbers. Most of the "improved algorithms" you are citing here attempt to improve upon that by creating more than MAXINT periods and attempt to avoid linear relationships between pairs of numbers.
If games are using something other than an LCG, I hope they do consider the computational penalties they are making when selecting that other algorithm. Depending on the game, it may very well be one of the most frequently used library functions in that game.
Most of the other algorithms usually are bench marked against the LCG in terms of comparing "randomness" and other factors, but they are all compromises in one way or another. That is also my point, that you need to know what it is that you are using. There certainly is a role to be played by depending upon statistical uncertainty in nature to be used as a means to generate random numbers, which is why this particular technique of using a laser to generate those numbers is so promising. There may be some "structure" in the random nature of the results, so the concern is valid that there might not be any "quick fix" to the problem either. Finding genuine "random numbers" may be an illusive goal. If you are trying to do research into quantum effects (aka simulating a Q-bit or doing quantum mechanical simulations), it is by far and away much more important to stay away from most of the other random number generators and certainly anything that uses the concept of an algorithm approach with a numeric seed or seeds.
Even the process of finding a good seed to start a series is usually simply a variant of applying get_time() (or some other similar function) and somehow applying that directly into the algorithm to start the period. That works fine for single player games, but it might be a problem if everybody in a whole network is starting at the same time, and therefore on the very same period and point in that period for all calculations being used. Again, most programmers that I've met and dealt with simply treat the standard library as a black box and don't care about these implementation details, thinking that the numbers are as random as the laser generation device. Poor choices of random number generators has shown up in scientific research where better algorithms or even numbers generated by nature should have been used, but were instead ignored or not even addressed in the results on the assumption that the compiler writers got it right and they don't need to "reinvent the wheel".
While there are other random number generators, by far and away the most common "random number generator" is the Linear congruential generator.... the typical one that is used for most video games due to the fact that it can be configured using only integer-based arithmetic operations (no need for floating point overhead). That makes the generator extremely fast, but unfortunately predictable. Sadly, lousy constants are usually picked with many operating system vendors or compiler writers which make this rather poor generator even worse.
The problem is that the very non-random nature of the generator can show up when you are using it for very precise calculations or for something that doesn't take into the fact that the LCG algorithm really is just a simply line slope formula applied in an unusual context and with some constraints. There is certainly a need for better algorithms to generate numbers that avoid these problems, and if you can get these numbers from nature it makes the issue even better.
Still, I agree with the grandparent post that the physical phenomena being used is going to be influencing the results of the number generator in some fashion.... it will just be more disguised. In the past census data was used to generate "random number tables", which also has drawbacks of its own.
I installed the software and went into the local administration, with a few clicks (it isn't quite as intuitive as I'd like it to be) I was able to set up the web crawling functions to bring in my favorite site. There are several limits that can be put onto that crawl, but the main point is that you can add sites to the search, and they show up when other peers are performing queries.
It will be interesting to see how this software performs. It seems about as good as Lycos was back in the early 1990's, so I can't complain.
You realize this isn't going directly to the heart of the city right..This will connect most likely at the end of the BART line in San Fran and North LA above the city. No where near the fault lines. And why haven't we had these problems with Amtrack or freight trains..
That sort of destroys the point of even building a high speed rail link. At least LAX and SFO are pretty close to the urban centers of the respective cities.
As for Amtrack and the freight trains, those go right into the urban centers even closer than the airports. CalTran has a stop that is right next to the stadium that the Giants play at and is in walking distance to Fisherman's Wharf (sort of... a bit of a walk but not too bad). Amtrack goes into the heart of Oakland just on the other side of the bay. Then again that Amtrack line was put in over a century ago when the population of the Bay Area was significantly less and mostly farmland.
This "bullet train" won't even go into either LA or San Francisco. It will reach the extended suburbs of both cities, depending on how you term that, but at the moment I haven't seen the plans for this to actually make it into the city centers without a whole monster pile more money being shoved in the direction of this train plan.
As the saying goes, the devil in in the details, and it is in those details that this particular plan seems to fall apart.
The land had temporary inhabitants which were hunter-gatherers that didn't have notions of fixed property rights. There were "territories" that were somewhat fluid from year to year or even according to the seasons, but it wasn't the same thing as land with marked boundaries (with a fence, road, or river marking the difference from one parcel to the next) or something "domesticated" for agricultural purposes.
I'm not saying that it was correct in terms of simply going out and claiming huge tracts of land for yourself at the expense of anybody who might be living on it, but there is much more to the issue than simply the big evil white guy going out and deliberately trying to defraud the natives as a con game. It really was more of a clash of cultures, and within that mix the need of an expanding continental empire sometimes needed to accomplish things that at best was indifferent to the plight of those caught in the middle of the expanding infrastructure that was being built.
"The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build"
In no small part due to the use of Chinese laborers that were banned from panning for gold- and the lack of consideration before the removal of Indians from the territories nearby.
I will assent that more than 27 miles per yer is more than doable though...
By the time the crews got experienced with the Trans-Continental Railroad, they were laying down about 20 miles of track per day. Yes, that was over flat ground that was unoccupied, but it does make you think how a similar kind of project could be organized. For several billion dollars, you would think you ought to be able to match that kind of performance... certainly more than a few miles per month.
There were no environment studies, real opposition, etc?
Actually, the Trans-Continental Railroad did have environmental studies (they used different terms in the 1870's) and there was real opposition to the concept.... both from federal money being spent towards the endeavor as well as some groups of people who opposed even the notion of a railroad as anything other than a pipe dream. The environmental concerns were certainly different in the late 19th Century, but it was still an issue.
The one thing that made the cost tolerable was the granting of land to the railroad companies who built the lines. One "township" of land (a 6 sq. mil by 6 sq. mile block) was given to the railroads on alternating sides of the route, on the premise that the railroad companies could in turn sell the land as a means to partially recover costs and to guarantee a source of revenue. Indeed far more land was given away and sold through railroad companies than was ever actually obtained through other federal land grant programs like the Homestead Act. It is also one of the reasons why the railroad companies emerged by the end of the 19th Century as the primary source of capital for America.
The building of that railroad also was full of all sorts of graft and corruption, including various games being done to decide where "mountains" began (tracks through mountain ranges paid more per mile than over flat ground), not to mention how the initial investors into the railroad companies literally blew all of their money on lobbying efforts in Washington DC before the first track was even laid down on the ground.
Not widely recognized either, it was one of the last major acts of the Abraham Lincoln administration, and nearly the last piece of legislation signed by him as well. The politics that went into the Trans-Continental Railroad would easily be recognized today, and really is no different than this railroad to nowhere in California. All that has really changed is the names of the people involved, and oddly even that hasn't changed as much as you would think it should. It even had the entire congressional delegation from California working on this one project in one way or another, and the governor of California even making a trip to Washington in order to secure the funding for that railroad.
One other key point mostly touched upon earlier, but I think well worth mentioning again in a more specific context:
In spite of some substantial real estate availability in the area roughly surrounding, it is illegal to the point of having the military of several nations come and pick you up if you decide to set up a commercial enterprise or for that matter do much of anything even close to Amundsen-Scott or even McMurdo. If you happen to be lucky and find a huge deposit of platinum-group metals or for that matter even a substantial petroleum reserve that is literally oozing up out of the ground and sticking to your feet, you are prohibited from even trying to exploit those resources or for that matter even trying to investigate that those reserves might even be there.
The problem also exists in space, but the problem there is the basic lack of any ability to file a land claim on extra-terrestrial real-estate. That is an issue that eventually needs to be dealt with, and it is also something that doesn't cost billions of dollars to try and fix either. Perhaps that is why nobody really cares about even dealing with the issue.
The political situation in Antarctica, unlike the Moon or Mars, is such that the stand-off in terms of territorial recognition of any part of Antarctica is highly unlikely, especially when it comes to private land claims.
The concept of "the rule of law" as opposed to "might makes right" is a tricky and precious thing when it actually happens. Especially the concept of "common law" where all citizens are held (supposedly, I'll admit that is not always true) to the same standards of conduct so what you do if you harm somebody under the law will be prosecuted equally regardless of if you are wealthy or poor, the color of your skin, or what "position" in society you may hold (either elective office or some elite family of some sort).
Yes, I know in practice such concepts are usually not really followed, and often the judiciary or even any branch of government (legislative or executive for that matter), and sadly throughout human history a system of tyranny and oppression is the normal expectation rather than any sort of real justice or equal treatment under the law. Indeed one of the founding documents of the United States of America spells this out quite clearly in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which states:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."
In other words, any attempt at reform of a government often ends up backfiring and making the situation worse along the way. It is for that reason where even an imperfect system should be celebrated for at least making some progress along the way of righting what is wrong and making sure that quite possibly ordinary people will be able to get their perceived and actual injustices fixed and corrected.
As for a "4th branch of government", it really doesn't exist except for "we the people" in a democratic society. The largest problem with that is when ordinary people are apathetic towards any power or authority they may wield and in essence acquiesce all authority to tyrants rather than taking charge of the governance process in society on their own terms. That is the ultimate check on tyranny, if ordinary people will but take that step to keep the government in check. If you give up, the battle is lost.
BTW, I never suggested that a 4th branch needed to be created, but pointed out that the judiciary can always be kept under control through the constitutional process of amending the document via legislative committees. In the state where I live (and indeed most other states in America too), the state constitution can only be changed in a general election through a referendum or plebiscite. Major changes in foundation documents indeed should be spread out to as many people as possible before such changes become law, and I think that is a good thing. My question was more towards why anybody would think judicial review and "setting aside" of laws passed by the legislative branch was a bad thing.
Flour is also a fantastic explosive, which is why you see the "XXXX" on some packages of the stuff when you buy it at a grocery store. Grain silos full of the stuff really makes a nice bang when a spark or flame gets near it.
Then again, I think you knew that :)
I am simply beside myself even trying to comprehend whatever it is you are saying here. What keeps guardsmen from pulling the trigger on a bunch of kids in an elementary school yard is that their commander-in-chief is subject to elections and an incident like that would either get him/her fired from his job or see the entire chain of command relieved of their duties and possibly (very likely if deaths were involved) prosecuted for 1st degree murder. If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening at UC Davis with the pepper spraying incident, where the school chancellor is barely holding on to her job at the moment and may be replaced real soon for a similar kind of incident. The guy with the gun doesn't always win, even if that guy is holding a badge at the time.
As for "solving the problem outside the judiciary", I think you need a crash course in constitutional law. The courts are not the only people who decide what is and what isn't the law, and the judiciary is not the only part of the government.
You can be that "statesman" and stand up for principles, but then those careers quite often simply are cut short... thus those members of congress (or other legislative bodies) no longer are in a position to do much of anything and the jerks who know how to kiss up to every lobbyist group in the world instead get put into office. As a result of this "filtering process", nobody with a backbone ever is able to stay in office for too long and you get politicians like can be seen in Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (BTW, the whole movie can be seen on YouTube and a couple other places if you've never seen it.)
The movie is sort of corny and certainly is dated with its portrayal of Washington politics, but I don't think it misses the mark too much either. The more I get involved in the political process, the more I see people like the governor and the "senior senator" as portrayed in this film. I certainly think a modern-day "Mr. Smith" would face similar kinds of problems in today's congress.
For myself, I don't see the harm is using the physical facilities of an elementary school as a shooting range or for that matter even teaching elementary school-aged children about the proper use and handling of firearms, so I fail to see your point here in the first place. It can be done safely and nobody has to be hurt, although safety procedures do need to be established (are established BTW) and strictly observed when such activity is taking place. Indeed I've seen very effective firing ranges being created with reasonable procedures taking place which involved the use of elementary school aged children. The decision as to if that should happen should be up to the parents and/or residents near that school, usually in the form of local school board elections and policy decisions made by that local school board, and is also one of the reasons why school districts ought to be small in order to keep this kind of decision making as local as possible.
BTW, in terms of "recognition" of a law, I agree it is quite weak. It would have been very useful to have in the U.S. Constitution something explicit in terms of defining the exact scope as to what the constitutional authority of the judiciary to limit legislation in the court system ought to be, but that unfortunately isn't the case in the U.S. Constitution. That scope, however, is spelled out in some state constitutions and the national constitutions of other countries, often with mixed results. Or you have governments like the United Kingdom which has no single formal document spelling out the scope of its government with the legislative branch (particularly the "lower house") having at the moment almost total authority to do whatever it wants to accomplish. Tradition and precedence are the main things that keep the UK from spiraling out of control, and even that can be argued to some fashion as not working very well, although it does work mostly to the satisfaction of its citizens.
The problem in U.S. federal courts is when they take Marbury v. Madison and extend that constitutional review principle far beyond the scope of that decision and do more than simply "ignore" statutory law, but instead invent new law out of whole cloth (aka "legislating from the bench") or have even gone so far as to impose taxes not specified in any tax code or to perform tasks like drawing redistricting maps which really are the exclusive domain of the legislative branch of government. I understand the frustration that some judges have when legislators are deliberately vague on some piece of statutory legislation or when there is something that should be done to "address grievances against the government", but the scope of authority of the judiciary can and ought to be extremely limited.
The wiki article does have a criticism section that addresses some of the legitimate concerns about this decision, and even points to potential legal and/or constitutional issues that even Chief Justice John Marshall had where technically even he exceeded his constitutional scope of authority and perhaps even should have recused himself from the decision before it was made. This is also one U.S. Supreme Court decision that I think is very highly unlikely to be overturned in the future, and any attempt to even address the issue by another branch of government is likely to get the general concept and philosophy of judicial review instead enshrined in the constitution through an amendment instead. If you disagree, I'd be curious why you might have a contrary opinion.
The problem is that almost any agency you want to cut has some strong constituents and with that some fairly substantial amounts of money involved which can be used for political campaigns. If you cut a whole agency in particular or do "disproportional" cuts compared to other agencies, that implies those federal workers plus contractors plus communities where those agencies have major facilities are going to be complaining. That is easily several million dollars in campaign contributions that can easily be used to finance an opponent in select districts (especially where those key facilities are located at).
As a result, nothing gets cut because everybody in Congress is paranoid about eliminating anything, for fear of losing their position if they vote for these major cuts that are almost universally acknowledged as being needed. You can say you are in favor of a balanced budget, but when you have to deal with specific details about what actually needs to be cut it becomes a completely different story. It is easy to be in favor of cutting an agency that isn't in your district, but eventually even those congressmen have to cave in just to make sure that their favorite federal agency isn't cut.