I think we may be going about this the wrong way. We're targeting things at the consumer or corporate board room level. Maybe we need to be looking more fundamental, at the investor level. What if we defined as a '100% American Corporation' as one with all employees located in the US and all the employees of any subsidiaries located in the US. If you employ a single person located o Then we go and say 'any investment made in a 100% American corporation will not have to pay taxes on dividends or capital gains taxes.' Investors are ultimately out to make a buck. If any purely-American company could be invested in tax free, that would be a huge incentive to keep jobs in the US.
Now, regardless of whether jets contribute to global warming, (once the contrail effect is taken into account), another problem still remains. With ever-increasing demand and peaking supplies, eventually the cost of jet fuel will become to high to be economically practical. With the scale of defense budgets and not having to operate at a profit, the military can probably hold out a lot longer than the passenger airlines. Still, eventually a point will be reached when jet fuel is too expensive to be practical for all large-scale use, both civilian and military. The question is then, what is the state of aviation beyond jet fuel?
I think certain batteries/fuel cells/electrical systems could be used. However, these would likely be extremely slow prop planes with limited capacity. The type of large-scale, cheap, and rapid air transport brought about in the 'jet' age would seem to be impossible.
What I've often wondered is if it's possible to modify a jet engine to directly burn hydrogen, producing thrust directly rather than through a fuel cell -> electric ->propeller based system. The energy obviously wouldn't be free; the hydrogen would have to be produced from nuclear, solar, or some other power source. It would be expensive, but it might still let us keep our planes in the air.
1. Most of these dying languages are spoken by small, indigenous ethnic groups.
2. Indigenous groups change their languages when it is necessary to participate in the trade and larger economies of outside groups.
3. Outside groups come into the isolated and remote territories of indigenous groups when the land the natives have has some monetary value to it, be it for farmland, or in this case, oil beneath it.
4. SUVs consume a lot of oil, driving up the price, and making profitable the exploitation of petroleum resources, no matter how distant the source might be.
Therefore, by driving an SUV, you're causing the world's indigenous languages to go extinct. I hope you're happy.
Better yet, if every case had to be brought to trial, it would force prosecutors and the law to focus on important cases.
I think it is reasonable that one of the factors contributing to the burgeoning prison population is the plea deal system. Currently, scores of people are convicted without the need for public input. Thus, out of sight, out of mind.
For example, consider the imprisoning of people for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Many people don't oppose laws that allow this because it does not affect them personally. Such things usually happen far outside the range of the average middle-class, middle-to-late-age white suburbanite, the same group of people that have the greatest influence on the law.
It's one thing to vote for a politician who promises to be tough on drugs; it's another thing entirely to sit on a jury box and condemn a man to jail for a petty offense.
This is how the system was supposed to work. People were supposed to be convicted by a jury of their peers. If the jury thought the case unjust, they either could use jury nullification or at least have an incentive to get the unjust laws repealed. With plea bargaining, the prosecutor will say, "You can get ten years for this offense, by pleading guilty you'll only get two." The defendant, knowing the chance of conviction is high, will take what he can get. The unjust law remains on the books, and injustice continues in relative obscurity.
Whether they've realized it or not, Vudu has chosen the perfect name for their insidious little device. Let's compare the Vudu box with your average Voodoo witch doctor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie
1. A witch doctor surrounds himself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to raise the dead. The Vudu box surrounds itself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to do the technologically impossible.
2. A witch doctor puts his victim in a death-like-state using a variety of poisons and venoms, resulting in the victim being buried alive. The Vudu box nearly kills the user with its initial cost and then proceeds to isolate the user from rest of the internet and humanity, resulting in his peers considering him dead.
3. A witch doctor revives the victim into a state of perpetual slavery, forcing them to work in a trance-like state for the profit of the witch doctor. The Vudu box constricts the power of the user down to a minimal level, and forces the user to give his bandwidth and work for Vudu in an endless state of vendor-slavery.
/Also, the movie service will have lots of Night of the Living Dead Movies
//Brains, Brains, BRAAAIINNSS!
This device sounds like a win for the MPAA/movie industry and a big loss for the consumer. Lets see how this device functions:
1. You have to buy an expensive box. Most services like this offer the device cheap or free. Satellite boxes, cable boxes, TIVOs, all are or can be free with service plans.
2. Peer-to-peer transfers. Sure, they say they are doing this to offer instantaneous availability of content, but it is just an excuse to shift the bandwidth cost to the end user. And, it doesn't just work exactly like BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, you are only uploading while the transfer takes place. This box uses every box as a source, all the time. If your box has a copy of a movie on it, it will upload it whenever someone else needs it. It doesn't sound like this service should be any more expensive than any other. If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie.
3. End-to-end DRM, vendor lock-in. This is why they're so popular with the studios. While freeing people from the "tyranny" of the computer, they simultaneously give up their best chance at circumventing draconian controls.
4. No DVD burner of any kind. This is the Achilles heel. They offer the option to "rent" or "purchase" downloads. For the 'rent' option, the file obviously deletes itself after a fixed amount of time. What about the movies I purchase? If it were on a computer I could make a backup copy on another hard drive or a DVD. With this, that option does not exist. The device's hard drive, however large, has a finite capacity. Once that fills up, whoops, what are you supposed to do? I guess you have to delete one of the movies you "bought." If they address this at all, they might let you re-download movies you delete. Regardless, it is at their discretion.
5. Bandwidth. Very few people have Ethernet jacks next to their television. For many people, this will leave wireless as their only option. With wireless, I would be skeptical of its ability to cope with the massive upload/download requirements. Even if it can cope, the necessity to either lay Ethernet cables down or configure a wireless network is completely antithetical towards the plug-and-play, instant gratification consumer they're targeting. They're trying to package a computer in a format your Luddite grandmother won't recognize as a computer, while simultaneously requiring her to configure a wireless network.
In summary, to use this system, I have to buy an expensive box, I have to pay for all the bandwidth, and I have absolutely no control over the files I download. This device is about one thing, control. Control of content and control of consumers.
As much as I would like to see no DRM, I will admit that Apple figured out how to do DRM right with iTunes. The basic principle they applied was, "we will make the new format no more restrictive than the old format." Like CDs, FairPlay lets you burn as many CD copies as you want of files. It also lets you back up your files to multiple computers. Vudu's box ties all of my purchases to the lifetime of a single piece of hardware, offering no backup solutions, total DRM, and a system that's designed to screw over the consumer at every single turn.
I hope this is not the way that the industry is going. I don't think the Vudu box will be a great success. However, they may still find enough people who want something that "just works" to find a market. Regardless, it will fall upon the usual legion, the modern fighters for freedom, the hackers and crackers to break the chains of DRM and vendor-lock in. It may be easier to crack something when it's on the computer, but being a stand-alone box hasn't saved the XBox, Playstations, and innumerable other devices from being opened in the same way.
Ultimately, the studios know this. They simply want the circumvention to be so difficult that 95% of users will not attemp
I think this could work. Imagine a facility centered around a nuclear reactor. It draws water from a lake/river, uses what energy is needed to power an array of these atmospheric C02 extractors, and combines them to produce usable fuel! This could change everything. At our current level of technology, we don't have a problem with clean energy. If we had the will power, we could turn off all the coal plants, build a bunch of reactors, and remove that component of global warming overnight (relatively speaking). However, we would still need a source of portable power. A facility like this would be an "instant oil field." Any nation on Earth can become its own Saudi Arabia.
I really hope this CO2 extraction technology proves viable, because if it is, we have on our hands nothing less than the solution to the entire global warming problem.
Read the article, it says that they want to sequester it. It's actually an ingeniously simple method to solve the carbon dioxide problem. If the technology proves viable, you just set up a bunch of these things next to an oil field. They pump the carbon dioxide down into the wells, forcing out more oil and trapping the carbon dioxide in the process.
Think about it, if the rocks beneath an oil field can stably hold volatile substances like natural gas in place for millions of years, there's no reason why the same rocks can't hold carbon dioxide. It's almost miraculously simple, stick the carbon dioxide right back in the ground it came from!
Although, I am skeptical of the total capacity of these oil fields, and they might be prone to leak.
What I've been wondering is if it's possible to reverse the reaction. Your basic combustion reaction goes like:
Is it possible to reverse this, take the concentrated CO2, add a stream of water, and put it through a series of endothermic chemical reactions to produce a usable fuel, preferably gasoline.
Now I know this sounds like a glorified perpetual motion machine, so it would obviously require an external power source. You could use anything for this, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, whatever.
Does anyone know if this is feasible? Do we have the technology to reverse a combustion reaction? You would definitely need to add energy, the question is HOW MUCH energy?
If you could figure out how to do that, especially if tied to nuclear or a renewable electricity source, you can forget about hydrogen cars, battery cars, and all the rest. It would be a beautiful system if you could get it to work. No more drilling for oil, no more dependency on volatile countries, and a renewable source of portable power that can be used till the end of time. You take C02 out of the air, make fuel, burn it, and it goes right back into the air. The whole system's completely carbon neutral. Best of all, you don't need to replace a single car that's currently on the road. Run it from a reactor, and you can quit making poor people starve so we can make ethanol.
Sure, I would like to drive a hydrogen car, but the technology is years and years away. We need to solve this problem yesterday. Mass deployment of hydrogen or electric cars would involve hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure, as well as replacing every single car on the road. Hydrocarbons have many benefits as an energy delivery mechanism. They're stable, portable, and highly energy dense, all the while being extremely easy to extract energy from. The only problems are that they exist in limited quantities, are found primarily in regions with degenerate/hostile governments, and are now known to cause global warming. The only downside that would remain when going to a synthetic fuel would be the smog that engines cause, but I think that could remedied with better filtering technology. If hydrocarbons could be made into a renewable fuel source, there is no reason they could and should not be used indefinitely.
How is it News for "Nerds" ?
- It's regulation of tech.
- It's related to science.
- It's going to require major technological innovation.
- It's likely to drastically affect nerds' ability to use technology and/or energy.
Just for starters
That's an awfully broad expansion of the definition of "News for Nerds." It sounds like you could make just about anything count as "News for Nerds." Now where have I seen that kind of thing before...
It seems that this theory should be fairly testable. If the orbital theory is correct, only Earth should display climate cycles of similar periods. If it's caused by the sun, then the whole inner solar system would be affected. Granted, it would be nearly impossible to see such evidence on Mercury and Venus, but perhaps evidence of some form would be left on Mars. I'm not quite up to speed on my astrogeology, does anyone know if we have any kind of reliable record of the ancient Martian climate?
No, I don't have a problem with our boys on the ground. I have a problem with the administration. They sold us on the idea that Iraq would be a cakewalk. They completely glazed over the fundamental problem, namely, Iraq is too much of a basket case to be fixed short-term. Iraq's problems come from deep, fundamental cultural divisions. Sure at the beginning it was just the old Baathists and foreign fighters, but it quickly, inevitably, turned to the fundamental divisions. Iraq was a powderkeg. One Shiia idiot from Iran attacks a few Sunnis. The Sunnis retaliate not only against the foreigners, but against their Shiia neighbors. One Sunni jackass from Saudi Arabia wanders over the border and bombs a Shiia mosque. The Shiia retaliate not only against the foreigners, but against their Sunni neighbors.
The problem I have with the administration is that they sold us an impossible dream. You can't solve these problems with any military invasion. Our troops were sent in there, and they did what they were trained to do. We truely do have the best army in the world. They took out the supposedly-strong Iraqi army quickly, efficiently, and with incredible skill and cunning. That is what an army is supposed to do, fight wars. You can't just plop an army down in some random country and expect them to magically solve all the problems. That is what the administration tried to do. They knew it wasn't going to work, so they immeadiately set about constructing large, permanent, highly-defensible bases. They want to maintain a large, permanent troop presence in Iraq, while minimizing US military casualties. Armies are designed to fight enemies. They're not designed to prevent two enemies from fighting each other.
The troops are doing their damn best in an impossible situation. The problem is that the guys on the ground and the guys at the top have completely different goals. The guys on the ground are honestly trying to do the best they can to stabalize the situation, fight the insurgents, and rebuild the Iraq. The guys at the top are looking at it from a regional strategic perspective, trying to maintain a troop presence in the Middle East, as a threat against Iran, Syria, and anyone else. They intend to use the Iraq troops to prevent a 1970s-style oil embargo.
This has been the strategy all along. They knew a civil war was inevitable. They planned it so largely, it would be the Iraqi forces getting chewed up and the Iraqi civilians that pay the highest price. The administration cares little about the troops on the ground, desiring only to keep the total US troop casualties low enough to prevent serious war-weariness.
This has nothing to do with training the Iraqi army or anything else. Even if you get a powerful army in place, the conflict will merely shift to who has control of the central government. The Shiia will gain control of the Iraqi army, and use it to fight their war, and the Sunnis will resist. This whole thing is exploding, and we've gotten ourselves into a whole pile of shit. We just need to cut our losses, get the fuck out, and let these idiots tear each other to pieces. At least then we're not losing billions on a hopeless boondoggle.
But here is the problem. We have sunk 500 BILLION DOLLARS into this Iraq boondoggle. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT MONEY COULD HAVE DONE??
We could have rebuilt our ENTIRE energy system. We have the technology RIGHT NOW to rid ourselves of the need for oil, it just costs a lot of money, the kind of money we've thrown into Iraq. We need oil for 3 things:
1. Electricity/Heating Oil
2. Vehicle fuel.
3. Petrochemicals
1. could have been taken care of with a few more nuclear power plants, retrofitting any buildings that need to convert to electric heat. We can use fission plants immeadiately, while investing heavily in fusion plant research for the long run.
2. Could have been replaced with electric vehicles. They have limited range, but if you build a large network of stations that swap out batteries, that's not a problem. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't build the battery stations without electric cars, you can't have electric cars without the battery stations. A coherent federal program would solve this. If the battery system isn't the best option, we could have had Manhattan Project-like development and deployment of hydrogen technology.
3. We can get these from biofuels. If there's not enough land available, build a reactor, desalinate some seawater, and irrigate some land. Problem solved.
The only oil products you now need are for things like jet liners (which can't easily be battery-powered) and remote outposts far from the electric grid. Our domestic oil capacity would be more than enough to cover this need.
There you have it. If we had spent the money wisely, not only would we not need to worry about Iraq, we wouldn't need to worry about any of the Middle East. We might even recoup the investment we made by licensing the technology developed to other nations. We would no longer be dependent upon any tin-pot Middle East dictatorship, or the whims of some wannabe-despot in Moscow. We could just turn our heads and let them fight their own stupid conflicts over who killed who 1200 years ago. AND, as a bonus, we've simultaneously removed the problem of global warming, AND eliminated a whole lot of air pollution, directly improving the health and lives of all of our citizens.
That, my friend, is what COULD have been done. Instead, that money is being blown through the deserts of Iraq, trying desperately to prevent a bunch of people from doing what they have been doing for generations, killing each other.
Possible, I need to catch up on my early Irish history, so I'll take your word for it. Ultimately, however, in terms of the clash between the two groups, its as much about perceptions as reality. If one group of the population views another as occupiers of what is rightfully their sovereign territory, it is very difficult to form a common social/cultural/political identitiy.
Three things. First, I bought into the whole WMD thing. For months prior, the Bush administration had been drumming up the threat, and the media gave them plenty of support. Secondly, Sadam did provide a little indirect support to terrorism. He did offer substantial cash gifts to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. It was inferred that if he was doing that publicly, he was probably working with Al Qaeda covertly. This later turned out not to be true. Sadam's support for terrorism was really little more than a PR move intended to give himself some support among some fundamentalist muslims who might otherwise oppose him.
Thirdly, and mainly, it was more of a gut-level, emotional thing than a logical thing. Sadam was obviously a total bastard, and the world would be better off with him at the end of a rope. However, there are a lot of people like that in the world. We can't go invading every one of them.
It was basically like this, "the guys a monster, he's supporting terrorists, and he's trying to get nukes, we have to act now before he gets them."
That worked out well....That's how the Bush administration sold the war, and I, like most of the US population, fell right for it. They completely glazed over the much more important social/ethnic/religious problems Iraq has, and how difficult any occupation would ultimately be. Also, 9/11 was always portrayed as "this generations Pearl Harbor." After all those lives lost, we got what felt like a small-scale invasion of Afghanistan. It just didn't "feel" like the kind of response the attack required. At that point, I could have probably been lead to support an invasion of just about anybody. Bush saw this feeling in the American populace, and used it to "finish what Daddy started."
Ultimately, I think we probably picked the wrong country. I don't know if an invasion of Iran would have gone any better, but at least we wouldn't have Ahmoud "the Holocaust never exhisted" Ahmadinejad on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb. Now I get the feeling that in a few years we'll find ourselves invading Iran, with our troops already spread thin in Iraq, right as I'm getting out of college and in prime draft age. WONDERFUL, JUST WONDERFUL....
What I meant by that is that when the British came into India, India was divided into dozens of tiny, warring states. How do you think a tiny island nation was able to conquer hundreds of millions of people? Simple, divide and conquer. By playing the divided states against each other, they slowly took over the whole subcontinent. Before the British came, there was no real, unified Indian identity. Yes there had been a few earlier governments, like the Guptas and Mughals, but these were EMPIRES, not NATIONS. The central government did little more than collect taxes from local princes/governors, and served only to surpress rebellion or prevent foreign incursion. At the time of the British arrival, India was divided into seperate, completely independent states. People identified with whatever little kingdom they lived in.
When the British left, there was a unified Indian identity. Sure, there was still the Hindu/Muslim clash, but the country was divided into 3 nations, not 50. This is not some grand endorsement of colonialism, however. The main thing the British did was merely provide stability and modern communication and transport. The same thing could have been done if one of the earlier Indian states acquired foreign technology and conquered its neighbors.
The lesson of the British in India is that a national identity cannot be created artificially, it can only develop naturally. It took TWO CENTURIES for this to take effect. The British enforced peace, provided a common language (their own, conveniently for them), and built railroads. This allowed people to move about with much greater ease, blurring the divisions between regions and slowly, naturally forming a kind of national identity. Now India is still a very diverse country, and it was only thanks to its early leaders that it was able to hold itself together, but the early leaders of modern India built upon the previous national identity.
Yes, the British did create unity in India. However, it must be mentioned that they did so purely for their own benefit. They took control of the national economy, and turned what had once been a world-leading, self-sufficient country with a vast manufacturing capability, into a colonial economy focused on providing cheap raw materials for foreign export. It's certainly debatable whether India would have been better off with or without British interference.
The whole point is that you can create a national identity, but only by a very long-term occupation, brutally surpressing any resistance. It was worth it for the British because they harnessed the entire Indian economy for their benefit. We would not do that in modern times not only because it would be morally reprehensible, but because we would have the entirety of the Muslim world trying to bomb US soil, not just a few pissed-off radicals. (You think things are bad now, imagine if Bush announced tommorrow that all Iraqi oil revenues and tax revenues were being confiscated, that numerous home-grown industries would be prohibited, and that Iraqi citizens would be legally required to buy a whole host of manufactured goods exclusively from US companies.)
As far as Northern Ireland goes, that's a whole diffent ballgame. The nation of Ireland existed prior to foreign intervention. Also, in the minds of people like the IRA at least, the opposing group and the occupier were one and the same. In India, the British could at least present themselves more as neutral arbitors. In Northern Ireland, the resistors at least saw it as the British, working for the advancement of British citizens, living in North Ireland. It's hard to create a common identity with your neighbor if you view him as a foreign occupier.
Logically, I think that's probably the best option. Iraq is completely artificial. There is really no logical reason to try so hard to preserve it as a unified nation. This is a problem in a lot of the developing world, and has been the cause of most of the African civil wars and conflicts of the post-colonial era. What it boils down to is that if you go and ask some random person on the street what they are, if they were to honestly reply, they would not say 'Iraqi.' They would say 'a Sunni living in a Iraq' or 'a Kurd living in Iraq.'
Logically, if we were trying to do what's best for Iraq, we should divide the country, try to minimize the violence and arrange some sort of orderly migration process, wish them the best, and get the hell out as fast as we can.
However, I don't think our leaders want to do this. They want to maintain a large, active military presence in the region. They want to be able to massively bomb Tehran on a few hours notice. They want to go to all negotiations involving the Middle East while carrying the metaphorical giant club. Iraq is only one piece in a much larger puzzle. The neocons really didn't like the way Saddam acted in the 90s, firing at our planes while we patrolled the no-fly zone. They would ideally like to maintain this occupation indefinately, or until the oil runs out.
I supported the conflict initially, but have since come to realize how foolish this little adventure was. Ultimately, we were duped into believing we could do the impossible. The main problem is that Iraq is an artificial state, with little real unifying history, religion, or any common identity. It was created by the European powers at the end of World War I, following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. It was created arbitrarily, for the sole convenience of the Western powers, with complete disregard to ethnicity and religion. THAT's the problem with Iraq. This is a problem at the very root of society. You can't drop some troops in there, and expect a vibrant, healthy democracy to just magically spring out of the Euphrates.
I think occupations can create democracies, by holding a diverse group of people together long enough to develop a common identity. It was done by some European powers, take India for example. The problem is that this sort of colonialism takes a large-scale occupation, much larger than we have now, for a time span of MULTIPLE DECADES. This is economically, strategically, and politically impossible in the modern era.
In order to hold this unstable country together, you either have to be a brutal dictator like Sadam or act like the freaking Romans. I suspect if every time a US soldier was killed we rounded up and killed 500 random people, the resistance would end quite quickly. However, any nation created this way will only last as long as that threat of force is present.
Ultimately, I think the people in charge of this whole charade knew this was going to happen all along. In the minds of the neocons who started this whole thing, the people of Iraq are just one piece in a puzzle. You'll notice lately that US troop casualties have been falling while Iraqi casualties have been rising. This is because our troops have been retreating to fewer, larger bases, performing fewer daily patrols, and patrol in more heavily armored convoys. The insurgents have gone for easier targets, Iraqi army members, and mainly, innocent civilians. Sunnis fight Shiia, Shiia fight Sunnis, the Kurds just want out entirely, and everyone wants a piece of the non-uniformly distributed oil resources.
I think the military is really content to sit back and watch as Iraq destroys itself, while the US troops serve their purpose, guarding the valuable oil pipelines. For the people in charge, as long as the crude is flowing, the whole country might as well just drop dead. Also, the troops presence serves a second important function. By having a large troop presence in the center of the Middle East, the pentagon intends to keep Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and all the major powers in line. While our boys on the ground fight for their lives trying to help the Iraqi people, the people at the top are looking at grand strategic goals.
And that is why we went there in the first place. Not WMDs, not democracy, not anything else. Our troops are there to stabilize Iraq's oil flow, and to keep the whole region in line, stabilizing the larger oil supply. The Iraqi people are meaningless. Our troops will be behind high walls and thick armor, while the rest of the country degenerates into pure chaos.
Well, if he did create a hyperbolic chamber in his basement, I would find that more amazing then a mere fusion reactor. Maybe he's been watching too much DBZ??:
Assuming it actually works, which is a huge if, it would definately be worthwhile. Yes, it would be expensive, but even a day's warning would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Look at the indian ocean tsunami that took 250,000 lives or the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan that claimed 75,000 lives. In the case of an earthquake, you really don't need to evacuate everyone, just get everyone out of the collapsing buildings. Have people stand in open fields at the time of the earthquake. In the case of the tsunami, make sure people move to higher ground. I don't know who would pay for it, but you might get enough governments to chip in to get the $300 billion necessary. Assuming it's possible, of course, which I admit is highly unlikely.
Maybe, we can only hope. Altough, would you want an infinitely powerful processor? How long before it starts advancing itself, becomes sentient, and decides we're no longer necessary?:)
Again, that works if you already find yourself within the causality loop, but how do you actually CREATE the causality loop in the first place. Ultimately, this is a temporal paradox problem. Another example of a temporal paradox:
Say someone in the year 2050 reads Einstein's works, and somehow builds a time machine based on them. He then travels back in time to 1900, meets Einstein, and ends up inspiring him to create his works. Who came up with the original idea for relativity? It's a paradox. There are two usual ways to resolve this:
1. Something interferes/It alredy happened. Einstein was already met by the traveler in the past, and the traveler is just part of history. If the traveler attempts to do something that is completely against history, he will fail. Say he tries, for some reason, to kill Einstein. His gun will jam, Einstein will escape, or his machine will break. This is how it worked in HG Well's The Time Machine.
2. Altrernate timelines. This is how thins worked in Back to the Future. The traveler, while changing the past, will create an alternate timeline, an alternate reality/universe, and when he returns to the future, can find it radically different.
We don't know which of these would occur. You don't need to try and kill Einstein to test them though. If you had a device that could send messages through time, simple causality experiments could be conducted to determine how paradoxes are resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
They're also the world capital for gender reassignment surgery! In this light, Bangkok's name is quite ironic.
I think we may be going about this the wrong way. We're targeting things at the consumer or corporate board room level. Maybe we need to be looking more fundamental, at the investor level. What if we defined as a '100% American Corporation' as one with all employees located in the US and all the employees of any subsidiaries located in the US. If you employ a single person located o Then we go and say 'any investment made in a 100% American corporation will not have to pay taxes on dividends or capital gains taxes.' Investors are ultimately out to make a buck. If any purely-American company could be invested in tax free, that would be a huge incentive to keep jobs in the US.
Some guys in Japan made a piloted plane that flew on 160 AA batteries: http://www.primidi.com/2006/07/17.html#a1571
Still, I'm a little more impressed by what NASA pulled off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Prototype
I think certain batteries/fuel cells/electrical systems could be used. However, these would likely be extremely slow prop planes with limited capacity. The type of large-scale, cheap, and rapid air transport brought about in the 'jet' age would seem to be impossible.
What I've often wondered is if it's possible to modify a jet engine to directly burn hydrogen, producing thrust directly rather than through a fuel cell -> electric ->propeller based system. The energy obviously wouldn't be free; the hydrogen would have to be produced from nuclear, solar, or some other power source. It would be expensive, but it might still let us keep our planes in the air.
1. Most of these dying languages are spoken by small, indigenous ethnic groups.
2. Indigenous groups change their languages when it is necessary to participate in the trade and larger economies of outside groups.
3. Outside groups come into the isolated and remote territories of indigenous groups when the land the natives have has some monetary value to it, be it for farmland, or in this case, oil beneath it.
4. SUVs consume a lot of oil, driving up the price, and making profitable the exploitation of petroleum resources, no matter how distant the source might be.
Therefore, by driving an SUV, you're causing the world's indigenous languages to go extinct. I hope you're happy.
Better yet, if every case had to be brought to trial, it would force prosecutors and the law to focus on important cases.
I think it is reasonable that one of the factors contributing to the burgeoning prison population is the plea deal system. Currently, scores of people are convicted without the need for public input. Thus, out of sight, out of mind.
For example, consider the imprisoning of people for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Many people don't oppose laws that allow this because it does not affect them personally. Such things usually happen far outside the range of the average middle-class, middle-to-late-age white suburbanite, the same group of people that have the greatest influence on the law.
It's one thing to vote for a politician who promises to be tough on drugs; it's another thing entirely to sit on a jury box and condemn a man to jail for a petty offense.
This is how the system was supposed to work. People were supposed to be convicted by a jury of their peers. If the jury thought the case unjust, they either could use jury nullification or at least have an incentive to get the unjust laws repealed. With plea bargaining, the prosecutor will say, "You can get ten years for this offense, by pleading guilty you'll only get two." The defendant, knowing the chance of conviction is high, will take what he can get. The unjust law remains on the books, and injustice continues in relative obscurity.
I understand you're feelings. However, I'm not sure how donating to UCLA will make you feel better.
Unless you're a Bruins fan of course..
Whether they've realized it or not, Vudu has chosen the perfect name for their insidious little device. Let's compare the Vudu box with your average Voodoo witch doctor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie
1. A witch doctor surrounds himself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to raise the dead. The Vudu box surrounds itself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to do the technologically impossible.
2. A witch doctor puts his victim in a death-like-state using a variety of poisons and venoms, resulting in the victim being buried alive. The Vudu box nearly kills the user with its initial cost and then proceeds to isolate the user from rest of the internet and humanity, resulting in his peers considering him dead.
3. A witch doctor revives the victim into a state of perpetual slavery, forcing them to work in a trance-like state for the profit of the witch doctor. The Vudu box constricts the power of the user down to a minimal level, and forces the user to give his bandwidth and work for Vudu in an endless state of vendor-slavery.
/Also, the movie service will have lots of Night of the Living Dead Movies
//Brains, Brains, BRAAAIINNSS!
This device sounds like a win for the MPAA/movie industry and a big loss for the consumer. Lets see how this device functions:
1. You have to buy an expensive box. Most services like this offer the device cheap or free. Satellite boxes, cable boxes, TIVOs, all are or can be free with service plans.
2. Peer-to-peer transfers. Sure, they say they are doing this to offer instantaneous availability of content, but it is just an excuse to shift the bandwidth cost to the end user. And, it doesn't just work exactly like BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, you are only uploading while the transfer takes place. This box uses every box as a source, all the time. If your box has a copy of a movie on it, it will upload it whenever someone else needs it. It doesn't sound like this service should be any more expensive than any other. If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie.
3. End-to-end DRM, vendor lock-in. This is why they're so popular with the studios. While freeing people from the "tyranny" of the computer, they simultaneously give up their best chance at circumventing draconian controls.
4. No DVD burner of any kind. This is the Achilles heel. They offer the option to "rent" or "purchase" downloads. For the 'rent' option, the file obviously deletes itself after a fixed amount of time. What about the movies I purchase? If it were on a computer I could make a backup copy on another hard drive or a DVD. With this, that option does not exist. The device's hard drive, however large, has a finite capacity. Once that fills up, whoops, what are you supposed to do? I guess you have to delete one of the movies you "bought." If they address this at all, they might let you re-download movies you delete. Regardless, it is at their discretion.
5. Bandwidth. Very few people have Ethernet jacks next to their television. For many people, this will leave wireless as their only option. With wireless, I would be skeptical of its ability to cope with the massive upload/download requirements. Even if it can cope, the necessity to either lay Ethernet cables down or configure a wireless network is completely antithetical towards the plug-and-play, instant gratification consumer they're targeting. They're trying to package a computer in a format your Luddite grandmother won't recognize as a computer, while simultaneously requiring her to configure a wireless network.
In summary, to use this system, I have to buy an expensive box, I have to pay for all the bandwidth, and I have absolutely no control over the files I download. This device is about one thing, control. Control of content and control of consumers.
As much as I would like to see no DRM, I will admit that Apple figured out how to do DRM right with iTunes. The basic principle they applied was, "we will make the new format no more restrictive than the old format." Like CDs, FairPlay lets you burn as many CD copies as you want of files. It also lets you back up your files to multiple computers. Vudu's box ties all of my purchases to the lifetime of a single piece of hardware, offering no backup solutions, total DRM, and a system that's designed to screw over the consumer at every single turn.
I hope this is not the way that the industry is going. I don't think the Vudu box will be a great success. However, they may still find enough people who want something that "just works" to find a market. Regardless, it will fall upon the usual legion, the modern fighters for freedom, the hackers and crackers to break the chains of DRM and vendor-lock in. It may be easier to crack something when it's on the computer, but being a stand-alone box hasn't saved the XBox, Playstations, and innumerable other devices from being opened in the same way.
Ultimately, the studios know this. They simply want the circumvention to be so difficult that 95% of users will not attemp
Well, guess I should have Googled first.
- a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=1QI&q=synt hesizing+hydrocarbons+from+water+and+carbon+dioxid e&btnG=Search
c 0ccf0a0742b164c1.pdf
c les/olah/index.html
Google: "synthesizing hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox
Apparently they've been working on this technology for awhile. I think they were originally planning on using the exhaust gases from a coal plant or something as a source of raw carbon dioxide. But I don't see why you couldn't use this new technology!
http://www.inl.gov/videos/sc/syntrolysis.pdf
http://www.kpk.gov.pl/images/i7pr/bb295736b8d250f
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/arti
I think this could work. Imagine a facility centered around a nuclear reactor. It draws water from a lake/river, uses what energy is needed to power an array of these atmospheric C02 extractors, and combines them to produce usable fuel! This could change everything. At our current level of technology, we don't have a problem with clean energy. If we had the will power, we could turn off all the coal plants, build a bunch of reactors, and remove that component of global warming overnight (relatively speaking). However, we would still need a source of portable power. A facility like this would be an "instant oil field." Any nation on Earth can become its own Saudi Arabia.
I really hope this CO2 extraction technology proves viable, because if it is, we have on our hands nothing less than the solution to the entire global warming problem.
Read the article, it says that they want to sequester it. It's actually an ingeniously simple method to solve the carbon dioxide problem. If the technology proves viable, you just set up a bunch of these things next to an oil field. They pump the carbon dioxide down into the wells, forcing out more oil and trapping the carbon dioxide in the process.
Think about it, if the rocks beneath an oil field can stably hold volatile substances like natural gas in place for millions of years, there's no reason why the same rocks can't hold carbon dioxide. It's almost miraculously simple, stick the carbon dioxide right back in the ground it came from!
Although, I am skeptical of the total capacity of these oil fields, and they might be prone to leak.
What I've been wondering is if it's possible to reverse the reaction. Your basic combustion reaction goes like:
fuel(in carbon-hydrogen-oxygen compounds) +oxygen => C02 + H20.
Is it possible to reverse this, take the concentrated CO2, add a stream of water, and put it through a series of endothermic chemical reactions to produce a usable fuel, preferably gasoline.
Now I know this sounds like a glorified perpetual motion machine, so it would obviously require an external power source. You could use anything for this, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, whatever.
Does anyone know if this is feasible? Do we have the technology to reverse a combustion reaction? You would definitely need to add energy, the question is HOW MUCH energy?
If you could figure out how to do that, especially if tied to nuclear or a renewable electricity source, you can forget about hydrogen cars, battery cars, and all the rest. It would be a beautiful system if you could get it to work. No more drilling for oil, no more dependency on volatile countries, and a renewable source of portable power that can be used till the end of time. You take C02 out of the air, make fuel, burn it, and it goes right back into the air. The whole system's completely carbon neutral. Best of all, you don't need to replace a single car that's currently on the road. Run it from a reactor, and you can quit making poor people starve so we can make ethanol.
Sure, I would like to drive a hydrogen car, but the technology is years and years away. We need to solve this problem yesterday. Mass deployment of hydrogen or electric cars would involve hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure, as well as replacing every single car on the road. Hydrocarbons have many benefits as an energy delivery mechanism. They're stable, portable, and highly energy dense, all the while being extremely easy to extract energy from. The only problems are that they exist in limited quantities, are found primarily in regions with degenerate/hostile governments, and are now known to cause global warming. The only downside that would remain when going to a synthetic fuel would be the smog that engines cause, but I think that could remedied with better filtering technology. If hydrocarbons could be made into a renewable fuel source, there is no reason they could and should not be used indefinitely.
- It's regulation of tech.
- It's related to science.
- It's going to require major technological innovation.
- It's likely to drastically affect nerds' ability to use technology and/or energy.
Just for starters
That's an awfully broad expansion of the definition of "News for Nerds." It sounds like you could make just about anything count as "News for Nerds." Now where have I seen that kind of thing before...
Oh my God,
Souter, is that you?
It seems that this theory should be fairly testable. If the orbital theory is correct, only Earth should display climate cycles of similar periods. If it's caused by the sun, then the whole inner solar system would be affected. Granted, it would be nearly impossible to see such evidence on Mercury and Venus, but perhaps evidence of some form would be left on Mars. I'm not quite up to speed on my astrogeology, does anyone know if we have any kind of reliable record of the ancient Martian climate?
No, I don't have a problem with our boys on the ground. I have a problem with the administration. They sold us on the idea that Iraq would be a cakewalk. They completely glazed over the fundamental problem, namely, Iraq is too much of a basket case to be fixed short-term. Iraq's problems come from deep, fundamental cultural divisions. Sure at the beginning it was just the old Baathists and foreign fighters, but it quickly, inevitably, turned to the fundamental divisions. Iraq was a powderkeg. One Shiia idiot from Iran attacks a few Sunnis. The Sunnis retaliate not only against the foreigners, but against their Shiia neighbors. One Sunni jackass from Saudi Arabia wanders over the border and bombs a Shiia mosque. The Shiia retaliate not only against the foreigners, but against their Sunni neighbors.
The problem I have with the administration is that they sold us an impossible dream. You can't solve these problems with any military invasion. Our troops were sent in there, and they did what they were trained to do. We truely do have the best army in the world. They took out the supposedly-strong Iraqi army quickly, efficiently, and with incredible skill and cunning. That is what an army is supposed to do, fight wars. You can't just plop an army down in some random country and expect them to magically solve all the problems. That is what the administration tried to do. They knew it wasn't going to work, so they immeadiately set about constructing large, permanent, highly-defensible bases. They want to maintain a large, permanent troop presence in Iraq, while minimizing US military casualties. Armies are designed to fight enemies. They're not designed to prevent two enemies from fighting each other.
The troops are doing their damn best in an impossible situation. The problem is that the guys on the ground and the guys at the top have completely different goals. The guys on the ground are honestly trying to do the best they can to stabalize the situation, fight the insurgents, and rebuild the Iraq. The guys at the top are looking at it from a regional strategic perspective, trying to maintain a troop presence in the Middle East, as a threat against Iran, Syria, and anyone else. They intend to use the Iraq troops to prevent a 1970s-style oil embargo.
This has been the strategy all along. They knew a civil war was inevitable. They planned it so largely, it would be the Iraqi forces getting chewed up and the Iraqi civilians that pay the highest price. The administration cares little about the troops on the ground, desiring only to keep the total US troop casualties low enough to prevent serious war-weariness.
This has nothing to do with training the Iraqi army or anything else. Even if you get a powerful army in place, the conflict will merely shift to who has control of the central government. The Shiia will gain control of the Iraqi army, and use it to fight their war, and the Sunnis will resist. This whole thing is exploding, and we've gotten ourselves into a whole pile of shit. We just need to cut our losses, get the fuck out, and let these idiots tear each other to pieces. At least then we're not losing billions on a hopeless boondoggle.
We could have rebuilt our ENTIRE energy system. We have the technology RIGHT NOW to rid ourselves of the need for oil, it just costs a lot of money, the kind of money we've thrown into Iraq. We need oil for 3 things:
1. Electricity/Heating Oil
2. Vehicle fuel.
3. Petrochemicals
1. could have been taken care of with a few more nuclear power plants, retrofitting any buildings that need to convert to electric heat. We can use fission plants immeadiately, while investing heavily in fusion plant research for the long run.
2. Could have been replaced with electric vehicles. They have limited range, but if you build a large network of stations that swap out batteries, that's not a problem. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't build the battery stations without electric cars, you can't have electric cars without the battery stations. A coherent federal program would solve this. If the battery system isn't the best option, we could have had Manhattan Project-like development and deployment of hydrogen technology.
3. We can get these from biofuels. If there's not enough land available, build a reactor, desalinate some seawater, and irrigate some land. Problem solved.
The only oil products you now need are for things like jet liners (which can't easily be battery-powered) and remote outposts far from the electric grid. Our domestic oil capacity would be more than enough to cover this need.
There you have it. If we had spent the money wisely, not only would we not need to worry about Iraq, we wouldn't need to worry about any of the Middle East. We might even recoup the investment we made by licensing the technology developed to other nations. We would no longer be dependent upon any tin-pot Middle East dictatorship, or the whims of some wannabe-despot in Moscow. We could just turn our heads and let them fight their own stupid conflicts over who killed who 1200 years ago. AND, as a bonus, we've simultaneously removed the problem of global warming, AND eliminated a whole lot of air pollution, directly improving the health and lives of all of our citizens.
That, my friend, is what COULD have been done. Instead, that money is being blown through the deserts of Iraq, trying desperately to prevent a bunch of people from doing what they have been doing for generations, killing each other.
Possible, I need to catch up on my early Irish history, so I'll take your word for it. Ultimately, however, in terms of the clash between the two groups, its as much about perceptions as reality. If one group of the population views another as occupiers of what is rightfully their sovereign territory, it is very difficult to form a common social/cultural/political identitiy.
Three things. First, I bought into the whole WMD thing. For months prior, the Bush administration had been drumming up the threat, and the media gave them plenty of support. Secondly, Sadam did provide a little indirect support to terrorism. He did offer substantial cash gifts to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. It was inferred that if he was doing that publicly, he was probably working with Al Qaeda covertly. This later turned out not to be true. Sadam's support for terrorism was really little more than a PR move intended to give himself some support among some fundamentalist muslims who might otherwise oppose him.
Thirdly, and mainly, it was more of a gut-level, emotional thing than a logical thing. Sadam was obviously a total bastard, and the world would be better off with him at the end of a rope. However, there are a lot of people like that in the world. We can't go invading every one of them.
It was basically like this, "the guys a monster, he's supporting terrorists, and he's trying to get nukes, we have to act now before he gets them."
That worked out well....That's how the Bush administration sold the war, and I, like most of the US population, fell right for it. They completely glazed over the much more important social/ethnic/religious problems Iraq has, and how difficult any occupation would ultimately be. Also, 9/11 was always portrayed as "this generations Pearl Harbor." After all those lives lost, we got what felt like a small-scale invasion of Afghanistan. It just didn't "feel" like the kind of response the attack required. At that point, I could have probably been lead to support an invasion of just about anybody. Bush saw this feeling in the American populace, and used it to "finish what Daddy started."
Ultimately, I think we probably picked the wrong country. I don't know if an invasion of Iran would have gone any better, but at least we wouldn't have Ahmoud "the Holocaust never exhisted" Ahmadinejad on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb. Now I get the feeling that in a few years we'll find ourselves invading Iran, with our troops already spread thin in Iraq, right as I'm getting out of college and in prime draft age. WONDERFUL, JUST WONDERFUL....
/rant
When the British left, there was a unified Indian identity. Sure, there was still the Hindu/Muslim clash, but the country was divided into 3 nations, not 50. This is not some grand endorsement of colonialism, however. The main thing the British did was merely provide stability and modern communication and transport. The same thing could have been done if one of the earlier Indian states acquired foreign technology and conquered its neighbors.
The lesson of the British in India is that a national identity cannot be created artificially, it can only develop naturally. It took TWO CENTURIES for this to take effect. The British enforced peace, provided a common language (their own, conveniently for them), and built railroads. This allowed people to move about with much greater ease, blurring the divisions between regions and slowly, naturally forming a kind of national identity. Now India is still a very diverse country, and it was only thanks to its early leaders that it was able to hold itself together, but the early leaders of modern India built upon the previous national identity.
Yes, the British did create unity in India. However, it must be mentioned that they did so purely for their own benefit. They took control of the national economy, and turned what had once been a world-leading, self-sufficient country with a vast manufacturing capability, into a colonial economy focused on providing cheap raw materials for foreign export. It's certainly debatable whether India would have been better off with or without British interference.
The whole point is that you can create a national identity, but only by a very long-term occupation, brutally surpressing any resistance. It was worth it for the British because they harnessed the entire Indian economy for their benefit. We would not do that in modern times not only because it would be morally reprehensible, but because we would have the entirety of the Muslim world trying to bomb US soil, not just a few pissed-off radicals. (You think things are bad now, imagine if Bush announced tommorrow that all Iraqi oil revenues and tax revenues were being confiscated, that numerous home-grown industries would be prohibited, and that Iraqi citizens would be legally required to buy a whole host of manufactured goods exclusively from US companies.)
As far as Northern Ireland goes, that's a whole diffent ballgame. The nation of Ireland existed prior to foreign intervention. Also, in the minds of people like the IRA at least, the opposing group and the occupier were one and the same. In India, the British could at least present themselves more as neutral arbitors. In Northern Ireland, the resistors at least saw it as the British, working for the advancement of British citizens, living in North Ireland. It's hard to create a common identity with your neighbor if you view him as a foreign occupier.
Logically, if we were trying to do what's best for Iraq, we should divide the country, try to minimize the violence and arrange some sort of orderly migration process, wish them the best, and get the hell out as fast as we can.
However, I don't think our leaders want to do this. They want to maintain a large, active military presence in the region. They want to be able to massively bomb Tehran on a few hours notice. They want to go to all negotiations involving the Middle East while carrying the metaphorical giant club. Iraq is only one piece in a much larger puzzle. The neocons really didn't like the way Saddam acted in the 90s, firing at our planes while we patrolled the no-fly zone. They would ideally like to maintain this occupation indefinately, or until the oil runs out.
I supported the conflict initially, but have since come to realize how foolish this little adventure was. Ultimately, we were duped into believing we could do the impossible. The main problem is that Iraq is an artificial state, with little real unifying history, religion, or any common identity. It was created by the European powers at the end of World War I, following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. It was created arbitrarily, for the sole convenience of the Western powers, with complete disregard to ethnicity and religion. THAT's the problem with Iraq. This is a problem at the very root of society. You can't drop some troops in there, and expect a vibrant, healthy democracy to just magically spring out of the Euphrates.
I think occupations can create democracies, by holding a diverse group of people together long enough to develop a common identity. It was done by some European powers, take India for example. The problem is that this sort of colonialism takes a large-scale occupation, much larger than we have now, for a time span of MULTIPLE DECADES. This is economically, strategically, and politically impossible in the modern era.
In order to hold this unstable country together, you either have to be a brutal dictator like Sadam or act like the freaking Romans. I suspect if every time a US soldier was killed we rounded up and killed 500 random people, the resistance would end quite quickly. However, any nation created this way will only last as long as that threat of force is present.
Ultimately, I think the people in charge of this whole charade knew this was going to happen all along. In the minds of the neocons who started this whole thing, the people of Iraq are just one piece in a puzzle. You'll notice lately that US troop casualties have been falling while Iraqi casualties have been rising. This is because our troops have been retreating to fewer, larger bases, performing fewer daily patrols, and patrol in more heavily armored convoys. The insurgents have gone for easier targets, Iraqi army members, and mainly, innocent civilians. Sunnis fight Shiia, Shiia fight Sunnis, the Kurds just want out entirely, and everyone wants a piece of the non-uniformly distributed oil resources.
I think the military is really content to sit back and watch as Iraq destroys itself, while the US troops serve their purpose, guarding the valuable oil pipelines. For the people in charge, as long as the crude is flowing, the whole country might as well just drop dead. Also, the troops presence serves a second important function. By having a large troop presence in the center of the Middle East, the pentagon intends to keep Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and all the major powers in line. While our boys on the ground fight for their lives trying to help the Iraqi people, the people at the top are looking at grand strategic goals.
And that is why we went there in the first place. Not WMDs, not democracy, not anything else. Our troops are there to stabilize Iraq's oil flow, and to keep the whole region in line, stabilizing the larger oil supply. The Iraqi people are meaningless. Our troops will be behind high walls and thick armor, while the rest of the country degenerates into pure chaos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_Time_Chamb er/
I was thinking of using simple particle experiments, but that would work too....
Assuming it actually works, which is a huge if, it would definately be worthwhile. Yes, it would be expensive, but even a day's warning would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Look at the indian ocean tsunami that took 250,000 lives or the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan that claimed 75,000 lives. In the case of an earthquake, you really don't need to evacuate everyone, just get everyone out of the collapsing buildings. Have people stand in open fields at the time of the earthquake. In the case of the tsunami, make sure people move to higher ground. I don't know who would pay for it, but you might get enough governments to chip in to get the $300 billion necessary. Assuming it's possible, of course, which I admit is highly unlikely.
Maybe, we can only hope. Altough, would you want an infinitely powerful processor? How long before it starts advancing itself, becomes sentient, and decides we're no longer necessary? :)
Again, that works if you already find yourself within the causality loop, but how do you actually CREATE the causality loop in the first place. Ultimately, this is a temporal paradox problem. Another example of a temporal paradox: Say someone in the year 2050 reads Einstein's works, and somehow builds a time machine based on them. He then travels back in time to 1900, meets Einstein, and ends up inspiring him to create his works. Who came up with the original idea for relativity? It's a paradox. There are two usual ways to resolve this: 1. Something interferes/It alredy happened. Einstein was already met by the traveler in the past, and the traveler is just part of history. If the traveler attempts to do something that is completely against history, he will fail. Say he tries, for some reason, to kill Einstein. His gun will jam, Einstein will escape, or his machine will break. This is how it worked in HG Well's The Time Machine. 2. Altrernate timelines. This is how thins worked in Back to the Future. The traveler, while changing the past, will create an alternate timeline, an alternate reality/universe, and when he returns to the future, can find it radically different. We don't know which of these would occur. You don't need to try and kill Einstein to test them though. If you had a device that could send messages through time, simple causality experiments could be conducted to determine how paradoxes are resolved.