Why wouldn't it? It would be very profitable if it happened. Money is a great motivator. I defy you to explain to me why marketing and financial risk management folks would NOT do something that would save them money. The police thing wouldn't happen directly, because that would be too scary and obvious, but I bet they could get a warrant to gain access to the marketing guy's trackers.
Advertisers will care. Statistics is their lifeblood. Same goes with creditors--what do you think your credit score is based on if not a statistical analysis of your life? It doesn't matter how trivial seeming a statistic is--they're always looking for patterns. Like maybe you've worn the same pair of shoes for three years now (as confirmed by RFID readers), and that means you're more likely to be a credit risk because you're more likely to be down on your luck. Or maybe this fact is more statistically likely to mean that you're frugal and thus have a better handle with your money. They'll also know when it doesn't work, 'cuz I won't buy.
Oh Christ al-fucking-mighty. You know, I'm a highschool dropout and I still seem to have a better grasp of statistics than oh, say, 89% of the population.
THEY DON'T FUCKING CARE IF YOU BUY ANYTHING OR NOT. If they can determine that you're not likely to buy anything via statistics, then they won't waste as much money targeting you specifically (sending you junk mail, etc.) On the other hand, they'll still send you nigh-free advertisement (e.g. most forms of net advertisement) on the things you're more likely to at least consider buying. Even if you don't buy anything, someone else that share a similar profile will. It's a mistake to assume that targetted marketing it centered around the individual. It's not. It's centered around the bell curve, and if you're not in the center of the bell curve than they just don't care about you. (Except for nich markets, which are really just little miniature bell curves within the main bell curve.) You might think that this makes you immune to any potential evil side effects, but increased statistical knowledge could very well affect things like your credit rating and insurance rates.
Holy hell, man, if you could track how long people keep using the stuff they buy, what items are bought and used together, the kinds of places these items are generally taken, etc. you'd be a fucking billionare. The basics of developing and producing stuff and selling it for a profit have been fine-tuned to death over the past 100 years--the real money is in getting people to notice your product. What if you could determine that the average person buys a new pair of shoes every 9-13 months? Wouldn't it be a good idea if you could concentrate all your shoe-related junk mail on previous shoe buyers who're just now approaching that window? What if a certain brand of shoe was most commonly detected (via RFID) in certain types of clubs or restaurants--you don't think that it'd be worthwhile for the company to put up a poster or billboard in the area? You're just one cusotmer, fungible.
They don't care about "just one customer." Targeted advertising is a more refined way of ignoring the different, the non-conforming, and the extraordinary in favor of targeting the least common denominator.
Oh look, an Anonymous Coward who has absolutely no concept of statistics. Modded up to +3 too. Impressive and/or sad.
RFID on EVERYTHING means that anomalies like that become less and less significant. Cross-reference enough data and you can spot patterns without having the faintest idea why they're there. (There's actually a famous psychiatric test based on this principle, though the name escapes me. Basically, it's a bunch of crazyass questions designed to give the shrink a statistical probability that you're suffering from a mental disease. The individual answers themselves are irrelevant; only the statistical whole counts. Thus, the potential for an individual to purposefully alter his answers is in effect built into the final percentages--there's really no way to cheat.)
You've missed the point completely. How often do you send shoes to someone living 3,000 miles away? Do you think Nike or Reebok care about the handful of people who've done such a thing? Marketing people only care about the fat, juicy center of the bell curve. Yeah, there are also those niche markets at the edges, but the instant you change your focus to that niche, then it becomes the center of the bell curve.
On the whole this isn't all terribly evil so long as it's used for relatively non-obnoxious advertisements, but the potential for abuse by insurance agencies, banks, law enforcement, etc. is very, very high. If you're not in the statistical norm for the targeted advertisement, who cares? You ignore the ad. But if you're far out of the statistical norm for "law abiding citizen" and the local PD finds out, you can bet your ass you'll be hounded until the day you die (or move to a saner country.) It won't matter if you're an exception; it won't matter if there's only a 55% chance you're a criminal. They'll do it because it's efficient. It'll be like racial profiling except it will apply to every single minority conceivable, from Yanni fans to gays to diehard otakus to atheists. Your difficultly in the world will be inversely related to your conformity. Stray too far out of the norm and your insurance rates will skyrocket, you credit rating will plunge, and cops will look at you that much harder next time they've got an unsolved crime on their hands.
It's not bizzare; it's not even inherently evil. Living by statistics is just an efficient way of doing things. The problem is that greater efficiency is bought with something far more precious; individuality. For now, I can ignore the ads, but for heaven's sake let's not get complacent.
The point is that despite its insecurities, it's on the same level of security as the current system, only more convenient.
Same level of security? Ha.
1. Picking takes skill (I'm not saying it's super hard; I'm just saying you can't do it reliably without days or weeks of practice. At least, that's how long it took me, and I still can't do high or even medium security locks reliably.) There are a few easier ways of doing it (no, a magnet would not work against a pin tumbler, though there is a famous example of a 128-bit electronic key lock being defeated by a 39 euro magnet), but they all have limitations and they all require one invest a significant amount of time learning them. Once the tools are designed to defeat this lock, any halfwit can download them, buy a scanner off of eBay, and be "picking" these electronic locks in no time, with a minimum investment of skill (maybe 15 minutes to experiment with the thing, or a few hours to build a homemade yagi/parabolic antenna.)
2. This method of "picking" leaves behind no trace. This is very important, especially if your valuables are insured. If there is no trace of entry and you cannot otherwise prove theft, your insurance company may deny your claim. Nearly every other method of lockpicking will leave traces, including conventional picking, pick guns, bump keys (unless it is carefully designed and used with a soft touch... even then, microscopic analysis might reveal something), raking, scrubbing, will all leave telltale scratches and small bits of metal.
3. A thief can find vulnerable targets en mass. There are several expensive locks out nowadays that are trivially bypassed-- Mul-T-Locks, for instance, are very pick-resistant in most regards but it's now found that most of the time they can be easily bypassed in under 5 seconds with a well-made "bump key". However, an enterprising criminal does not necessarily know which houses have this type of lock. With the passive RFID lock, on the other hand, a criminal can find the locks by "door-driving" and following people home or by noting their license plates and getting a pal at the DMV to look them up for him (thus giving him addresses to match every key he scans.) If this lock gains popularity, he could theoretically scan dozens or hundreds of keys given a few days work. He knows where the locks that match these keys are, and he knows that this is an expensive lock, so the house likely has expensive goodies in it. Compare this to a thief who knows about the Mul-T-Lock vulnerability, knows how to make the bump key, yet has to resort going door to door in well to do neighborhoods, trying not to look suspicious, making progress at maybe 1/100 the rate of the criminal with the RFID scanner.
4. A thief can defeat a single target with ease. Let's say he has discovered that there are many valuables in this ONE PARTICULAR house or business. If the house has a quality pin tumbler on it (i.e. one that probably costs half what this electronic nightmare costs), he will have a very hard time getting in quietly, without damaging anything. A good pin tumbler with sidebars, security pins, trap pins, etc. will take a PROFESSIONAL LOCKSMITH at least 10 minutes to pick, possibly much longer. I'm not saying the thief couldn't figure out a quick and efficient way inside, but it would definitely take skill, time, and creativity (we're assuming throwing a brick through the window or drilling holes in the door is too risky for our clever thief. Perhaps the house is right next to a police station.) On the other hand, if the house has one of these handy-dandy RFID locks, it's a simple matter of hooking a parabolic or yagi antenna up to a scanner you bought off of eBay and aiming it at the doorknob. The next time anyone tries to open the door, their key will be brought into line of sight of your scanner (hidden somewhere across the street) and you will have their code.
In a nutshell, anyone who buys this thing is paying much MORE for much LESS securi
It appears that you are the one that needs to be straightened out. Interstellar travel is not shown because traveling outside the solar system would effectively cut off that ship from the rest of civilization for many, many years. In a relatively dense solar system, these kinds of delays are avoidable.
Firefly is actually one of the MOST realistic shows because it does not conviently introduce the extremely implausible/impossible concept of FLT travel without time dialation. Warp drive, hyperspace, worm holes and jump gates are fairly unscientific plot devices almost always used without considering the theoretical consequences (such as the fact that you CANNOT posses FLT travel without also possesing time travel. This is blatantly obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of Special and General Relativity. No, you can't get around this via wormholes or some such nonsense. If wormholes warp spacetime enough to allow you to effectly travel faster than light, then they also warp it enough to allow you to go back in time.)
The solution to your problem is rather straightforward: the original settlers of the solar system came here on interstellar ships. They either used some form of hibernation, lived their lives normally (with perhaps many generations living and dying on the spacecraft, if the distance was very great), or they traveled at high Relativistic speeds, completing the journey in mere hours/days/months (from THEIR point of view--in the rest of the universe, hundreds or thousands or millions of years might have passed.) The reason why you don't see any ships using this same interstellar tech is because it would mean cutting themselves off from the rest of civilization (and cutting themselves out of the main storyline in the process.)
Btw, there's nothing to indicate that the colony ships carried hundreds of millions of people. I don't believe that Joss has given any indication as to how much time has passed--for all we know, only a few hundred colonists made it to the new solar system.
Am I the only one that sees the horrible security risk here? Sure, this thing will stop your average thug, but against a technology-savvy criminal even a crappy 5 pin tumbler Kwikset would offer much more security.
According to Wikipedia, a passive RFID tag (since TFA refers to them as merely "chips", I'm going to assume that they are passive and thus unencrypted) can be read at a distance of up to 18 feet. This is presumably with conventional readers. Even this distance poses a significant threat (one could find marks by simply around in any crowd of people with a covert scanner), but I'm willing to bet that if you increased the power output of the reader by an order of magnitude and designed a parabolic or yagi antenna, you could effectively read a passive RFID tag from across the street. For a criminal interested in a specific house or business, this means that constructing a working key is as simple as aiming the antenna at the doorknob and waiting for someone else to use their key.
Christ, if you want an electronic lock just so you can impress your friends and be locked out whenever your battery dies, get a magstripe or barcode lock. At least those can't be read by a stranger from dozens of feet away. If you want real security, get a good pin tumbler with security pins and sidebars.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. RFID is bad enough, but unpowered ("passive") RFID tags are an obscenely bad idea. If it's a passive tag, then it cannot be encrypted. How long until crimminals develop a yagi antenna for "door-driving"? The typical range *without* a specialized antenna is over a dozen feet. At least with active RFID you still have the possiblity of *some* encryption, though size and power requirements will probably ensure that it is fairly weak. If you want an electronic door lock, use magstripes or even bar codes.
While I appreciate the attractiveness of simply waving one's keys and having the door unlock, a barcode or magstripe would be almost as easy and it would afford you much greater protection. Passive RFID can be read at a distance of 6-18 feet--more if a yagi or parabolic antenna is employed. Even the active RFID systems tend to have rather pathetic encryption. RFID for secure identification is just a bad idea, plain and simple. The only reason people are advocating it over other tried and true electronic technologies is because it's the latest buzzword.
The ideal method of identification will require something you have (card or fob), something you know (PIN or password), and something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan, photo ID.) For many purposes two of these may be sufficient, but a system that uses only one of these methods is by default insecure, and the least secure out of all of these is fingerprints.
Severed fingers should be the *least* of anyone's worries--rest assured, working artificial fingers *will* be developed. Even better, the fingerprints could undoubtably be found at the very same location that they are used. Crooks can simply use the self-checkout lane and sprinkle corn starch everywhere. And God help us if they start using these as the only means of ID at ATMs--the equivalent of your PIN AND your account number will be printed right on the "Ok" button!
If they don't combine this with a PIN, I predict this system to fail and fail spectacularly.
You can make a fake finger with gelatin. They're not THAT hard to make and once you have the technique figured out, lifting the fingerprint is trivial. Doorknobs alone are virtually guaranteed to give you your target's prints.
No. It's the actual, real speed of light which is being increased in the exacts same way that time dilates and space contracts.
Um, no. This is blatantly false. In fact, this is exactly the OPPOSITE of what Special Relativity predicts. Have you even read about how Einstein's Special Relativity came about? It was formulated as an explanation for strange results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, IN WHICH THEY PROVED THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT REMAINS CONSTANT NO MATTER WHAT YOUR FRAME OF REFERENCE. Gravity does not alter it. Speed does not alter it. Einstein predicted that time and space would bend specifically to accommodate c's unchanging value.
Certain theoretical models might predict that in the past c held a different value, but this has no bearing on FLT travel and no one that I know of has predicted that it is possible to alter c for a single frame of reference, because the entire POINT of c is that it's the same in all frames of reference.
You are also wrong about light traveling slower through different mediums. This is merely light's APPARENT SPEED--the true speed of a single photon (c) does not change (except in certain cosmological histories.) For example, a black hole does NOT slow down light, it merely redshifts it out of existence. This I have read in numerous sources, and a quick wiki backs me up:
Note that the speed of light referred to is the observed or measured speed in some medium and not the true speed of light (as observed in vacuum). On the microscopic scale, considering electromagnetic radiation to be like a particle, refraction is caused by continual absorption and re-emission of the photons that compose the light by the atoms or molecules through which it is passing. In some sense, the light itself travels only through the vacuum existing between these atoms, and is impeded by the atoms. The process of absorption and re-emission itself takes time thereby creating the impression that the light itself has undergone delay (i.e. loss of speed) between entry and exit from the medium in question. It may be noted, that once the light has emerged from the medium it changes back to its original speed and this is without gaining any energy. This can mean only one thing - that the light's speed itself was never altered in the first place.
c is a constant.
Btw, I don't have awe of Hawking. I do agree that he is somewhat overrated as a physicist because of his disability and the books he has written--he certainly doesn't deserve to be compared to Einstein, for example. However, he's won four major physics/astronomical awards, is the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and has done some groundbreaking work on black holes (Hawking radiation anyone?) and other singuarlities (Big Bang/Big Crunch.) I drop his name because people have heard of him, and because he's the one author I know by name that has addressed this very issue of FLT travel and time travel. Feel free to bash his unprovable speculations (e.g. "Baby Universes") all you want, but if you want to disagree with one of his *mathematic* proofs, you'll have to do a lot better than saying you've taken a year of applied physics and you think Hawking's math is wrong because he's not on other physicists' top ten lists.
I never said that those three techs violated the laws of physics. I said that claiming they allowed FTL travel without time dilation (which, at FLT speeds OR THE EQUIVENCE OF FLT SPEED reached via warping space or traveling through a wormhole, is the same as time travel) DOES violate the laws of physics. Time dialation is an integral part of gravity/spacial distortion/wormholes just as much as it's an integral part of high speeds. I'm not sure if we're in disagreement on this point or not, because I thought you were the poster who gave the "warp drive" wikipedia link... however, you've got some extremely dodgy ideas about Relativity and the speed of light locked up in that head of yours, and if you still don't believe me I suggest y
Go out and pick up A Brief History of Time. Hawking says that he has mathematically proved that if a wormhole allows one to go faster than light (I don't mean literally; I mean able to traverse a length of space faster than light) then it can also transport one back in time. If you disagree, then I suggest you take it up with him. Me, I tend to believe him over Wikipedia.
You don't seem to understand that compressing space DOES NOT FREE YOU FROM TIME DILATION. Time in a gravity well slows down just like time on a fast-moving vessel. Thus, it does not matter if you try to get around the lightspeed barrier via "compressing spacetime"--note the TIME part of "spacetime." You CANNOT mess with one without messing with the other. If you manage to warp SPACE enough to traverse a given distance faster than light could, then you have also warped TIME enough to allow time travel.
scientists speed up/slow down light
C is a constant, an absolute. The actual perceived speed of light can be changed but from what I've seen, it amounts to quantum trickery. No one has truly been able to make anything travel faster than C (e.g. the "leading edge" of the faster-than-light light still travels at C. Thus, you CANNOT use it to send a signal at speeds greater than C.) That wikipedia article you sent me is indeed interesting, but since it goes against everything I've read (including Hawking's proof), I'm inclined to believe that it is incorrect.
You use the word "conspire" as if the universe has an active role in thwarting your action. What actually is being described is the timeline already took into account your actions, you're just playing out your role. You can't change the past because you were part of the past.
Your nature to try and change the universe is based on the electro-chemical reactions in your brain. Unless there is some "free will" that is outside of the governing of the universe, your actions would be fixed. For a given set of stimulus you would have a set of reactions that would be predictable. You couldn't change the future or the past, all you can do is play your part.
I understand the mechanics of what you're saying--Kurt Vonnegut used to say the same thing, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it does back in the 60's. Electro-chemical reactions still have desires, patterns that they attempt to impose on the rest of the universe. And we are in fact able to impose those patterns on the universe at will. Being conscious means that you can analyze and adapt to the universe around you. Curiosity is part of this adaptation. Thus, it does not make sense to say that a time traveler would only "play his part" if the traveler KNOWS he's in the past and WANTS to change something. When presented with time travel, MOST of those patterns would involve changing the past and violating causality. Most people would attempt to do something that would result in a temporal paradox. You are saying that they cannot--that what's happened has already happened and there is no changing it. WELL... if there is no changing it, then why not say that we simply can't go back in the past at all? It doesn't make sense to say that we can go back into the past and move around freely, yet we are somehow prevented from violating causality.
Ok, example: we build a time machine, and send 100,000 soldiers armed with RPGs back into the past, one at a time, 5 seconds apart, with orders to destroy the time machine. It doesn't matter how much you believe that causality must be preserved. Put away the rhetoric and do a very simple thought experiment. Assume that:
1.The time machine works. The soldiers are transported into the past physically and mentally unharmed.
2. The soldiers are very well disciplined and skilled. A few may fail due to unlucky accidents, a few may have second thoughts and run off to bet on the horse races instead, but the majority carry out their mission. The chances that all will fail are so low as to be absurd.
3. There is no significant resistence by human means. Ok, perhaps there is a protestor or two, but everyone (scientists included) has agreed to this experiment in causality.
So, since you've stated that the past (and indeed, the future and present) is static and deterministic, SOMETHING must prevent all 100,000 soldiers from completing their task. I submit to you that the simplest explaination for this is that assumption #1 is incorrect, and the time machine does not work (or at least does not work in a predictable or useful fashion.) As per Occam's Razor, I think that this explaination must be correct because all other explanations are hopelessly complicated and improbable.
I used the word "conspire" for anthromophic purposes, because to any time traveler it must appear as though the universe is actively hindering his efforts to change the past. Our soldiers must be prevented from carrying out their task, even though it is hopelessly improbable that all 100,000 would fail. A Jurrasic tourist must be prevented from dropping his bottle of beer into the tar pit. How the hell does that happen? Does a pterodactyl swoop down and snatch it up before it hits the tar? What if he brings a whole case of beer and chucks bottle after bottle into a tar pit that has been examined in present time and shows no traces of beer bottles? What if you remove the beer bottles from the equasion, and the geologists find his footprints long before the time ma
Interesting. I did not realize that a region of space can "move" in this fashion. If the ship was in the distortion itself then it would undoubtably experience dialation, but if space itself can move... I don't know, I don't quite understand how this can be allowed yet FTL wormholes be forbidden.
Wormholes are just gravitational phenomina (remember that gravity is just bent space, and a wormhole is essentially just extremely bent space), and thus they are subject to the same rule I've outlined. If a given wormhole offers the ability to travel faster than light, then the gravitational distortion is also strong enough to send you back in time. Stephen Hawking said this specifically about wormholes. Whether or not Relativity predicts wormholes has little bearing on whether or not wormholes that offer practical FTL travel break Relativity, but Relativity would likely be unable to explain or predict what happened next. Maybe I should have phrased it "breakdown of Relativity." Another very similar example is that Relativity is unable to explain what happens in a singularity even though Relativity predicted the existence of singularities.
One is that time travel into the past isn't possible beyond the point at which you build the time travel device
I've heard that as an explanation for why we haven't seen any time travelers yet, but it doesn't address the underlying problem--the breakdown of causality. So I go through the time machine and destroy it right after it is activated, before anyone has a chance to go through it. How can the universe permit that?
Or from another perspective, there is only one timeline, the idea that we can change it (free-will) is an illusion caused by not knowing the future. If you knew the future, then it would be unchangable. The old prophet paradox.
To me, this is the same as saying that time travel isn't possible. My reasoning is as follows: There are many many many people, myself included, that would try to alter the past simply to see if it could be done. This doesn't have to be nearly as dramatic as breaking the time machine or killing your grandfather--there are so many incredibly minor (yet detectable) ways in which one could alter the past. If this theory is to be believed, than ANY attempt to make even the SLIGHTEST change (like, say, dropping a candybar wrapper in the Jurassic period) must be prevented. You can come up with all kinds of wild scenarios where time travelers are prevented from exercising their free will (or their will, free or not) by "fate", but a much simpler and plausible explanation is to simply forbid backwards time travel at all (at least on the macroscopic scale, or even on the deterministic microscopic scale, which could be used to send messages into the past.) Which is more likely--that the universe conspires through strange twists of fate to thwart every attempt to change the past, no matter how minor, or the universe simply does not permit (practical) time travel?
If I knew the future, I would try to change it. There is no future you could show me that would not make me want to try to change it (at least in some small way), simply to see if it could be done. Free will or not, this is my nature. I think it's just easier to say that one cannot know the future, nor can one change the past... unless there is a possibility of alternate timelines/alternate universes.
Everything you say is more or less true in theory, but the thing most people fail to grasp is that faster than light travel is actually time travel. Lightspeed is actually *instantaneous*... from the photon's point of view. If you could accelerate to just under lightspeed you could go anywhere in the universe almost instantly from YOUR point of view, though most of the universe around you would "disagree" and to them it would seem as though many, many years (or centuries or millenia) had passed. These are all very basic concepts in relativity that Einstein proved 100 years ago... it's a crying shame that most highschool science classes don't explain it better (if they even mention it at all.)
The "faster than light" travel you see in Sci-Fi is not really an attempt to get around the speed barrier, because lightspeed travel is already fast enough for the traveler (instantaneous.) It is an attempt to get around the TIME barrier--that which is imposed by Special Relativity. Writing a story where everyone in your universe experiences the flow of time at different rates is challenging to say the least (though many have tried, some quite successfully), so most "soft" Sci-Fi authors simply do away with the problem with those things you mentioned--wormholes, warp drive, hyperspace, etc. Unfortunately, these devices things actually create more problems than they solve.
You can't get around time dialation. It's built into both Special Relativity and General Relativity, and there's no tricking or cheating way around it. If you travel faster than light, whether through speed or through gravitational distortion or a combination of the two, THEN YOU ARE TRAVELING FASTER THAN INSTANTANEOUS TRAVEL. What's faster than instantaneous travel, you say? Well... time travel. If you somehow beat the lightspeed barrier, then you've just managed to travel back in time. If you don't believe me, I suggest you read Stephen Hawking's The History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. Also, a good book that concentrates on explaining Relativity probably wouldn't hurt.
The only exception I can possibly see to this MIGHT be hyperspace. If one can make use of another spacial dimension, then one might be able to appear to be moving faster than the speed of light even though one really isn't. To any observer capable of seeing all the dimensions of the universe, you would still appear to be moving slower than light.
But I'm not sure if that's even possible. The explanations I've seen describe the other (4-11+) spacial dimensions as being "curled up", i.e. there's not nearly as much wiggle room in them as there is in the first 3 spacial dimensions, so I kinda doubt that they're big enough to have any practical benefit.
But FLT warp drive and wormholes definitely definitely DEFINITELY break Relativity by involving time travel. This might be physically possible, but it goes beyond the confines of Relativity and we don't really understand how it works. Seriously, what happens when some contrary/curious bastard goes back in time and kills his grandfather? Or better yet, goes back in time and destroys the time machine before anyone can use it? Either the time traveler must enter a parallel universe, or he must be prevented (at the most basic quantum physical level) from altering the past in any way, shape, or form.
In conclusion, hyperspace may or may not be OK, but for someone who takes science and reality seriously, wormholes and warp drive are either outright impossible or more trouble than they're worth.
That kind of thing is common to most distros. The way hardware support currently is in the Linux world, it's unavoidable. My point was, I believe that more people to able to have Ubuntu "just work" than SuSe (or $distro.) There will always be ancedotal evidence to the contrary, but I think that the popularity of Ubuntu says otherwise.
Eh, not really. I can spend a hundred hours just trying to figure out the quirks that ONE piece of hardware has with the Linux kernel, like certain features on WiFi cards not working 100% (making me to run around scratching my head, thinking I have the wrong driver or am not configuring it correctly, when really there is no solution) or incorrect drivers working for some features but not others (making me to think I'm not configuring it correctly, when in reality the solution is to change drivers entirely.) I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, but trying to troubleshoot hardware problems while simultaneously trying to learn the Linux way of doing things (I haven't used a CLI in a decade, I didn't know how NDISwrapper worked, I didn't know what config files to edit, I didn't understand how to do a kernel patch, etc.) is not easy at all. Remember, before Linux I had ZERO *nix experience.
For many people (though not all), Ubuntu *just works* out of the box. That's something else that few distros can claim. Before Ubuntu, I never gave Linux a chance because I wasn't willing to spend hundreds of hours just to get it to the same state of usability that XP gave me right out of the box. It's tough being only semi-geeky. I'm pretty proficient with computers when it comes to day to day tasks (I include "reinstalling Windows" under that heading), but troubleshooting a Linux box takes a much higher level of expertise, and to be honest I just didn't want to fuck with it. I loved everything that Linux stood for, but I just couldn't stand trying in vain for hours to make it work properly.
Then Ubuntu comes along and everything just magically works with the default install. Well ok, I still had a few things that didn't work 100% right, but I didn't mind tweaking with those on my own time. Every other distro I've tried--including SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and Knoppix--were somehow broken out of the box (usually, a key piece of hardware wasn't recognized), and I could never find an easy solution. I'm sure there were solutions out there, but I wasn't patient enough to find them--I wasn't satisfied leaving my computer in a halfway-usable state until I managed to find them.
I've often heard the "hood welded shut" analogy when comparing open source to closed source software. It's a good analogy, but I guess my problem was I didn't want to be FORCED to go underneath the hood because my car only turns left and I can't go over 40 MPH without first turning on the windshield wipers. Being able to tweak is wonderful; it's only been a few months now and I'm already doing a lot that I couldn't do on my Windows box. But being forced to basically finish building the car yourself is a royal pain in the ass, at least for those of us that aren't quite ubergeeks. Ubuntu still has a ways to go (e.g. the latest update has actually broken Firefox for many people, including me), but as long as it stays true to its motto, I have confidence that it will continue to remain at #1.
Assuming you're applying the similar criteria to moons (round and orbits a planet), that would rule out Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos. Just thought I'd point that out.
A lot of the "new" definitions one sees seem hellbent on maintaining the status quo; giving us the same 9 planets we've always had. Is that really important? So the schoolkids will have to learn a few new names; big deal. Maybe we can finally drill it into peoples' heads that science is a process and not a destination.
If there isn't a terribly scientific need to classify celestial objects based on roundness, then don't.
I hate to nitpick, because I totally agree with the gist of what you're saying, but the GPL is only possible BECAUSE of copyright law. Copyright law is the only thing compelling companies to release the source code for their improvements. Now the BSD license on the other hand...
The Middle East is probably the only source for terrorists willing to fly a plane into a building just to make a point. Many asian countries may try to oppose us in various ways. but on the whole East Asian religions are not nearly powerful enough to inspire such actions. Guerilla fighting yes, kamikaze attacks on our miltary yes, but generally speaking conservative/fundementalist religion is the only thing powerful enough to drive large groups of people to take such actions (there are always cults, to be sure, but there aren't enough of them to pose a significant threat.)
Cost/Benefit is better expressed as benefit/cost. I maintain that the benefit is 0 or very close to 0, so I really don't care how cheap it is. People might forget a lot about 9-11, but they're not going to forget the "crazy arab-looking guys flew planes into our skyscrapers" bit. I've met a lot of people who were born after the WWII generation who STILL don't trust the Japanese (ridiculous as that may be) because of Pearl Harbor. For better or worse, the cultural memory is there and it will be there for a while longer. 9-11 will ALWAYS overshadow Pearl Harbor because it was such a ghetto technique, it was used against civillian targets, it was carried out in the name of God and aimed (at least partially) towards the religion they have declared war on. Plus, the 9-11 footage is a hell of a lot more extensive and in your face than the Pearl Harbor footage.
My point is if my dad can still harbor an irrational dislike of the Japanese because of some grainy shots of an attack that was carried out 60+ years ago against a purely military target, then I'm pretty sure my kids and my kid's kids will be able to hold onto the "crazy arabs trying to take over the plane=bad" meme.
Make the cockpit door sturdy and stick a good lock on it. Everything else is pointless fluff. I don't care if the entire system would only cost them $5000--that's $5000 that could be used to buy a traffic light for the crazy dangerous intersection near my house, and I'll guarantee that would save more lives than some stupid panic button.
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Science just isn't definite these days, is it?
It never was, you fuckwit. The people who claim to have truly definitive explanations are called "priests" or, more commonly, "televangelists."
Why wouldn't it? It would be very profitable if it happened. Money is a great motivator. I defy you to explain to me why marketing and financial risk management folks would NOT do something that would save them money. The police thing wouldn't happen directly, because that would be too scary and obvious, but I bet they could get a warrant to gain access to the marketing guy's trackers.
Advertisers will care. Statistics is their lifeblood. Same goes with creditors--what do you think your credit score is based on if not a statistical analysis of your life? It doesn't matter how trivial seeming a statistic is--they're always looking for patterns. Like maybe you've worn the same pair of shoes for three years now (as confirmed by RFID readers), and that means you're more likely to be a credit risk because you're more likely to be down on your luck. Or maybe this fact is more statistically likely to mean that you're frugal and thus have a better handle with your money.
They'll also know when it doesn't work, 'cuz I won't buy.
Oh Christ al-fucking-mighty. You know, I'm a highschool dropout and I still seem to have a better grasp of statistics than oh, say, 89% of the population.
THEY DON'T FUCKING CARE IF YOU BUY ANYTHING OR NOT. If they can determine that you're not likely to buy anything via statistics, then they won't waste as much money targeting you specifically (sending you junk mail, etc.) On the other hand, they'll still send you nigh-free advertisement (e.g. most forms of net advertisement) on the things you're more likely to at least consider buying. Even if you don't buy anything, someone else that share a similar profile will. It's a mistake to assume that targetted marketing it centered around the individual. It's not. It's centered around the bell curve, and if you're not in the center of the bell curve than they just don't care about you. (Except for nich markets, which are really just little miniature bell curves within the main bell curve.) You might think that this makes you immune to any potential evil side effects, but increased statistical knowledge could very well affect things like your credit rating and insurance rates.
Holy hell, man, if you could track how long people keep using the stuff they buy, what items are bought and used together, the kinds of places these items are generally taken, etc. you'd be a fucking billionare. The basics of developing and producing stuff and selling it for a profit have been fine-tuned to death over the past 100 years--the real money is in getting people to notice your product. What if you could determine that the average person buys a new pair of shoes every 9-13 months? Wouldn't it be a good idea if you could concentrate all your shoe-related junk mail on previous shoe buyers who're just now approaching that window? What if a certain brand of shoe was most commonly detected (via RFID) in certain types of clubs or restaurants--you don't think that it'd be worthwhile for the company to put up a poster or billboard in the area?
You're just one cusotmer, fungible.
They don't care about "just one customer." Targeted advertising is a more refined way of ignoring the different, the non-conforming, and the extraordinary in favor of targeting the least common denominator.
Oh look, an Anonymous Coward who has absolutely no concept of statistics. Modded up to +3 too. Impressive and/or sad.
RFID on EVERYTHING means that anomalies like that become less and less significant. Cross-reference enough data and you can spot patterns without having the faintest idea why they're there. (There's actually a famous psychiatric test based on this principle, though the name escapes me. Basically, it's a bunch of crazyass questions designed to give the shrink a statistical probability that you're suffering from a mental disease. The individual answers themselves are irrelevant; only the statistical whole counts. Thus, the potential for an individual to purposefully alter his answers is in effect built into the final percentages--there's really no way to cheat.)
You've missed the point completely. How often do you send shoes to someone living 3,000 miles away? Do you think Nike or Reebok care about the handful of people who've done such a thing? Marketing people only care about the fat, juicy center of the bell curve. Yeah, there are also those niche markets at the edges, but the instant you change your focus to that niche, then it becomes the center of the bell curve.
On the whole this isn't all terribly evil so long as it's used for relatively non-obnoxious advertisements, but the potential for abuse by insurance agencies, banks, law enforcement, etc. is very, very high. If you're not in the statistical norm for the targeted advertisement, who cares? You ignore the ad. But if you're far out of the statistical norm for "law abiding citizen" and the local PD finds out, you can bet your ass you'll be hounded until the day you die (or move to a saner country.) It won't matter if you're an exception; it won't matter if there's only a 55% chance you're a criminal. They'll do it because it's efficient. It'll be like racial profiling except it will apply to every single minority conceivable, from Yanni fans to gays to diehard otakus to atheists. Your difficultly in the world will be inversely related to your conformity. Stray too far out of the norm and your insurance rates will skyrocket, you credit rating will plunge, and cops will look at you that much harder next time they've got an unsolved crime on their hands.
It's not bizzare; it's not even inherently evil. Living by statistics is just an efficient way of doing things. The problem is that greater efficiency is bought with something far more precious; individuality. For now, I can ignore the ads, but for heaven's sake let's not get complacent.
The point is that despite its insecurities, it's on the same level of security as the current system, only more convenient.
Same level of security? Ha.
1. Picking takes skill (I'm not saying it's super hard; I'm just saying you can't do it reliably without days or weeks of practice. At least, that's how long it took me, and I still can't do high or even medium security locks reliably.) There are a few easier ways of doing it (no, a magnet would not work against a pin tumbler, though there is a famous example of a 128-bit electronic key lock being defeated by a 39 euro magnet), but they all have limitations and they all require one invest a significant amount of time learning them. Once the tools are designed to defeat this lock, any halfwit can download them, buy a scanner off of eBay, and be "picking" these electronic locks in no time, with a minimum investment of skill (maybe 15 minutes to experiment with the thing, or a few hours to build a homemade yagi/parabolic antenna.)
2. This method of "picking" leaves behind no trace. This is very important, especially if your valuables are insured. If there is no trace of entry and you cannot otherwise prove theft, your insurance company may deny your claim. Nearly every other method of lockpicking will leave traces, including conventional picking, pick guns, bump keys (unless it is carefully designed and used with a soft touch... even then, microscopic analysis might reveal something), raking, scrubbing, will all leave telltale scratches and small bits of metal.
3. A thief can find vulnerable targets en mass. There are several expensive locks out nowadays that are trivially bypassed-- Mul-T-Locks, for instance, are very pick-resistant in most regards but it's now found that most of the time they can be easily bypassed in under 5 seconds with a well-made "bump key". However, an enterprising criminal does not necessarily know which houses have this type of lock. With the passive RFID lock, on the other hand, a criminal can find the locks by "door-driving" and following people home or by noting their license plates and getting a pal at the DMV to look them up for him (thus giving him addresses to match every key he scans.) If this lock gains popularity, he could theoretically scan dozens or hundreds of keys given a few days work. He knows where the locks that match these keys are, and he knows that this is an expensive lock, so the house likely has expensive goodies in it. Compare this to a thief who knows about the Mul-T-Lock vulnerability, knows how to make the bump key, yet has to resort going door to door in well to do neighborhoods, trying not to look suspicious, making progress at maybe 1/100 the rate of the criminal with the RFID scanner.
4. A thief can defeat a single target with ease. Let's say he has discovered that there are many valuables in this ONE PARTICULAR house or business. If the house has a quality pin tumbler on it (i.e. one that probably costs half what this electronic nightmare costs), he will have a very hard time getting in quietly, without damaging anything. A good pin tumbler with sidebars, security pins, trap pins, etc. will take a PROFESSIONAL LOCKSMITH at least 10 minutes to pick, possibly much longer. I'm not saying the thief couldn't figure out a quick and efficient way inside, but it would definitely take skill, time, and creativity (we're assuming throwing a brick through the window or drilling holes in the door is too risky for our clever thief. Perhaps the house is right next to a police station.) On the other hand, if the house has one of these handy-dandy RFID locks, it's a simple matter of hooking a parabolic or yagi antenna up to a scanner you bought off of eBay and aiming it at the doorknob. The next time anyone tries to open the door, their key will be brought into line of sight of your scanner (hidden somewhere across the street) and you will have their code.
In a nutshell, anyone who buys this thing is paying much MORE for much LESS securi
It appears that you are the one that needs to be straightened out. Interstellar travel is not shown because traveling outside the solar system would effectively cut off that ship from the rest of civilization for many, many years. In a relatively dense solar system, these kinds of delays are avoidable.
Firefly is actually one of the MOST realistic shows because it does not conviently introduce the extremely implausible/impossible concept of FLT travel without time dialation. Warp drive, hyperspace, worm holes and jump gates are fairly unscientific plot devices almost always used without considering the theoretical consequences (such as the fact that you CANNOT posses FLT travel without also possesing time travel. This is blatantly obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of Special and General Relativity. No, you can't get around this via wormholes or some such nonsense. If wormholes warp spacetime enough to allow you to effectly travel faster than light, then they also warp it enough to allow you to go back in time.)
The solution to your problem is rather straightforward: the original settlers of the solar system came here on interstellar ships. They either used some form of hibernation, lived their lives normally (with perhaps many generations living and dying on the spacecraft, if the distance was very great), or they traveled at high Relativistic speeds, completing the journey in mere hours/days/months (from THEIR point of view--in the rest of the universe, hundreds or thousands or millions of years might have passed.) The reason why you don't see any ships using this same interstellar tech is because it would mean cutting themselves off from the rest of civilization (and cutting themselves out of the main storyline in the process.)
Btw, there's nothing to indicate that the colony ships carried hundreds of millions of people. I don't believe that Joss has given any indication as to how much time has passed--for all we know, only a few hundred colonists made it to the new solar system.
Am I the only one that sees the horrible security risk here? Sure, this thing will stop your average thug, but against a technology-savvy criminal even a crappy 5 pin tumbler Kwikset would offer much more security.
According to Wikipedia, a passive RFID tag (since TFA refers to them as merely "chips", I'm going to assume that they are passive and thus unencrypted) can be read at a distance of up to 18 feet. This is presumably with conventional readers. Even this distance poses a significant threat (one could find marks by simply around in any crowd of people with a covert scanner), but I'm willing to bet that if you increased the power output of the reader by an order of magnitude and designed a parabolic or yagi antenna, you could effectively read a passive RFID tag from across the street. For a criminal interested in a specific house or business, this means that constructing a working key is as simple as aiming the antenna at the doorknob and waiting for someone else to use their key.
Christ, if you want an electronic lock just so you can impress your friends and be locked out whenever your battery dies, get a magstripe or barcode lock. At least those can't be read by a stranger from dozens of feet away. If you want real security, get a good pin tumbler with security pins and sidebars.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. RFID is bad enough, but unpowered ("passive") RFID tags are an obscenely bad idea. If it's a passive tag, then it cannot be encrypted. How long until crimminals develop a yagi antenna for "door-driving"? The typical range *without* a specialized antenna is over a dozen feet. At least with active RFID you still have the possiblity of *some* encryption, though size and power requirements will probably ensure that it is fairly weak. If you want an electronic door lock, use magstripes or even bar codes.
While I appreciate the attractiveness of simply waving one's keys and having the door unlock, a barcode or magstripe would be almost as easy and it would afford you much greater protection. Passive RFID can be read at a distance of 6-18 feet--more if a yagi or parabolic antenna is employed. Even the active RFID systems tend to have rather pathetic encryption. RFID for secure identification is just a bad idea, plain and simple. The only reason people are advocating it over other tried and true electronic technologies is because it's the latest buzzword.
The ideal method of identification will require something you have (card or fob), something you know (PIN or password), and something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan, photo ID.) For many purposes two of these may be sufficient, but a system that uses only one of these methods is by default insecure, and the least secure out of all of these is fingerprints.
Severed fingers should be the *least* of anyone's worries--rest assured, working artificial fingers *will* be developed. Even better, the fingerprints could undoubtably be found at the very same location that they are used. Crooks can simply use the self-checkout lane and sprinkle corn starch everywhere. And God help us if they start using these as the only means of ID at ATMs--the equivalent of your PIN AND your account number will be printed right on the "Ok" button!
If they don't combine this with a PIN, I predict this system to fail and fail spectacularly.
You can make a fake finger with gelatin. They're not THAT hard to make and once you have the technique figured out, lifting the fingerprint is trivial. Doorknobs alone are virtually guaranteed to give you your target's prints.
No. It's the actual, real speed of light which is being increased in the exacts same way that time dilates and space contracts.
Um, no. This is blatantly false. In fact, this is exactly the OPPOSITE of what Special Relativity predicts. Have you even read about how Einstein's Special Relativity came about? It was formulated as an explanation for strange results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, IN WHICH THEY PROVED THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT REMAINS CONSTANT NO MATTER WHAT YOUR FRAME OF REFERENCE. Gravity does not alter it. Speed does not alter it. Einstein predicted that time and space would bend specifically to accommodate c's unchanging value.
Certain theoretical models might predict that in the past c held a different value, but this has no bearing on FLT travel and no one that I know of has predicted that it is possible to alter c for a single frame of reference, because the entire POINT of c is that it's the same in all frames of reference.
You are also wrong about light traveling slower through different mediums. This is merely light's APPARENT SPEED--the true speed of a single photon (c) does not change (except in certain cosmological histories.) For example, a black hole does NOT slow down light, it merely redshifts it out of existence. This I have read in numerous sources, and a quick wiki backs me up:
Note that the speed of light referred to is the observed or measured speed in some medium and not the true speed of light (as observed in vacuum). On the microscopic scale, considering electromagnetic radiation to be like a particle, refraction is caused by continual absorption and re-emission of the photons that compose the light by the atoms or molecules through which it is passing. In some sense, the light itself travels only through the vacuum existing between these atoms, and is impeded by the atoms. The process of absorption and re-emission itself takes time thereby creating the impression that the light itself has undergone delay (i.e. loss of speed) between entry and exit from the medium in question. It may be noted, that once the light has emerged from the medium it changes back to its original speed and this is without gaining any energy. This can mean only one thing - that the light's speed itself was never altered in the first place.
c is a constant.
Btw, I don't have awe of Hawking. I do agree that he is somewhat overrated as a physicist because of his disability and the books he has written--he certainly doesn't deserve to be compared to Einstein, for example. However, he's won four major physics/astronomical awards, is the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and has done some groundbreaking work on black holes (Hawking radiation anyone?) and other singuarlities (Big Bang/Big Crunch.) I drop his name because people have heard of him, and because he's the one author I know by name that has addressed this very issue of FLT travel and time travel. Feel free to bash his unprovable speculations (e.g. "Baby Universes") all you want, but if you want to disagree with one of his *mathematic* proofs, you'll have to do a lot better than saying you've taken a year of applied physics and you think Hawking's math is wrong because he's not on other physicists' top ten lists.
I never said that those three techs violated the laws of physics. I said that claiming they allowed FTL travel without time dilation (which, at FLT speeds OR THE EQUIVENCE OF FLT SPEED reached via warping space or traveling through a wormhole, is the same as time travel) DOES violate the laws of physics. Time dialation is an integral part of gravity/spacial distortion/wormholes just as much as it's an integral part of high speeds. I'm not sure if we're in disagreement on this point or not, because I thought you were the poster who gave the "warp drive" wikipedia link... however, you've got some extremely dodgy ideas about Relativity and the speed of light locked up in that head of yours, and if you still don't believe me I suggest y
Go out and pick up A Brief History of Time. Hawking says that he has mathematically proved that if a wormhole allows one to go faster than light (I don't mean literally; I mean able to traverse a length of space faster than light) then it can also transport one back in time. If you disagree, then I suggest you take it up with him. Me, I tend to believe him over Wikipedia.
You don't seem to understand that compressing space DOES NOT FREE YOU FROM TIME DILATION. Time in a gravity well slows down just like time on a fast-moving vessel. Thus, it does not matter if you try to get around the lightspeed barrier via "compressing spacetime"--note the TIME part of "spacetime." You CANNOT mess with one without messing with the other. If you manage to warp SPACE enough to traverse a given distance faster than light could, then you have also warped TIME enough to allow time travel.
scientists speed up/slow down light
C is a constant, an absolute. The actual perceived speed of light can be changed but from what I've seen, it amounts to quantum trickery. No one has truly been able to make anything travel faster than C (e.g. the "leading edge" of the faster-than-light light still travels at C. Thus, you CANNOT use it to send a signal at speeds greater than C.) That wikipedia article you sent me is indeed interesting, but since it goes against everything I've read (including Hawking's proof), I'm inclined to believe that it is incorrect.
You use the word "conspire" as if the universe has an active role in thwarting your action. What actually is being described is the timeline already took into account your actions, you're just playing out your role. You can't change the past because you were part of the past.
Your nature to try and change the universe is based on the electro-chemical reactions in your brain. Unless there is some "free will" that is outside of the governing of the universe, your actions would be fixed. For a given set of stimulus you would have a set of reactions that would be predictable. You couldn't change the future or the past, all you can do is play your part.
I understand the mechanics of what you're saying--Kurt Vonnegut used to say the same thing, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it does back in the 60's. Electro-chemical reactions still have desires, patterns that they attempt to impose on the rest of the universe. And we are in fact able to impose those patterns on the universe at will. Being conscious means that you can analyze and adapt to the universe around you. Curiosity is part of this adaptation. Thus, it does not make sense to say that a time traveler would only "play his part" if the traveler KNOWS he's in the past and WANTS to change something. When presented with time travel, MOST of those patterns would involve changing the past and violating causality. Most people would attempt to do something that would result in a temporal paradox. You are saying that they cannot--that what's happened has already happened and there is no changing it. WELL... if there is no changing it, then why not say that we simply can't go back in the past at all? It doesn't make sense to say that we can go back into the past and move around freely, yet we are somehow prevented from violating causality.
Ok, example: we build a time machine, and send 100,000 soldiers armed with RPGs back into the past, one at a time, 5 seconds apart, with orders to destroy the time machine. It doesn't matter how much you believe that causality must be preserved. Put away the rhetoric and do a very simple thought experiment. Assume that:
1.The time machine works. The soldiers are transported into the past physically and mentally unharmed.
2. The soldiers are very well disciplined and skilled. A few may fail due to unlucky accidents, a few may have second thoughts and run off to bet on the horse races instead, but the majority carry out their mission. The chances that all will fail are so low as to be absurd.
3. There is no significant resistence by human means. Ok, perhaps there is a protestor or two, but everyone (scientists included) has agreed to this experiment in causality.
So, since you've stated that the past (and indeed, the future and present) is static and deterministic, SOMETHING must prevent all 100,000 soldiers from completing their task. I submit to you that the simplest explaination for this is that assumption #1 is incorrect, and the time machine does not work (or at least does not work in a predictable or useful fashion.) As per Occam's Razor, I think that this explaination must be correct because all other explanations are hopelessly complicated and improbable.
I used the word "conspire" for anthromophic purposes, because to any time traveler it must appear as though the universe is actively hindering his efforts to change the past. Our soldiers must be prevented from carrying out their task, even though it is hopelessly improbable that all 100,000 would fail. A Jurrasic tourist must be prevented from dropping his bottle of beer into the tar pit. How the hell does that happen? Does a pterodactyl swoop down and snatch it up before it hits the tar? What if he brings a whole case of beer and chucks bottle after bottle into a tar pit that has been examined in present time and shows no traces of beer bottles? What if you remove the beer bottles from the equasion, and the geologists find his footprints long before the time ma
Interesting. I did not realize that a region of space can "move" in this fashion. If the ship was in the distortion itself then it would undoubtably experience dialation, but if space itself can move... I don't know, I don't quite understand how this can be allowed yet FTL wormholes be forbidden.
Wormholes are just gravitational phenomina (remember that gravity is just bent space, and a wormhole is essentially just extremely bent space), and thus they are subject to the same rule I've outlined. If a given wormhole offers the ability to travel faster than light, then the gravitational distortion is also strong enough to send you back in time. Stephen Hawking said this specifically about wormholes. Whether or not Relativity predicts wormholes has little bearing on whether or not wormholes that offer practical FTL travel break Relativity, but Relativity would likely be unable to explain or predict what happened next. Maybe I should have phrased it "breakdown of Relativity." Another very similar example is that Relativity is unable to explain what happens in a singularity even though Relativity predicted the existence of singularities.
One is that time travel into the past isn't possible beyond the point at which you build the time travel device
I've heard that as an explanation for why we haven't seen any time travelers yet, but it doesn't address the underlying problem--the breakdown of causality. So I go through the time machine and destroy it right after it is activated, before anyone has a chance to go through it. How can the universe permit that?
Or from another perspective, there is only one timeline, the idea that we can change it (free-will) is an illusion caused by not knowing the future. If you knew the future, then it would be unchangable. The old prophet paradox.
To me, this is the same as saying that time travel isn't possible. My reasoning is as follows: There are many many many people, myself included, that would try to alter the past simply to see if it could be done. This doesn't have to be nearly as dramatic as breaking the time machine or killing your grandfather--there are so many incredibly minor (yet detectable) ways in which one could alter the past. If this theory is to be believed, than ANY attempt to make even the SLIGHTEST change (like, say, dropping a candybar wrapper in the Jurassic period) must be prevented. You can come up with all kinds of wild scenarios where time travelers are prevented from exercising their free will (or their will, free or not) by "fate", but a much simpler and plausible explanation is to simply forbid backwards time travel at all (at least on the macroscopic scale, or even on the deterministic microscopic scale, which could be used to send messages into the past.) Which is more likely--that the universe conspires through strange twists of fate to thwart every attempt to change the past, no matter how minor, or the universe simply does not permit (practical) time travel?
If I knew the future, I would try to change it. There is no future you could show me that would not make me want to try to change it (at least in some small way), simply to see if it could be done. Free will or not, this is my nature. I think it's just easier to say that one cannot know the future, nor can one change the past... unless there is a possibility of alternate timelines/alternate universes.
Everything you say is more or less true in theory, but the thing most people fail to grasp is that faster than light travel is actually time travel. Lightspeed is actually *instantaneous*... from the photon's point of view. If you could accelerate to just under lightspeed you could go anywhere in the universe almost instantly from YOUR point of view, though most of the universe around you would "disagree" and to them it would seem as though many, many years (or centuries or millenia) had passed. These are all very basic concepts in relativity that Einstein proved 100 years ago... it's a crying shame that most highschool science classes don't explain it better (if they even mention it at all.)
The "faster than light" travel you see in Sci-Fi is not really an attempt to get around the speed barrier, because lightspeed travel is already fast enough for the traveler (instantaneous.) It is an attempt to get around the TIME barrier--that which is imposed by Special Relativity. Writing a story where everyone in your universe experiences the flow of time at different rates is challenging to say the least (though many have tried, some quite successfully), so most "soft" Sci-Fi authors simply do away with the problem with those things you mentioned--wormholes, warp drive, hyperspace, etc. Unfortunately, these devices things actually create more problems than they solve.
You can't get around time dialation. It's built into both Special Relativity and General Relativity, and there's no tricking or cheating way around it. If you travel faster than light, whether through speed or through gravitational distortion or a combination of the two, THEN YOU ARE TRAVELING FASTER THAN INSTANTANEOUS TRAVEL. What's faster than instantaneous travel, you say? Well... time travel. If you somehow beat the lightspeed barrier, then you've just managed to travel back in time. If you don't believe me, I suggest you read Stephen Hawking's The History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. Also, a good book that concentrates on explaining Relativity probably wouldn't hurt.
The only exception I can possibly see to this MIGHT be hyperspace. If one can make use of another spacial dimension, then one might be able to appear to be moving faster than the speed of light even though one really isn't. To any observer capable of seeing all the dimensions of the universe, you would still appear to be moving slower than light.
But I'm not sure if that's even possible. The explanations I've seen describe the other (4-11+) spacial dimensions as being "curled up", i.e. there's not nearly as much wiggle room in them as there is in the first 3 spacial dimensions, so I kinda doubt that they're big enough to have any practical benefit.
But FLT warp drive and wormholes definitely definitely DEFINITELY break Relativity by involving time travel. This might be physically possible, but it goes beyond the confines of Relativity and we don't really understand how it works. Seriously, what happens when some contrary/curious bastard goes back in time and kills his grandfather? Or better yet, goes back in time and destroys the time machine before anyone can use it? Either the time traveler must enter a parallel universe, or he must be prevented (at the most basic quantum physical level) from altering the past in any way, shape, or form.
In conclusion, hyperspace may or may not be OK, but for someone who takes science and reality seriously, wormholes and warp drive are either outright impossible or more trouble than they're worth.
Fucking bullshit. It is NOT theft, because no physical property was misappropriated. They deserve to be sued, NOT thrown in jail.
That kind of thing is common to most distros. The way hardware support currently is in the Linux world, it's unavoidable. My point was, I believe that more people to able to have Ubuntu "just work" than SuSe (or $distro.) There will always be ancedotal evidence to the contrary, but I think that the popularity of Ubuntu says otherwise.
Eh, not really. I can spend a hundred hours just trying to figure out the quirks that ONE piece of hardware has with the Linux kernel, like certain features on WiFi cards not working 100% (making me to run around scratching my head, thinking I have the wrong driver or am not configuring it correctly, when really there is no solution) or incorrect drivers working for some features but not others (making me to think I'm not configuring it correctly, when in reality the solution is to change drivers entirely.) I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, but trying to troubleshoot hardware problems while simultaneously trying to learn the Linux way of doing things (I haven't used a CLI in a decade, I didn't know how NDISwrapper worked, I didn't know what config files to edit, I didn't understand how to do a kernel patch, etc.) is not easy at all. Remember, before Linux I had ZERO *nix experience.
For many people (though not all), Ubuntu *just works* out of the box. That's something else that few distros can claim. Before Ubuntu, I never gave Linux a chance because I wasn't willing to spend hundreds of hours just to get it to the same state of usability that XP gave me right out of the box. It's tough being only semi-geeky. I'm pretty proficient with computers when it comes to day to day tasks (I include "reinstalling Windows" under that heading), but troubleshooting a Linux box takes a much higher level of expertise, and to be honest I just didn't want to fuck with it. I loved everything that Linux stood for, but I just couldn't stand trying in vain for hours to make it work properly.
Then Ubuntu comes along and everything just magically works with the default install. Well ok, I still had a few things that didn't work 100% right, but I didn't mind tweaking with those on my own time. Every other distro I've tried--including SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and Knoppix--were somehow broken out of the box (usually, a key piece of hardware wasn't recognized), and I could never find an easy solution. I'm sure there were solutions out there, but I wasn't patient enough to find them--I wasn't satisfied leaving my computer in a halfway-usable state until I managed to find them.
I've often heard the "hood welded shut" analogy when comparing open source to closed source software. It's a good analogy, but I guess my problem was I didn't want to be FORCED to go underneath the hood because my car only turns left and I can't go over 40 MPH without first turning on the windshield wipers. Being able to tweak is wonderful; it's only been a few months now and I'm already doing a lot that I couldn't do on my Windows box. But being forced to basically finish building the car yourself is a royal pain in the ass, at least for those of us that aren't quite ubergeeks. Ubuntu still has a ways to go (e.g. the latest update has actually broken Firefox for many people, including me), but as long as it stays true to its motto, I have confidence that it will continue to remain at #1.
Assuming you're applying the similar criteria to moons (round and orbits a planet), that would rule out Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos. Just thought I'd point that out.
A lot of the "new" definitions one sees seem hellbent on maintaining the status quo; giving us the same 9 planets we've always had. Is that really important? So the schoolkids will have to learn a few new names; big deal. Maybe we can finally drill it into peoples' heads that science is a process and not a destination.
If there isn't a terribly scientific need to classify celestial objects based on roundness, then don't.
I hate to nitpick, because I totally agree with the gist of what you're saying, but the GPL is only possible BECAUSE of copyright law. Copyright law is the only thing compelling companies to release the source code for their improvements. Now the BSD license on the other hand...
Dear USA:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha.
Seriously though, fuck you.A
The Middle East is probably the only source for terrorists willing to fly a plane into a building just to make a point. Many asian countries may try to oppose us in various ways. but on the whole East Asian religions are not nearly powerful enough to inspire such actions. Guerilla fighting yes, kamikaze attacks on our miltary yes, but generally speaking conservative/fundementalist religion is the only thing powerful enough to drive large groups of people to take such actions (there are always cults, to be sure, but there aren't enough of them to pose a significant threat.)
Cost/Benefit is better expressed as benefit/cost. I maintain that the benefit is 0 or very close to 0, so I really don't care how cheap it is. People might forget a lot about 9-11, but they're not going to forget the "crazy arab-looking guys flew planes into our skyscrapers" bit. I've met a lot of people who were born after the WWII generation who STILL don't trust the Japanese (ridiculous as that may be) because of Pearl Harbor. For better or worse, the cultural memory is there and it will be there for a while longer. 9-11 will ALWAYS overshadow Pearl Harbor because it was such a ghetto technique, it was used against civillian targets, it was carried out in the name of God and aimed (at least partially) towards the religion they have declared war on. Plus, the 9-11 footage is a hell of a lot more extensive and in your face than the Pearl Harbor footage.
My point is if my dad can still harbor an irrational dislike of the Japanese because of some grainy shots of an attack that was carried out 60+ years ago against a purely military target, then I'm pretty sure my kids and my kid's kids will be able to hold onto the "crazy arabs trying to take over the plane=bad" meme.
Make the cockpit door sturdy and stick a good lock on it. Everything else is pointless fluff. I don't care if the entire system would only cost them $5000--that's $5000 that could be used to buy a traffic light for the crazy dangerous intersection near my house, and I'll guarantee that would save more lives than some stupid panic button.